Wednesday, 21 February 2018

Free this Week on Amazon: Two Road Trip e-Books, from Texas to the Northwest Territories



Free this Week on Amazon: Two Road Trip e-Books, from Texas to the Northwest Territories

Driving North – On the Road to Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories

Have you ever wondered about a road trip to the far north, north of the Sixtieth Parallel?  Well, here is your chance to read about three road trips, through the Peace River country and the northern Rockies, all the way to the shores of Great Slave Lake, just south of the Arctic Circle.

It’s free this week (Feb 22 to 25, 2017) on Amazon, 99 cents at other times (or always free if you have Kindle Unlimited).

Summary

The highways in northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories give one the opportunity to drive pretty far north, without a lot of elaborate preparations and extreme expense. Starting from Edmonton, one can drive as far north as Yellowknife, NWT, without leaving the hardtop, so an average vehicle can do the trip. There are a reasonable number of fair sized towns along the way, so accommodations are not much of a problem, either. The same goes for food, gasoline and other essentials.

One can also link up with the Alaska Highway, and the Dempster Highway, and make it all the way to the Arctic Ocean. But that’s another story.

Trip number 1 involved driving north through Alberta, visiting several areas of interest along the way, then into the Northwest Territories, to Hay River on the southern shore of Great Slave Lake. The return trip featured a drive through the north-central foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Trip number 2 was a combined air and car trip. We went to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories by airplane, then rented a car to explore much of the area of the north shore of Great Slave Lake.

Trip number 3 was a return to Hay River, with a different travelling companion. This allowed one to retrace steps, compare and contrast, and focus on some areas that we had not had time to explore in depth on trip number 1.


On the Road with Bronco Billy

Read about a fascinating road trip across western North America, with “On the Road with Bronco Billy”.  Sit back and go on a ten day trucking trip in a big rig, from Alberta to Texas, and back again.  Explore the countryside, learn some trucking lingo, and observe the shifting cultural norms across this great continent.

It’s free this week (Feb 21 to 24, 2017) on Amazon, 99 cents at other times (or always free if you have Kindle Unlimited).



Summary

What follows is an account of a ten day journey through western North America during a working trip, delivering lumber from Edmonton Alberta to Dallas Texas, and returning with oilfield equipment. The writer had the opportunity to accompany a friend who is a professional truck driver, which he eagerly accepted. He works as a statistician for the University of Alberta, and is therefore is generally confined to desk, chair, and computer. The chance to see the world from the cab of a truck, and be immersed in the truck driving culture was intriguing. In early May 1997 they hit the road.
Some time has passed since this journal was written and many things have changed since the late 1990’s. That renders the journey as not just a geographical one, but also a historical account, which I think only increases its interest.

We were fortunate to have an eventful trip - a mechanical breakdown, a near miss from a tornado, and a large-scale flood were among these events. But even without these turns of fate, the drama of the landscape, the close-up view of the trucking lifestyle, and the opportunity to observe the cultural habits of a wide swath of western North America would have been sufficient to fill up an interesting journal.

The travelogue is about 20,000 words, about 60 to 90 minutes of reading, at typical reading speeds.

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