Edmonton to Lethbridge

Our trip started in the province of Alberta in Canada. We flew to Canada using Canadian Affair. When we last visited, they were using Thomas Cook’s aeroplanes but now they have switched to Air Transat.

The flight was fine, and every seat had it’s own media centre and USB charging point which was very handy, not least because three of our five seats were the only ones on the place that it didn’t work. This happened three years ago when we travelled, so it was a bit disappointing. Luckily, we could swap seats and also use the USB charging point to use the iPhone and laptop without fear of running them down.

 

We have family in Edmonton and planned to finish our trip there to chill out there for a few days before flying back, so it made sense to also start there as well if possible.

When renting a car, it is cheaper if you take the car back to where you first rented it, so this also made sense.

Tip 1 – Rent the car from the same place you intend to end up. It is cheaper and simpler.

One disadvantage of starting here however, was that we needed to get to America first. We landed in Edmonton at around 11am so picked the car up straight away and departed for…McDonalds.

Fast food chains in the US and elsewhere have free wifi. We knew this, so as we needed a hotel for that evening, we guessed this would be the most effective way.

Tip 2 – Stop immediately at a fast food chain…lol.

Something to consider

For security purposes, I set up a secure VPN on the laptop before leaving the UK.

This means that people can’t intercept your internet browsing activity when using wifi hotspots, (apart form the NSA, of course). It is pretty important if you are accessing your private and personal accounts in a strange land.

A good secure VPN also works on iPhone and Android, which is also susceptible to the likes of Firesheep without it. Skype works through the VPN and if you get a good one, you can access the non-advertising version of the BBC website by pretending you are in London. Nice. You can also use this to watch movies and Premiership games while you are away, as long as you have a Sky Subscription and Sky Go installed.

I installed Truecrypt which encrypts files and put all my files into an encrypted folder. This sounds daunting but it isn’t really. If my laptop was stolen, none of the files would be accessible by the crooks.

The final step was to get as much a stuff as possible into the cloud to make sure it was just me and the US government who had access. My emails are already cloud based, so this was already set up.

Tip 3 – Secure your technology

I spent the last couple of years working with various hotels and restaurants to improve their  web and social media presences, so I already had a stack of apps installed on the iPhone to help guide us.

The first stop was the ubiquitous TripAdvisor. Although the reviews on the site are not always transparent, I decided that it was a good first step. Part of the trip is about research for me, so this is the first bit of that research.

Tip 4 – Take into account the time zone you came from in case you get tired with the extended day.

I checked out different journey distances from Edmonton to the US border and tried to work out how far we could get, bearing in mind we had just lost 7 hours. We decided that Lethbridge was the best stopping point, which was around 5 hours away.

Arriving early evening would mean around midnight UK time, so this would be about right. We could also check in and start to adjust to the new time zone.

Here is the route courtesy of Google Maps. Click the version at the side of this page to see a bigger version.