Driving Across Canada: How to Sleep in Your Car In the Depths of Winter (Part 2)

We recently shared part one of our cross-Canada winter adventure. You’re now reading part two!

Once our bags were packed and we’d said goodbye to our families, our journey really began.

We set off on the first leg of our journey: crossing British Columbia in our 1982 Toyota Station wagon.

Oh, those heady first days of a road trip… When the car is clean and some semblance of order remains inside the car. When every map and pair of mittens has its place and the car remains clean.

I distinctly remember our first phone call home, when my jacket was still clean and I was paranoid about germs. Look, here I am–sweet pathetic road-trip newbie–wiping the phone down with a wet nap. Aah, how quickly these concerns fall by the wayside when you’re living in your car for a month.

Our first few nights found us whizzing through British Columbia and sleeping in a variety of parking lots.

For the first few nights of the trip, temperatures were mild. We’d turn the Webasto heater on for an hour to heat up the car, and then turn it off before we went to sleep because we didn’t really need the extra heat.

However, we experienced our first cold night in Vavenby, BC. We spent the night here, on the side of the highway.

Here in Vavenby, we discovered a fundamental flaw in our heating system: it was too good.

We fell asleep feeling toasty warm inside our sleeping bags with the heater on full-blast. The next thing I remember was waking up a few hours later with a parched throat, drenched in sweat.

“Cam, wake up, wake up…” I croaked in a dried out voice. “It’s too hot. Way too hot!!!”

We both struggled out of our many layers, sprawled out and on top of our sleeping bags, and switched off the heater. And back to sleep we went in a hot fugue.

Well, it turned out that completely turning off the heater in the middle of the night was not a good idea either. We awoke early the next morning, teeth chattering. We had gone from stripping down to almost nothing in the middle of the night due to the heat…to waking up to a completely frozen car.

Upon waking, the temperature inside the car was a cool minus thirteen degrees celcius.

We knew that this hot/cold effect was going to become a serious problem, so Cam immediately gave the heater an over-haul. (Yes, that means doing repairs to the car’s electronics on the side of the road, with toolbox sprawled out on the snow and lots and lots of layers to keep warm.)

In a nutshell, the heater was equipped with a sensor that detected the ambient temperature so that it would know when the area it was heating was warm. This sensor was installed under the hood, where it was always freezing, so the sensor never told the heater to turn off.

Once Cam moved this temperature sensor from under the hood into the car, the sensor worked like a charm and the heater kicked in and out all night, keeping us at a pleasant temperature.

And so it was through the next leg of our journey: the Rocky Mountains and Alberta, where we stopped to see family along the way!

Then came Saskatchewan, arguably one of the most beautiful provinces on the planet.

Saskatchewan was notable for us for so many reasons.

Cameron had been intrigued by the Grasslands National Park, and we very much wanted to see it for ourselves. We visited this phenomenal park on Christmas Eve day, and had the entire park to ourselves.

I loved Saskatchewan so much that we considered ending our trip there and settling down! But…we didn’t. Maybe someday!

Christmas Eve night was spent parked outside of a Canada Post outlet in the tiny village of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan. (Edit: I got to tell the story of our Christmas eve night sleeping on the side of the road on CBC Radio’s national program, Definitely Not the Opera, but I’m skipping ahead now!)

Aah Saskatchewan, I could sing your praises all day. But eventually we continued on our Eastward journey…to Manitoba!