Summer vacation, Day 3: Lac La Hache, Williams Lake, Quesnel, Barkerville

Day 3 – Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Lac La Hache, Williams Lake, Quesnel, Barkerville

We left Lac La Lache early in the morning and I counted a few more mosquito bites. By the end of the day I had bites on the following areas of my body:

  • forehead (2)
  • face (2)
  • neck (4)
  • arms (2)
  • legs (1)
  • ankle (1)

Conclusion: Mosquitoes have seen too many Dracula movies. Also, mosquitoes suck. That is both a joke and a statement of fact.

Barkerville was our destination today and we planned on doing it in two stages, with stops at Williams Lake and Quesnel along the way.

We stopped at Williams Lake to buy a few more groceries, filling out that “inevitably forgot something” list. Sadly they were sold out of those clip-on mosquito repellent things. I suspect it would have worked in reverse on me, anyway, but it would have been nice to have at least tried it out.

After that we had a quick break at a “rest area” (really, just a place to pull over) where I took yet another shot of the dandelions that grow by the millions along the highways.

More dandelions, this time with even more dandelions.

Our next destination was Quesnel, but we only stopped to get gas from a station that had full service. I didn’t even know those still existed. One day all gas will be pumped by Amazon drones that magically descend from the sky to your moving vehicle. The guy who filled the tank smiled. The weather was pleasant and in the high teens, so maybe he was happy about that.

From there we ventured off Highway 97 and onto the winding Highway 26 to our last destination, Barkerville (technically the Lowhee Campground, but it’s only 2 km away from the town).

It started to shower and Jeff got to test his now newly-installed wiper blades. They worked very well. The temperature fell from 22 to 15. The showers stopped as we got to the campground, only to find we had power but no water. This did not please Jeff. Options were considered. Brows were furrowed. We took the stop and set up camp after realizing that exactly one camping spot out of 87 had both power and water. Not surprisingly, it was unavailable.

We consoled the loss of water with hot dogs for lunch. Also, the public washrooms are conveniently across the road from us, in case we feel like flushing someone else’s toilet.

The weather continued to be a mixed bag, but slowly improved, with the sky clearing and the sun coming out.

The sunset was very dramatic and very pretty. The colors in the photo below don’t do it justice, nor does it illustrate how rapidly the colors went from vivid red/orange to gray.

Here’s an earlier shot of the sunset, with people in the distance walking the campground loop:

The loop around the campsite was just under 2 km. Not visible: bears hiding in the woods.

And our first official campfire of the trip. Hooray!

The joy of not having a fire ban.

The fire danger level here is actually Low, which means the chance of a fire ban coming into effect while we’re here is basically zero.

A time machine will be needed for this to change while we’re here.

To feed the fire, we followed a Forest Service access road and chopped up some legal deadfall. Well, Jeff chopped, I loaded the truck, as I am not to be trusted with a chainsaw.

Forest Service road. It’s all very scenic until you need to turn around.
It will burn. Very slowly.

Before dinner we road our bikes along the 2 km path to the Barkerville Reception Center. And yes, it was uphill all way—literally. It was much faster coming back. We paid for the campsite, two days of Barkervilling and had hamburgers for dinner. Yes, hot dogs and hamburgers on the same day. How can you tell we’re camping?

We did a few more walks around the campsite, had s’mores around the fire for dessert (of course), then retired for the evening at the ungodly hour of…10:45 p.m. I was hoping to see the sky filled with billions of stars by this time but it was still too bright. If I went back out I’d probably just add to my bite collection, anyway.

Tomorrow we go to see Barkerville. I will be wearing head-to-toe netting.

Summer vacation 2018, Day 2: Cache Creek, 100 Mile House, Lac La Hache

Day 2 – Monday, July 2, 2018
Cache Creek, 100 Mile House, Lac La Hache

Today was another day of travel, our destination the provincial park campsite at Lac La Hache, north of 100 Mile House.

We left the frigid climate of Kamloops just past 10 a.m. after a yummy breakfast of eggs and toast. Yes, I have this every single day. It’s still yummy.

The weather continued to be unsettled, with cloudy skies and temperatures struggling to reach into the double digits.

We stopped to rest at the Big Bar REST AREA at the Bonaparte Plateau.

