 I'm already cleared to cross so everything's been going real smooth. The only downside to today is the first official snowfall of the season for me that I've seen and experienced. You can hardly see it so it's not so bad yet. I know the camera's probably not picking it up but that's not fog that you see in the distance. That is in fact snow. Fantastic. We all knew it was coming. It may as well get it over with. Coming up today, not too bad. 2456 trucks in front of me. I think that goes across the border between Canada and the US every single day. And this isn't even the busiest crossing. It's one of the busier ones, definitely the busiest in Manitoba. But our busier crossings from Michigan, USA at Detroit into Windsor, Ontario I believe is our busiest border crossing. And if I'm remembering correctly right now, over a billion dollars of trade crosses that bridge every single day. Correct me if I'm wrong. That's just one border crossing. So economically and among many and many many other ways we're completely tied to the United States. Two brothers from the same mother definitely got our differences. One of our different histories, but we're the same people. It's just sort of like you know you grow up in mom and dad's house with your siblings and then one day one of your siblings moves out of the house and you know they get their own house and they start their own thing and they get married, they start a family and they sort of got their own thing going over there and then 100 years later so you do the same thing over here. Except it's not as you know when you when your sibling left they kind of left very upset. They wanted their independence from mom and dad now. We sort of moved out of the house a little bit later and it was a little bit more like can we please have our own place now? And they said okay. But yeah so then we started our own history. They have their own history but we go back to the same place. Plus we share the longest unprotected border of anywhere, any two countries in the world. All of this all the way down here. Take a look at this. Look at this flat land. There's no fence. There's no border that you can see. Right there. There's an invisible line. It's an invisible line between our two countries that's mutually respected. We don't have the same problems on this border that our neighbors have on their other border. It's a mutually respected border and you don't have, we have border patrols obviously. But it's minimal and there's definitely no military. No tanks or anything. Some countries in Europe right now, they've got military along their border because they have to guard against their neighbors. I couldn't imagine having to guard ourselves and worry about our neighbor invading us and attacking us. That thought is so foreign. We're so used to the safety that we enjoy here in North America. We're oceans away from all the world's problems, right? Oceans away. And because we have Big Brother America right next door, they keep the peace for us in this part of the world. I understand there's not peace in every part of the world, but in our part of the world. There's peace. You go as far as you can that way, you'll hit an ocean. You go as far as you can that way, you'll hit an ocean. You gotta cross those oceans to get here. And if there's one thing our neighbors take seriously, it's continental defense. We have many treaties with them as well. Like I said, we're tied in many different ways. We have treaties that we protect our continent. It's very hard to get here. You know, with everything going on in Ukraine right now, whatever you think of that war over there, I just can't imagine being a smaller country being invaded by this massive country next door to you. Think about it this way. That's sort of like, you know, a lot of people say, you know, Ukrainians and Russians are pretty much the same people, right? They used to be the same country and they sort of split. Now they have their own histories. The same thing I was talking about with us in the US here, right? You can sort of think of it this way. That's like the United States invading Canada and just starting to take huge sections of our country and be like, this is ours now because we used to be the same people. We used to be the same people back in the day. So it's ours now. Can you imagine living with that kind of fear because we're a smaller country. Because we have a lot of land. We have few people. And the military we do have is best in the world, but we're few in numbers. The US next door to us has so much more, so many more people, so much more weapons. We wouldn't stand a chance. We could put up one heck of a fight though. We would not make it easy. I'll tell you that. We would make their lives hell, but that would never happen here. At least I hope it would never happen. Yeah, as far as you can see here, unprotected border, just a mutually respected line in the ground. I love North America. It's a good place to be. I am proud of what we've built here. Both sides of the border here, we speak the same language. You wouldn't be able to tell us apart. Me coming from Manitoba here, going into North Dakota, even our accents are the same. Their regional accents and the regions of North America. They don't know that border is there. Even the culture is the same, you know, along the coastlines of the United States, you sort of get more leftist, leftist Democrat policies, liberal policies. And in the center of the heartline, it's more Republican, more, more red states, right? More conservative. It's the same thing in Canada. Our East Coast is very liberal, West Coast, very, very leftist, liberal Democrat. And the center where I come from is very what the Americans would probably see as a Republican area or a conservative area. It's a conservative stronghold. If you want to see what conservative Canada, or if you want to know where conservative Canada has its like home base, that's out in Western Canada here on the Prairies. Probably centered in Alberta. So even the cultures are the same, East to West. It's just we have this line in the dirt and we've said, hey, that's your land, it's our land. Nine minutes from when I pulled the air here, put myself into on duty unloading. To the time I'm ready to roll out. Now that I've talked to you for a little bit, it now says 10 minutes. 