ON THE ROAD AGAIN - a rough start /// EFRT S6-EP1

Welcome to another episode of the epic family road trip. So this is the last episode this year of being at the cabin because we are back on the road again. We are heading back west to the beautiful mountains of British Columbia to continue on our adventure exploring the back country of northwestern Canada with our jeeps. Back in March we had to cut our trip short and head back to Ontario before the borders closed because of everything going on. So we are excited to be hitting the road again and to be bringing you some new epic content to our channel. We also really wanted to enjoy some time on the lake as a family before leaving the cabin for the season. During our last week at the cabin we did a lot of prep work both for hitting the road again and prepping for winter and finishing projects we had around the island like repainting some of the old log buildings. We sanded off the old paint, applied a layer of primer on the logs, then painted over with the original brown paint color to make it look fresh but to also preserve the old logs for many more years to come. We also had to do some vehicle maintenance before making the long drive 4,500 kilometers or 3,000 miles across Canada. We were just here getting that bolt fixed and I should have got the tires rotated at the same time but it didn't. We're back just getting the tires rotated before our long journey west. All right we are still packing up our gear getting things ready for taking off to the beautiful west coast and leaving this beautiful part of the east coast. I hate to leave as I think I said before because the weather's getting cooler and fall time is our favorite but we're also excited about getting on the road. Right now we're going to go to the boathouse and get our boat out of the water so and winterize it already. We normally don't do that in August but this year is different in every single way so we're going to get on that. So what we're doing is we tie on the boat and then we take these cranks here and just go ahead and crank until the boat is lifted right out of the water for the winter and then we drain everything make sure there's no water. We're going to have to use the fuel in a different vehicle because you can't leave fuel over the winter it'll go stale and we take the batteries out because they'll freeze so we're going to put those in warm storage and then we fog the motor which kind of winterizes it and then we're good to go and this little boat will be hanging in the air Pete's cranking it now. All right so there we have it the boat is cranked up high high enough to fit the Sea-Doo and the boat underneath without any problem nothing's touching so we're good to go it's shut down for the winter. I'm dumping the boat gas which is a 50 to 1 mix which is the same that we run in our chainsaw so I'm just dumping that in this container so it gets used this fall when they're cutting firewood and so on and it won't go stale then I'll put this back in the boat. Now on to the next chores bringing more stuff out to the jeeps all of our gear. All right we've got a load of mattress and clothing and we are heading out to the RV I'll probably have to do about five of these loads before we're done getting packed up and ready to roll. It's always hard when you're going for you know five six months you really got to think it through because once you've gone 5,000 miles away you can't just turn around and pick up something you forgot so that's Carol's job she does all the thinking and list making. Good morning it is August 29th a beautiful morning here after quite a rain last night um I always I love the sound of rain on the on the tin roof and just always feels like the rain is cleansing the earth and watering the trees it just uh smells delicious in the morning out here so um the thing is today is our final day at the cabin for this season and so it's um one of those things you know we love being here but we're also excited to get on the road and I'm sure the kids are gonna have a hard time leaving today but um normally we stay till mid-November but this year with everything's everything's weird this year it's 2020 nothing's as normal. Hey Lindo I'm just gonna throw this Lindo loves chasing his ball um yeah so we don't normally we stay till mid-November and then we head south into the United States of America where the weather's warm in the winter months you ready buddy ready go get it over that tree go get it buddy man he loves chasing that thing um yeah and we don't know if we can head south we just don't know um the borders are still closed until the end of September so we're heading west um and that's gonna be awesome we're going early because we want to explore you know parts of Alberta and BC and if we're lucky you can get right up to Yukon and maybe even Northwest Territories and do it before the snow flies you know so we can explore it while the weather's still decent you brought it back bud wanna go get that yeah one more throw yeah so it's gonna be amazing out there it's gonna be a crazy awesome fun and wild adventure and we are ready for it Lindo's really excited right because you get to run in front of the jeep ready go get it there it goes yeah so many new episodes coming we're gonna call this season six I guess even though last year we started our season in January we're going a bit early this year because it's a new chapter and a new expedition and if everything opens up in the next couple of months which we're hoping we'll head south into the southwest and kind of pick up where we left off in March when we were when we had to leave so man we're excited and we're gonna take you every single step of the way I hope you enjoy season six coming right up so today is the big move day so we're getting ready to hit the road and we're all excited so just doing the final touches but lots and lots and lots to do and shut down the cabin yeah my mind's kind of everywhere but it's gonna be fun we leave tomorrow morning and I can't wait to take you guys