We did indeed help keep it clean.

Our next major destination was Cache Creek, where we stopped for gas. Since that’s all we did and one PetroCan station doesn’t look dramatically different than any other, I have no pictures. But here it is on Google Maps:

For those times when “lush jungles” is not on your vacation must-see list.

After that we arrived at 70 Mile House (about 262 km north of Vancouver if you could ignore all roads) and got propane. Here’s a shot of both the 70 Mile General Store (we bought a barbecue starter for $2.49) and Jeff getting propane.

Jeff bundled up while getting propane in 70 Mile House, a recurring theme of the trip (the bundling up, not the getting propane).

And some flowers next to the highway with a handsome red 18-wheeler roaring by.

I’m not sure if the truck actually had 18 wheels. Also, going by the focus, it appears the phone camera was more interested in it than the flowers.

After this the weather took a turn for the wet, with the rain coming down hard enough at times that Jeff kind of regretted not putting on the new windshield wipers he bought in Kamloops.

We arrived at Lac La Hache around 2:30 p.m. and the campsite was virtually deserted, as most people were heading back from the holiday weekend while we were crazily doing the opposite. With the camper and trailer parked in stall 46, we settled in for evening, eschewing fires and barbecues because we’d be skipping out early in the a.m.

Here is Jeff going his best, “What , me worry?” look regarding the rain.

No fear of a little rain (while wearing full rain gear).

It let up shortly after we got to the camp, so we went for walking through what turned out to be a semi-abandoned trail adjacent to the campsite. This is when the mosquitoes descended to feast upon me and lo, they had a rich harvest. Keep in mind that due to the weather, I was wearing jeans, a hoodie, had the hood up and my hands shoved into the pockets. The only exposed flesh was my face and neck. Surely I would notice a parasite sucking the blood from my peripheral vision.

I did not.

I got four bites: one on my forehead, one on my cheek, one on my upper lip and one on my neck. The Calamine lotion in the trailer became my new best friend. Jeff claimed he escaped getting bitten because he “tastes bitter” to which I say, “Pfft!” and yet I admit it is a mystery. Maybe they can sense fear or something and home in on it.

I killed one in the trailer tonight using a box of Alleve, and it did in fact make me feel better. Thanks, Alleve.

With the weather no longer seeming so much like December, we ventured over to the lake itself for one of those “take in nature (and pray you don’t get devoured by mosquitoes)” walks.

This is the scary-looking culvert you go through to pass under the highway to get to the lake. I resisted the urge to start honking like a car horn—but only just barely.

The safe way to get across the highway. Also the wettest as there was a honking big puddle in it.

The lake is very nice and filled with lots of water, just as you’d expect. Across the way was a strange and very tall tree which turned out to be a cell tower and is probably the reason we can check Facebook tonight instead of living like complete savages. I call this picture Our Lord and Savior.

Natural splendor and cell coverage, together at last.

Pretty pink flowers at the lake:

The day picnic and boat launch area discourages several varieties of fun. I’m guessing this sign is so big after a couple of boats collided, sending Kokanee everywhere.

In the parking lot was, of course, a van painted in homage to Woody Guthrie (available for rent).

We returned to the campsite, had a traditional home style dinner of chicken and veggies, then walked back to the lake because the sun came out, reminding us that is was actually summer. The Woody Guthrie van was gone. But in its place we saw frolicking marmots.

This is cropped and I’ve fiddled with the brightness/contrast. The marmot did not attempt to fit into the sewer grate.

Finally, we settled in for the evening, with the temperature now 12ºC, downright balmy compared to earlier.

A shot of the campsite:

And later that night it rained again.

Summer vacation 2018 Day 1: Hope, Kamloops

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.

A hot turkey sandwich and a roast turkey dinner. Just the sort of light lunch to get us started.

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.

Pardon the iPhone shadow. The lighting was very bad at our table.

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.

Judging from the view down the bowl (you have to look to aim), the D-EVIL was down there somewhere.

The actual view from the rest area was more pleasant.

Looking at this makes me want to run into the field, swing my arms around and start singing.

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.

The thunderstorm starts rolling in. Much rain, lightning and thunder followed.

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.

