Day 1 – Sunday, July 1, 2018
Hope, Kamloops
Happy Canada Day! I celebrated by leaving town, but stayed in Canada.
With Jeff back in New Westminster and reasonably refreshed from a night’s sleep in a proper bed, we loaded up our bags of stuff in the truck, hoping we didn’t forget anything but knowing we inevitably would, and headed out for our ultimate destination of Barkerville. Our stop for today would be at his sister’s house in Kamloops, where we would stay for the night.
The weather in Vancouver was hovering around 20c and was partly sunny. It stayed much the same on the drive to Kamloops, but going through the mountains it did drop as low as 9c and climb as high as 22c. We saw a few showers, but nothing significant. It was quite a change from the trio to Manning Park last year, though, when temperatures were close to 30c and the sky was as blue as a great big blue thing.
We stopped at Hope and went Home to have giant turkey dinners. Here is the traditional photo of our food. Pretend this is an Instagram post.
And for dessert we shared a 10,000 calorie chocolate cream pie. I think in the shot below Jeff was putting his hand up to his mouth to prevent throwing up from the massive ingestion of food.
After we left Hope behind (yes, I never get tired of Hope jokes) we continued on, occasionally stopping at one of the utilitarian rest areas along the Coquihalla Highway. This is what the luxurious toilet facilities looks like from the outside:
FUN FACT: Using the GPS info embedded in the photo, I can find this same outhouse using Street View on Google Maps. Isn’t technology grand/weird/frightening?
Inside was a D-EVIL sticker and a conspiracy theorist scrawl on the window because even conspiracy theorists gotta pee.
The actual view from the rest area was more pleasant.
Once we arrived in Kamloops we enjoyed the typical sun-scorched weather of the region. Just kidding. It was actually cooler than Vancouver and a scary thunderstorm dumped a bunch of rain while thunder rolled ominously through the sky. Also, lightning.
We completed our pre-vacation checklist by buying a ton of groceries at the local Save-On, doing our patriotic duty in helping to prime the Canadian economy. We got out 20 minutes before they closed. We hunkered down for the night in a bed Jeff described as comfortable as plywood. With sore backs we would be ready for Day 2 and the second leg of our journey to Barkerville.