along all right carol's got most of the stuff organized now in the motorhome both jeeps are loaded up for the first little part of our journey just till we get out west we're gonna be towing a vandy behind the motorhome and we might sell the motorhome out there and in the meantime we'll use it for storage for some of our gear and then we're gonna unhitch the jeeps and get going as far north as we can go but I think we have two or three more loads of odds and ends and all that stuff you need for six or seven months on the road so the job continues hopefully tomorrow morning fairly early we can hit the road we boarded up the screened-in room to prevent damage to the screens over the winter since we can get really strong winds and snow storms coming off the lake we then winterized the water system with non-toxic rb antifreeze we also harvested some of the herbs and vegetables that grew in our garden to take on the road with us as you know we've been planning to sell our motorhome which has been in storage for the last couple of years before selling the motorhome we need to reupholster some of the furniture but since we ran out of time here in ontario we were taking the motorhome to bc with us to hopefully get the work done there and then put it up on the market so we hitched up danny to the back of the motorhome and we finally hit the road again but then this happened so we've had a little issue happen with the flat toe of the blue jeep and we're now on the side of the road all right so the reason we're here with dandy up on the tow truck is we're literally a slight amount of damage tow the jeep back to the chrysler jeep dealership which is in town probably 10 minutes back here so and 10 minutes forward is a provincial park they told us about hopefully it's open we don't know but we're going to head up there and try to get a camp spot for the night and then we'll try to sort all this out tomorrow there goes van we gotta say linda we gotta say for you okay buddy this is a little provincial park here that just happened to be up the road so it's convenient and they did have a spot and have a good night's sleep and then we'll deal with all this stuff tomorrow so we had a really nice night's sleep here in this little provincial park called shoots it's right on on the spanish river we've got to go sort out this mess with the jeep and the tow bar and all that stuff so we're heading into town we're gonna see what's up with vandy try to repair the tow bar if we can't repair it that means we have to order another one which um who knows how long that'll take but we're gonna we're gonna see if we have to order one we can hopefully overnight it and then we can be back on the road 200 bucks for what yeah all right we uh went to napa and got a pin very similar like the exact same size just not the exact same pin but i think it'll do and now we have to see if we can bend the the um brackets over that bent and if that is possible we're trying to go to a fabrication shop here in town then it's a matter of determining whether our uh blue ox tow bar is still um sound and good enough to go otherwise we have to buy a new one and the price for that is twelve hundred dollars so uh yeah we'll let you know how that turns out yeah i don't know if you want to open that though so i can get it in there and get it off and you got something yeah we got a press we can bend it so very lucky in this little town there's a company called a10 fabrication these guys are metal fabricators we just met the owner and they they create all kinds of things for the mining industry which is big in this area but he can also custom cut anything you want so they're taking off the bent pieces and they they've got a big press inside a big 10 ton press or whatever and they're going to bend things back into shape for us so we're we're in the right hands um i wondered about that if we'd have to send it away but these guys are the experts so we're pretty excited about that so that should get us going um the other thing is uh we've been talking about getting some kind of uh covering for the back windows for some time we've been looking on amazon all over the place they make them for the defenders but we haven't seen a good solution for the jeeps but he's gonna custom fabricate something for us so that's two in one with this one we're pretty excited what they tried to do was get a cable come along and pull it together try to bend it back into shape but it's going to take a little more than that so they're gonna have to pull the whole front bumper off and the winch and all that because it's all one piece which makes it very very strong and safe for towing but it's a bit of a job when you have to fix it so that's what they're working on now all right so they got one straightened out and they're just doing the other one the really bad one that was really bent is now straight they're doing the other one then they're going to weld a few things up and the jeep's good to go now they're actually hopeful that they can straighten out or replace the bolt on the tow bar and then i think we're we're done we don't have to order in a new tow bar so man we found the right shop here with a10 fabrication these guys are in a little town called uh espanola ontario and they are really good at what they do all right so they fixed up the blue ox now this plate this is the plate that was on there and you can see it's got a big old bend in it and it probably would have been okay to tow but it's not safe so what they did is they rebuilt a brand new one and they welded it on here put in the new bolt and we are back in business a little setback of a couple of days um all in all um the bill is about 600 what was it 670 dollars um to buy a new blue ox is 1200 we got a price on that so i think we did well and everything's repaired and back ready to get back on the trail so today we're going to hitch up it is now september 1st we're going to hitch up the jeep and start heading west and get as far as we can probably somewhere in ontario still and then tomorrow