T Minus 5 Days - Over the hills and far away

Some people have asked me why I chose the rockies over anywhere else. A few things came to mind. First off, what I'm really looking forward to the most on this trip is amazing scenery, and fun roads. I think that the mountains would be a great place for both of those. Also, for my first big trip like this I would like to stay in Canada. If I were to get stopped and searched at the border, it would probably hours for them to go through all of my stuff and repack it again. Also this way I don't have to worry about getting health insurance in case anything happens.

But really, I think the reason for heading to the rockies should be self evident:

The only problem is that I'm heading from Winnipeg, and although Winnipeg is a great city, it happens to be in the middle of the prairies. Flat land, straight roads, and 13 hours of torture lay between me and the mountains. Unfortunately there really is no good way around this, so I'm going to do my best to cover the prairies as quickly as possible and get it over and done with. That first day will probably have me sore, tired, and hating life, but I need to push through it to get to the fun stuff.

Speaking of which, I really don't have a specific destination or a plan. I always shake my head when people come back from a trip and claim that they're tired and need a vacation to recover from their vacation. Clearly, they're doing it wrong. I want to make sure I enjoy this trip as much as possible, and for me that means being able to go wherever I want on a whim. I'm not going to force myself to be in a certain city at a certain time. If I want to explore a highway, stop at a random town, or take a day off, then I will. The small caveat to all this is I have a few different friends in Calgary, so I'm going to be stopping there along the way to visit for a day or two.

This whole freedom thing could go horribly wrong as I have very little direction besides "West", but that's fine by me. I'll probably spend each evening in the motel looking over my road maps and picking out which highways look the most interesting for the next day. To me, that sounds like a pretty good vacation.