Griffy’s a trooper! Yesterday she rode 11 hours in the truck with us, using her floor litter twice, and sleeping most of the way. It’s super cold up here (feels like minus 32) so she hasn’t had any outside time (which is okay, since she’s mainly an indoor cat and we want to keep her away from the eagles in The Pas, anyway). She does like to occasionally watch the world go by from a lap though.

We covered Wawa to Dryden yesterday – that’s 800 kilometers or so – because the roads were dry and bare and the sky was clear. By the time we pulled into our hotel we were nearly delirious and didn’t do much for New Years – a hotel restaurant dinner, gin martini for me, shiraz for J., and a bit of reading back in our room (I’ve made the switch to an e-book,  but that’s another post) before conking out around 9:30. At 2 a.m., a slurred, shouting version of Auld Land Syne from the parking lot woke me which is how I even remembered that we were supposed to stay up ’til midnight and watch the ball drop or something like that. Oops.

Today we’re getting ready to head to Winnipeg. Hoping to find a motel a wee bit north of the city, along the highway to The Pas. Tomorrow we arrive in our new town, get the keys to our house, and start unloading the cargo we’ve carried across a province that, in Europe, would likely be a few separate countries.

Onward, on this first, frozen day of a brand new year. Happy New Year! How did you all ring in 2013?