10 minutes. New record. We're flying J again. We fueled up. We fueled up here yesterday. So from here back to Carmen, to Wapden, back to here was 884 kilometers or 500 miles or so. Let's just quickly check this out. I didn't do this math before I started talking kilometers to miles of 550 miles or so. I burnt 90 gallons, US gallons of fuel, 340 and a half liters. Fuel here today is the same as yesterday, $5.30 US per US gallon. It wasted me $476.92 for one day. I averaged 6.1 miles per gallon. That's US gallons. I always talk in US gallons. I don't use imperial gallons ever. So if you ever hear me saying gallons and I don't and I forget to say US in front of it, it's always US gallons in my mind. US gallons is 3.75 liters. I burned 38.54 liters per 100 kilometers. Not the greatest for being empty half the time and hauling a pretty light load. We were fighting quite the wind yesterday on both directions. It was coming from the west and it was catching us in both directions. It wasn't the greatest, but it's definitely not the worst. That's about average. I like to keep it above 6 miles per gallon and this whole week we stayed above our target. Monday we filled up or the sixth. Last week we filled up 6.46 miles per gallon. Then on the Friday we filled up 6.1 miles per gallon. Yesterday we filled up we had gotten 6.25 miles per gallon and 6.1. So it's pretty consistent. The reason, one of the reasons I keep track of that on paper here because paper is more reliable than an app on your phone, which can just disappear or be taken away or get lost or whatever. I guess you could lose this too, but I like having it on paper as well. I like keeping track of my fuel economy so that I can go back over months and see if it's been getting better or worse. And if the average has been consistently getting worse and worse and worse and worse, I know I've got a problem with my engine. I should probably get that looked at. It goes the other way too. If it gets better and better and better, hey, things don't always have to get worse. Sometimes they can get better. So yeah, we've been averaging. Actually last week I was averaging about 7 miles per gallon. Six and a half to seven. The week before that, any words, yeah, it's all pretty much the same. Depending on what I'm pulling and what the climate is and how the wind is. This truck usually gets between five and eight miles per gallon, which I guess in Canuck Speak would be, I usually go by miles per gallon. In Canada, we have a mixture of US measurements and metric measurements. It's kind of weird. We use them both. Like I would say I'm five foot 10 tall, five foot 10 and I weigh 220 some pounds. I want to weigh 180 pounds. We'll get there. We're talking pounds and stuff. We use feet and inches. However, our speed limits are in metric 100 kilometers an hour and we use both. We use it's weird, but I'm averaging between. Let's see here, both 30 liters per 100 kilometers on the good end of things and on the low end of things, about 45 liters per 100 kilometers. That's the low end and the high end. We usually sit right in the middle of that. So yeah, fuel prices didn't go up overnight again. Woo! First time in like a week and a half, they didn't go up overnight. Knock on wood, knock on wood. They're going to shoot up 50 cents. Morally living, man. Oh, I try to stay out of it all, try to stay out of the politics of it, but why so blue, Weasel? Probably going to be doing something different next week, but we'll wait and see what the load gods have for us. If there's more of these, I will gladly do these, but I go where the loads are, wherever they need me. It's really fun though. I don't get a lot of opportunities to actually work with friends and work with coworkers. Very often I'm just by myself and I've got used to that. I like working by myself. I feel like I get the job done faster that way, but it's nice to get to know my co-drivers here much better. I got to spend pretty much every day running up and down the highways here with Pedro. You've seen his truck in this vlog and then almost every other vlog becoming a really good friend of mine. So that's been a real cool benefit to the last couple of weeks. I see that we got Pedro up ahead here. I'll show you, I'll show you why I'm not pointing the camera that way because you can't see anything. Even if I turn the lights off in here, you see the one guy with the lights on there? That's Brian with the W900, the one that I used to drive way back in the day. He's here. Pedro's here. Now, Karuti's here in front of me and then I'm here. So as far as I can see, there's four of us here. Maybe there'll be more here in the morning. Sometimes the guys go home for night or they go stay at a truck stop nearby for night and then come here in the morning. Depends on the day, I guess. But it's been a, this has been great. Old blue has been running good. I noticed one thing though, my heat isn't working in my sleeper. The heat is coming out of my dash here nice and hot. It's not a big deal because I can heat the whole truck with the front dash. It's not that cold out yet. And my bunk heater works in the sleeper. So I can heat up the sleeper with that if I need to. But my vents in the back, they only blow cold air, which tells me that I must have a valve that's stuck somewhere between my heater core and the vents because it's not turning the AC off in the back. AC is stuck on. So I've got to figure out where this valve might be or what do you call it again? You guys know what I'm talking about, right? Those of you, I have an audience here, maybe I'll pick your brains. Where should I look? Okay, heat is working great in the front. My bunk heater, that's a whole different system. That's working great. But my vents in the back, they're stuck on AC, they're stuck on air conditioning. I check the, like I definitely have it on heat, I have the air conditioning turned off. It's just blowing cold air, I can't get it to blow warm in the sleeper. Not a big deal right now because like I said, I can still keep the truck nice and toasty warm. I'm actually very warm right now. I'll take this sweater off but I'm going to be going outside to walk the weasel right away. Where is this valve thing that I need to check that's stuck? Where is the heater core for the sleeper? Does it run off the same heater core as the front? And if it does, why isn't the heat getting to the back? Somewhere in there there's something, let me take a look at that this weekend. So I'll be in my comment section if any of you have some wisdom and knowledge of these Kenworth W900s, if you want to give me some pointers of where to start looking for problems, hopefully it's just an easy fix. Maybe I just have to tap it. Sometimes you get lucky. Maybe I had to replace the part. I can't, it's got to be something simple because the heat is working. It's just not getting to the back. So look, it's got to be a separate heater core in the back then right? I bet you anything is just a stuck valve. So thanks for your help in advance, I appreciate that. Everything as we go, right? I learn new things every day. So please join me tomorrow, hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I really appreciate that to all my regular viewers. Thanks for tuning in every day hanging out with me and tomorrow's Friday, so it'll be a rough kind of day. I hope you're going to have fun with this. I'll see you then.