we'll be hopefully up on the prairies across the prairies and then back to our beloved mountains of alberta nbc canada and was uh see these pins i put this pin on it was upside down so i in the when we were leaving i just quickly flipped it around now the proper way is for it to clip like that and you can hear it smack what happened i think because i went like that they're looking it looked like it's closed but it's not and and it can actually slip out and then the bolt slips out so i'll never make that mistake again just remember if you don't hear that clip then these things aren't properly closed so let's listen for the clip that's done once he's locked in good to go everything's brand new i just got to put my safety cables on and away we go we're back in north at least camp tonight uh long lake superior and then get up fairly early tomorrow try to make some real good all right so we just we're getting all set up we're at the a provincial park called uh pancake bay i think we've been here a couple of times now it's uh this is the fourth time going on this road dry seven this year so we're getting pretty used to the whole area this spot is nice we've stopped here like three times now on the way somewhere so kind of know our area and we're camping in similar uh campsite to last time so it's all cozy knowing where we are but uh it's great okay a lot of you have asked for us to use maps to kind of give you a idea of where we're going and i think that is a great idea we could drive 5 000 miles and in our video you wouldn't really know so this is a map of canada the vast country of canada in fact when i look at this i'm like wow we've got a long ways to go but we started uh here in the southern ontario area north northern part of southern ontario i guess you'd call it and let's just say somewhere around here we went north to Sudbury and we started heading along here and right there that's a little distance we got before we had that breakdown and so we camped a couple of nights there and now we're back on the road today we didn't drive very far we went about three hours continued along here through Sault Ste. Marie and are now at a camp about there for the night and tomorrow we're going to head up over Lake Superior and start working our way out here now if you remember Pickle Lake that was this road up here i'm going to mark it this map will have everywhere we've been so you go to Pickle Lake and then we went beyond all the way up to Windigo Lake so just looking at the map that's all we've done so far and we left sunday it's now tuesday but we had that breakdown we're going to carry on up here then we're out of ontario we get into manitoba um it normally takes i don't know a day or so to cross and then we'll be in the we're just going to book it through saskatchewan and as far as we can get into alberta we'll probably go down the southern part through lethbridge and then into bc the very south here and we're gonna once we get probably up a little ways we're going to find a place to park put the rv in storage and then with the two jeeps we're going to begin exploring this huge province of bc and parts of alberta it's absolutely gorgeous and our hope is to well before it gets too cold to get up into the yukon territory here somewhere as far as we can get we're not sure of what the restrictions are right now but um our dream was to go into northwest territories as well up the yellow knife and so on but um looks like that you have to quarantine for 14 days or something which would be hard to do for us so anyway we're going to try to get up as far as we can and maybe into the arctic circle that since we can't go all the way to tuktoyaktuk we're going to try to get into the arctic circle on this one and then come back into bc and explore as much of it as we can and even get out to vancouver island and then hopefully the border opens and we can go visit our family down here in oregon and start exploring the west where we left off before all this stuff started happening but for now here we are way back at the beginning and as you can see we've got a long ways to go all right we had a good night's sleep in pancake bay provincial park and we're now hitched up and rolling hills go up and down and it's almost like a coastal highway because we're right along the north edge of lake superior and it looks very much like overlooking the ocean absolutely beautiful last night we spent the night at rainbow falls provincial park and woke up to some pretty hard rain you can see it's blustery out there it's still raining pretty good we're driving along the lake superior and the wind's coming up they're pretty pretty harsh they're whipping us around a little bit so we're taking it easy today and gonna just push on and get as far as we can possibly all the way to canora but we'll see that's the goal in the meantime we're kind of white knuckle driving all right so we just pulled into sandbar provincial park last time we were here this was our last stop before driving all the way up to pickle lake and doing that whole expedition to the end of the road which brings back good memories wasn't too long ago already but still now we are headed back out west the whole time driving today we were heading through this big storm got more windstorm than anything else we did get occasional uh heavy rain spots but it's cool now seeing the lake because last time when we were here going up to pickle lake it was just crisp clear and calm and so we hope you guys enjoyed this episode we are definitely excited to be getting back to our regularly scheduled program of weekly episodes but also episodes of overlanding and exploring wild places together once we get out west we hope to head north with the jeeps to the yukon and even up to the beautiful canadian arctic circle so stay tuned join the adventure and become a member of the epic family road trip by subscribing to our channel and as always a big thank you to our patreon family we really appreciate the support and in the meantime we'll see you down the road