Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

nescience \NESH-uhn(t)s; NESH-ee-uhn(t)s\, noun:
Lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.

Regina, Saskatchewan is the goal today. Fortunately for us, the winds have died down considerably making driving less arduous and fuel economy more pleasant, if I may use that term for a vehicle that averages 8 miles per gallon! The roads were, as you might expect, pretty straight and pretty flat. The weather was the usual nice although there were decidedly more clouds today but they appeared to be innocuous and mearly seemed to give the sky more character. Not long after we left we passed the exit for Gimli, Manitoba. Upon seeing this city name, I had no choice but to regale the kids and Chantal with the story of the now famous “Gimli Glider” incident from the early 80s. It is a fascinating story of an Air Canada plane which ran out of fuel at 40,000 feet and all the issues that the pilots had to deal with to manage to bring it down. Check out the story at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider . Then the kids took turns sitting up front with me while I was driving. That is always fun as you get to find out about all sorts of things that are on their minds and that are of interest to them. For instance, when Morgan was sitting with me, one of the subjects he brought up was what he would do if he had 10 million dollars. André-Paul, of course, likes to discuss completely different things and on this particular day I found out that A-P could lead a happy life if he was restricted to only eating the following items: pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, Kraft Dinner mac & cheese, asian food, sea food, and, of course, hot dogs. Maybe I should touch on this subject with A-P again in 10 years to see if that is still the case.

As many of you may have expected, I have been keeping track of what we are spending everyday as we are going along to see how closely we are tracking to my original budget estimates. I thought that it might be interesting to share these stats we you as we progress just in case you might be thinking of doing something like this yourself someday. So, after our first 4 weeks, our daily average for the following categories is:


Accommodation: $19
Food: $48
Entertainment: $19
Misc: $25
MoHo/Auto Maint: $15
MoHo/Auto Gas: $48

And our current km/day works out to be:
MoHo: 168
Matrix: 39

If I can remember I’ll try to give an update on this every 4 weeks or so to see how it has been changing. Feel free to remind me about this.

And to close out, if you have ever wondered whether or not people in Manitoba have a sense of humour, all you need to do is check out the sign in front of the motel near our campsite which reads, “Free hotel room with every $59 breakfast!”