Road Trip Canada (BC to Alberta) // Hasta Alaska // S04E12

Last time on Asta Alaska, we arrived in Canada and immediately fell in love with the country as we went about exploring British Columbia. We continued our theme of creating our own fun on a budget and we said goodbye to half of our crew and welcomed back Leah for her third adventure with Kombi Life. This time we're exploring Alberta and preparing for our final push to Alaska. Crossing further into British Columbia, we spent the next night at a quiet roadside stop, or so we thought. It wasn't until we tucked into bed and that first train passed right by our Kombi window that we realized we'd made a mistake. For those of you who haven't seen the size of trains in Canada, believe us they go on and on and on. These are the spiral tunnels first invented in Switzerland to allow trains to loop inside the mountain to gain or reduce altitude. Pulling into Revelstoke last night, we saw a Kombi and all good things come from people that own Kombis so we went and said hi Peter and Kai and they've taken us to their little local camping spot. Kai and Peter have been living in their bus for a little while and explained to us what van life is like in the winter. Snow coming in the front vents and there's no such thing as defrost. You have to have the windows open so that they're angled perfectly so that the wind is going on the front windshield otherwise you just fog and frost straight up. It's not the best, it's not very comfortable. To be honest that doesn't sound like much fun and we decided no matter what happens we have to get to Alaska before winter arrives but what we didn't know at this point was that winter comes much earlier in Alaska than we had thought. Winter is coming. Let's go exploring. The next morning Kai decided to jump from her rig to ours for a micro adventure with a Kombi crew. That's one thing I love about living in a bus. My bathroom, my kitchen, everything changes every day. This is my bathroom today. This is where I took a shower today. Tomorrow will be another waterfall. While bathing sure was beautiful in this part of the world, washing in these cold waters is guaranteed to wake you up. But then the Kombi crew didn't need any help waking up. Our free camp spot next to the Kicking Horse River had us waking up to the familiar sound of Canadian rail. It seems to be that some small Canadian towns have more animals than people and some towns as we found out didn't even have basic supplies like milk, bread or gasoline. With limited supplies in the area we felt lucky that our newfound adventure buddy knew a thing or two about foraging for food in the forest. Good morning from beautiful Banff. It's a little less cloudy today and sure is nice to see the mountains. Starting the Kombi day with a beautiful breakfast. It's apple oats with chia, honey, sunflower seeds, almonds, cranberries and what's this? Fireweed. Fresh from the ground. Inspired by nature we headed off into the boreal forest to see if we could forage a meal. Eating unidentified plants can be extremely dangerous. Be sure to consult a guide if you're in doubt. Yeah so this this one is lamb's quarters and we'll eat the leaves and they they taste like spinach. Vitamin A and vitamin C. A strawberry. Two baby strawberries. We'll need a lot more than that if we're gonna make a meal Leah. Into the hippie hut. So tonight for dinner we have wild onion and lamb's quarters and plantain, dandelion leaf, wild sage and labrador tea for dessert and some juniper berries. To add a little protein we added some local meat which we are seasoning with wild sage and juniper berries. Wild sage and juniper berries so we still kind of forage the dressing for the meat. That still counts right? Foraging is a lot of fun. You'd be surprised how much nutritious food you can find whilst you're out hiking. Cheers guys. Yum good mousse. Banff is a great town to visit at any time of the year and we had a blast but this is where we had to say goodbye to both Ariana and Kai leaving Ben, Alaska and I to continue on towards Canmore alone. In Canmore we met more cool people not least of which was John and Alaska's new boyfriend Melon. I wish I could come to Jasper with you guys. I wish you could too. John hooked us up with one of his climbing buddies so that we could experience one of the activities that Canmore is most famous for. Another activity on our ever-growing bucket list was horse riding, Rocky Mountain style. Yeah I don't think I'm exactly what you would call a natural cowboy. Now I've got control of the horse. Doug and Wendy are Canmore locals and they showed us incredible hospitality by inviting us into their home for a few days whilst we prepared for the final push to Alaska. Spare spray check, spare parts check, combi running okay, check, ish. Part of that preparation was increasing the size of our crew so I recruited Angela from Switzerland who was as eager to get to the Arctic as we were. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Sorry if you're waiting. It was impossible to repay the generosity that Doug and Wendy showed us but we were able to help out a little at the horse stables which was fine by us. Leave you alone for one minute Leah, we'll check you out. Dream come true. We were really lucky to be invited in by Doug and Wendy. We honestly couldn't have asked for better people to get us ready for our trip to Alaska. There are some things that have happened on this Pan-American trip that we will never forget. The day that we led the horses down to the pasture from the back of the combi is one of those days. From Canmore to the end of the Pan-American highway is approximately 4,033 kilometers or around two and a half thousand miles so we picked up another traveler Fernando from Brazil who joined us for the ride. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. It would be a much longer and more challenging journey than any of us could have anticipated but that is a story for next time. Next time on Astra Alaska we finally get to tackle the world famous Alaskan highway. After 41 months of difficult overlanding and preparation will we be up to this huge challenge and will the road be kind to us? Well what do you think?