Day 12: Almost There

L had one request for the trip: we had to stop at a Tim Horton’s. Someone told her he was a famous Canadian hockey player or something and he now had a huge chain of these coffee and donut stores that were fantastic. We had noticed one a block away from our campsite as we pulled in last night, and we all agreed we would save time in the morning by having breakfast at Tim’s instead of oatmeal in baggies.

Tim Horton’s was directly across the street from a McDonald’s. The McDonald’s had no one in line. Tim Horton’s had 22 cars waiting at the drive-through and a line of 5 or 6 people at the counter inside. We figured that was a pretty good endorsement. We went in and were dazzled by their pastries and breakfast sandwiches. We decided to try them both. They were delicious. The whole place was like a Dunkin’ Donuts crossed with Panera. We all agreed that if we had these stores in our neighborhoods, we would never eat breakfast at home.

The morning was bright and pleasant. We headed west towards Alaska. Based purely on observation only, we decided the main industry in B.C. was logging. We wondered what the other residents did for a living, since we so rarely saw homes, and we did, they were clustered in tiny towns that did not appear to support anything but possibly ATV repair.

After several days of traveling through the Canadian Rockies and beyond, my own impression is that their second major occupation was roadway construction. B.C.’s economic stimulus plan also involves roadway improvement projects, most of them on two-lane roadways reduced to a single lane for several hundred meters at a time and controlled by flaggers on both ends.

My estimation is that about 90% of the flaggers were women. I don’t know if women don’t have the heavy equipment skills, or if crews don’t allow women to do anything else, or if they have hiring quotas to include a certain percentage of women and that’s the easiest place to fill positions, or if they staff women in these positions because irate drivers tired of waiting tend to be more polite to women than men. Those were my top theories. You have a LOT of time alone to follow the most inane mental wanderings when on a motorcycle. Since we entered Canada, we had to stop at least once an hour for a construction zone, and our bikes were absolutely filthy from several thousand miles of bugs and grime and dirt construction zones.

We flew past tiny towns and finally stopped in Smithers where there was a Harley dealer. For a change, we did not stop for mechanical difficulties. We stopped just to have lunch, and while we were there, we got the firefighter connection yet again. When you travel with two firefighters, both riding Firefighter edition Harleys and both wearing their firefighter patches and firefighter only riding group jackets, people talk to you even more than when you are just a group of four women riding together. Almost every place we stopped, someone would come and talk to S and K, and invariably, they were retired fire fighters or had been a volunteer for a decade or so, etc. The man running the Harley dealer was a 17 year volunteer. He couldn’t do enough for us, and he let us use their soap/water/equipment to wash our bikes. We took a break for an hour or so to clean them up.

We headed back out on clean machines and within 8 miles, hit another construction zone with dust flying everywhere. Well, clean is a temporary and fleeting condition, for motorcycles as well as homes. Or bodies, as this trip would attest.

We reached our day’s tentative destination: Kitwanga. S had called the night before and made a reservation at a campground here as well as another campground about 45 miles north, according to her map. However, the GPS could not find the second town. We were going to touch Alaska the next day, but the current schedule had us riding 300 miles riding to and from AK in the same day. We figured that would not leave a lot of time for us to sightsee in Alaska, so we wanted to get some additional mileage in today.

We finally decided to chance it and head up the road. About 30 miles later, S, who almost always leads, pulled over beside the road. There was almost no traffic on the road – we saw other vehicles about every 5 or 10 minutes. The signs all said to check your gas because there were no services for about 120 km. S was worried that maybe we had called the wrong campground. What if we went 45 miles and there was nothing there? Then we would be stuck going another 45 miles or so hoping to find another campground and hoping they would actually have a site left we could use (not a good bet as we have found in Canada). The remoteness of our current location suggested we would also definitely need bear boxes to hold our food overnight, but what if the campgrounds were too primitive to provide them?

We took a vote and 3 out of 4 of us decided to drive 15 more miles and hope the campsite we reserved was actually located here. Fifteen miles later, there was nothing. L was defeated. She lay down in the middle of the road while we once again voted on our next move. There was zero chance she would be hit by a car. Attacked by a bear would be more likely on this road. We took a blind vote: 2 to return to Kitwanga, 2 to continue on.

None of us really wanted to backtrack. We had ridden too hard to get where we were. We pulled out the map again. We took a couple more votes. It is nigh on impossible to achieve consensus with four tired women. In the end, S decided and we followed, driving another 45 miles to another provincial park: Lake Meziadan, B.C. It was stunning. There were a handful of sites left, the sun was still up (sun doesn’t set until about 10:30 p.m. in these parts), and it was, as the name suggests, on a beautiful lake that we could see from our campsites. We boiled water, ate a freezer bag meal, and considered ourselves lucky. If one cared to look, one could see a divine hand all over this trip.

Daily Recap: 400 miles, Still British Columbia, campground at Lake Meziadan, B.C.