OH Canada!

1200 miles later and here we are, perched on the Western Coast of BC, an hour away from driving onto a ferry and weaving through islands big and small, finally landing in Ketchikan. We’ll stay the night there and tomorrow night, too, and then we’ll take our final ferry to Prince of Wales Island, large in size but small in population.

It’s been very much a road trip. I was hoping we’d have time to stop and hike or find some hot springs or have some jollies on the side but it’s been go go go. The motor home will go 60 mph if we really want it to (or if it’s headed down a hill, then it has even hit 70!) but it would much prefer 55 or even 50. So we would drive all day and net 250-300 miles and then stop at a provincial park campground and enjoy a little dinner, the occasional fire and roasted marshmallows, a bit of our books and then head to bed. I’m reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors and, as always and even more so this time, as I’m doing Travels with Alex, it resonates deeply.

The motor home has performed extremely well, except for two glitches. We had some trouble with the fridge and couldn’t get it running, and then one day the engine wouldn’t stay running.

The fridge, well, a man in the campground we were in for the night saw us looking perplexedly at it from the outside and came over to offer some advice. Turns out he’d worked on RVs for many years as a career and after 30 minutes or so of unscrewing this, throwing a little compressed air through that, lighting and re-lighting the pilot light again and again, he got it working for us. He wouldn’t take anything as a thank-you, not even blueberries or a single strawberry. He just said, he hoped someone would do the same for him.

And then the day the engine wouldn’t run. It kept dying on us as we were trying to pull it out of the campground. So I finally finagled it enough to where we were able to get on the highway and off we went, hiccuping our way to Prince George. We got to the edge of town and it died coming down the hill and wouldn’t start up again at all. Alex started pushing it into a gas station parking lot while I steered, then a gas station attendant dashed out to help him, and then a pickup pulled up in front of us, stopped quickly and and discharged a young man who dashed behind to give Alex and the attendant a hand.

We called the only mechanic available on a Sunday morning and were blessed with Vic and his father, who’d interrupted their bacon and eggs to come help us out. They helped us fix our problem. It was the most hands-on mechanic experience I’ve ever had. They were telling fishing stories the entire time they were also walking us through the process of what was wrong and how to fix it. We finished up, handed them $50 after they’d asked for $40 (“I guess that’s a tip then, right?” Vic said. “Americans must not be so bad after all!”) and we were on our merry way.

We’ve been lucky. The drive has been stunning. Usually a scenic drive involves an hour getting to the scenery and fifteen minutes of neck-craning ooh’s and aahs. This was 20 hours of gorgeous everywhere you looked. Want to see some natural beauty? Get your ass to BC!!

And now it’s ferry time! Can’t wait to get to where we’re going and see what this summer’s going to be all about.

<3