Day 14: Heading East

We are going to be backtracking for the next couple of days. Fortunately, the scenery is so dazzling here, we are not opposed to this concept.

I’m not usually a coffee drinker at home in my regular life, but hot coffee has been the antidote to camping and motoring. There wasn’t a Tim Horton’s for miles, so we had our oatmeal and coffee at the picnic table on site, while a fellow camper in bright red hair, yellow crocs, and pink jammies covered in little cupcakes came over to chat. I wished the caffeine in the coffee hadn’t shot my eyes open so much. Half lidded would have been a better defense.

For our return trip through B.C., L and I were excited to stop at some of the attractions with obvious chicken picture potential that we had blown by on our way through heading west. One of our first stops was at a town that had lumberjack statuary outside an information center. We stopped, posed the chicken, started to snap the photo, and then disaster! The chicken fell from about 7 feet, and his metal base broke off from his little metal legs. The four of us grieved for our beloved silent sentinel. Alas, he was designed for years of use on a kitchen counter next to the blender, not the kind of industrial abuse we have put him through. He was already missing some of his wooden comb from previous journeys, and now he was, well, de-feeted. Ha ha! See, that’s punny! Ha! … Heh … Huh. Okay, I’ve been in the woods too long.

We traveled on. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but L just loathes riding over grooved pavement, metal grated bridges, anything uneven that shakes you around on two wheels. We had our Bluetooth intercoms on for a change. We bought the intercoms right before the trip so we could talk helmet to helmet to each other. You are supposed to be able to touch a button and talk to the other person, then when you don’t want to talk, you press the button again to make them go in standby until you see something you want to talk about again.

Ours function perfectly only for the first part. The intercom link never turns off, unless you turn the whole unit off. Of course, when you do that, there is no way for the person in the back to notify the person in front to turn the unit back on so you can talk again. I hope to return them when we return home, but the box and everything in it looks like it has been dragged to Alaska and back, and I think the only way they will take them back now is if I complain strenuously, ardently, and most probably, jackassedly. I am up to the task.

Anyway, that was a lot of setup. The point is that we were driving along, discussing the day, the evergreens, the razzle dazzle of the landscape, and then I heard this:

“I think I just saw an eagle back there and --- AAAH! Oh no! I can’t believe it! We’re heading straight for a wooden bridge! Aaah! We’re going to fall into the river and die! We’re on a perfectly good road – why is there a wooden bridge here? What century is this? For God’s sake, you can’t drive on wooden planks! We’re all going to fall in and drown! All four of us, we’re going to …”

We got to the other side of the bridge. Silence from the intercom.

“Crisis averted. Stand down.”

Another day of lovely weather meant another day of camping. We tried to stay at the same RV site in Prince George where we had stayed on our previous way through, but they were full. We liked it, although it was close to a road that after dark carried so much truck traffic that L and K had to wear earplugs to bed to get any sleep. (S and I sleep like the dead.)

We found another RV campground on the other side of town – it had a sign that said “Adult Camping” that gave us pause. What could be so adult about camping? Sans clothing? We hoped not. We are excellent friends, yet there are limits.

S and I went in to register, and the couple that ran the place were very concerned that there were four of us and two tent campers on one site. We have run into this occasionally for tent sites where campgrounds had a policy of one tent per site, so we had to pay for two. We had no problem with this. But when you are renting an RV site, the site is HUGE, and our two tiny campers together are smaller than all but a conversion van.

S pointed out each of our little campers was about 6’x10’ when opened and set up. The couple said the two campers weren’t the problem – it was the extra people. We would have to pay for two additional people on the site. S asked, quite reasonably I thought, well, what happens if you have a whole family in an RV? Her point was that if you pay for an RV site, do you really check how many people are in it? What if you brought the grandparents along?

But the point was missed. The couple went into a long explanation that families could camp there and their “Adult Camping” just meant that they had no playground or facility for children, not that children were excluded, so yes, you could have a family in an RV. S and I looked at each other. It was an extra seven bucks for the two “additional” people. Without a word, we paid the seven dollars rather than try to get back to S's original point.

We found our site. It was shaded with nice, mature trees on it. Unfortunately, it had zero trees between us and the major road we were on. We could literally pick up a rock and throw it into the middle of the road. This area of the road was also under construction. The “Beep – beep – beep” of heavy equipment and clouds of dust accompanied us while we set up our tents. We cooked our finest meal of the trip – hamburgers and fresh corn on the cob – while the construction crews came across the road into our campsite at the end of their day. From what we can gather, the construction crews for these remove roadway projects throughout B.C. must live somewhere else and live at the closest campgrounds for the duration of the construction.

As night fell, the traffic picked up again, and that's when we heard the trains. Clearly a depot close by that ran all night. So much for camping to get back to nature. We’ve had our share of incredibly noisy campsites lately. L and K looked at each other. Tomorrow night, they declared, we’re going to camp in the median strip.

Daily Recap: 335 miles, Province: British Columbia, The Sequel