Day 5: Granisle BC - Jasper AB

I had hoped to avoid all that tedious mucking around with time zones this year, but I have failed because I am in Alberta.  Alberta is in the Mountain Time chiz so in addition to all the catching up I have had to do after yesterday's tubes-free overnight I have lost an hour at the end of an already long day.

There is not much excitement to report from today at all.  It was 700 km, and thus about one junction per 100.  Of them.  Most of which were in Prince George, for the first half of the route here was a retrace to that august town before pushing east towards the Proper Mountains i.e. the Rockies.  Highway 16 takes fright when it sees them, though, and plunges south-east for quite a long way before biting the bullet and diving headlong up the Fraser River valley into them thar hills.  Natch it rained all day, so I could barely see the mountains, but some of them are big enough and close enough to the road that they are hard to miss.

It's raining

That's supposedly Mount Robson in the middle, which is about four thousand metres big.  Sadly neither of the flanking peaks is Mount Jerome.

So, Jasper.  As the name suggests, Jasper is pretty poncy.  It probably has a twin town called Poppy¹.  In Surrey.  It is smack in the middle of a National Park, so you have to pay to get in, and being a tourist trap charges through the nose for everything.  This room is costing about two and a half times last night's, and the view out of the window is of a flat roof and some air-conditioning equipment.  Also it is full of BRITONS, loudly demanding fish and chips, Watneys Red Barrel and the Daily Mail².  Also I went out to buy milk earlier and I could see the mountains, which can only mean one thing:

It is, however, a good deal warmer than of late.

Now, Anbarickal Devices have been conspiring to annoy lately.  After yesterday's notwork nonsense we have, in no particular order:

• The reversing camera on the motor-car.  It was fine this morning but after a long day of overtaking logging trucks in the rain it appears to have developed a cataract.  If this is FoMoCo's idea of "self-cleaning" it is this: crap.  Also it has the usual complement of mirrors anyway, so why?  You could have retained the Emily-tray on top of the dashboard, and the cover over the cup-holders, and had the little cable cut-out in the armrest cubby coming out of the front like it used to instead of in the space already reserved for a passenger's elbow instead of spending all that development cash on something useless.
• And you don't need to keep telling me you can't talk to my phone.  Once will do.
• And if you copy files from a Babbage-Engine onto a USB memory wossname and plug the latter in the motor-car's USB port it complains "Device not supported".  How hard can it be?  So I still have not listened to "The Lore of the Land" because I'd prefer to do so through better squeakers than the tinny ones on the laptop.  But this will require either the purchase of blank CDs or the installation of iTunes which will take half the bloody night.
• Leftpondian mains anbarism is so feeble that it takes about a week to boil my ickle travel kettle.  Considering Thomas Edison is widely, if inaccurately, credited with inventing mains anbarism you lot are remarkably rubbish at using it.  Although Edison did maintain that AC current would kill you utterly to DETH if you spilled its pint or looked at its girlfriend, hence the toning down of the stuff until it is barely fit for purpose.  You should have listened to Nikola Tesla, then you'd be able to boil a kettle wirelessly and the countryside would be littered with masts with GBFO sparks coming out of them.

Bah!

PS: Can anyone identify this:

Edit: One Austin M Bassador³ over on sniffpetrol.com says it's a Lloyd LS600, built in Bremen between 1955 and 1960.  How it came to be impersonating a tank in a far-flung corner of BC remains a mystery.

1. "Poppy, of course, is the Demon of Very Bad Things, and you shouldn't upset her" - ian on yacf
2. Lie.  The bit of the sentence after the comma, anyway.
3. Not, in all likelihood, his real name