Summer vacation 2018 Day 0: New Westminster

Summer vacation 2018
or
How I Learned to Have Fun
No Matter How Many Mosquito Bites I Got
(Which was Roughly a Million)

Day 0 – Saturday, June 30, 2018
New Westminster

Technically this is not actual vacation time, but it is my first of 23 days off, so it sort of counts as something.

I spent most of the day doing exciting vacation-related activities such as laundry, shopping and getting my new glasses, which arrived a week early, hooray.

The sunglasses make me look much cooler than I am and the regular glasses make me look normal, but with everything now in focus, just the way I like it.

That was pretty much the day, so as first vacation days go, it was not the most exciting, but it did leave me reasonably prepared for the actual vacation to come.

June 2018 weight loss report: Down 1.4 pounds

Although I had no infections or other maladies to assist me, I maintained my losing streak and was down for the month, shedding another 1.4 pounds. I benefited from a massive 2.1 pound drop on the last day of the month (today) but would have still been down regardless, so yay for me. I now stand 11.6 pounds from my official™ goal of 150 pounds. With a week and a bit of travel up north to Barkerville, I would expect the hiking and whatnot will at least let me hold the line, even as we indulge in hot dogs and other yummy but perhaps not calorie-wise camping foods.

For the year to date my weight loss is actually, for the first time, an actual loss, down 0.7 pounds. With the body fat also down, it appears I am finally starting to lose weight for real and getting back to the ultra-sexy form of a few years ago.

I will, as always, resist having a donut to celebrate.

June 1: 163 pounds
June 30: 161.6 pounds (-1.4 pounds for the month)

Year to date: From 162.3 to 161.6 pounds (down 0.7 pounds)

And the body fat:

January 1: 18.5% (30.2 pounds of fat)
June 30:
17.5% (28.4 pounds of fat (down 1.8 pounds)

Book review: Uncommon Type

Uncommon Type: Some StoriesUncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tom Hanks is a good writer and these are good stories.

Tom Hanks is also obsessed with typewriters. They inform the title of this collection, they pop up in many of these stories, and a typewriter takes center stage in several of them. Typewriters are the glue that binds everything together in Uncommon Type, and what a typewriter symbolizes reflects directly in many of the tales–a simple machine from a simpler time, a nostalgic callback, an evocation of memories both warm and bittersweet.

The first story actually defies all of this, though, and perhaps sets an inadvertently light tone for the remainder of the collection. “Three Exhausting Weeks” is just that–a story about friends that become more than friends, with the go-getter Anna driving the protagonist (and narrator) to exhaustion with her frenetic lifestyle over a stretch of just a few weeks. It’s breezy and funny and very unlike many of the other stories, which trade on sentimentality, a yearning for a simpler world and are often more character studies or mood pieces than fleshed-out stories.

This is not to say the more meditative stories are bad, but some of them never generate much heat, they just ramble along amiably and then end with a quick sign-off.

Another favorite, though, is the seemingly inevitable time travel story, “The Past Is Important to Us.” This seems much like a lot of the other tales, filled with lovely, warm people sharing wonderful times together, but it twists beautifully, in a way that I don’t feel is diminished even when the twist seems unavoidable.

“A Month on Greene Street” was another I enjoyed. A cynical single mother moves to a new neighborhood and thinks the worst of her likewise single next-door neighbor. For added flavor she also has occasional visions of the future. Hanks does some nice character-building here and the ending is both sweet and satisfying.

“A Month on Greene Street” also highlights both a strength and weakness of the stories. The women are complex, multilayered characters, but most of the men are much simpler, and less interesting as a result. I’m not sure if this is actually a fault of Hanks’ writing or if he just sees men as less interesting in general, but it was something that began to stand out as I read through more of the stories. One exception may be the newspaper columnist Hank Fiset, whose columns are interspersed throughout the book. His voice is clear, loud and colorful as he rambles on about the future of the paper he writes for and, of course, typewriters.

Overall, even when a story didn’t make my socks roll up and down, I was still entertained by the surprisingly sturdy wordcraft. As I mentioned at the top, Hanks is a good writer, and there are certain moods and technologies and emotions he is very fond of and obviously enjoys writing about. If you are up for some low-key character studies about mostly decent, but variably flawed people, Uncommon Type will serve you well. Jut don’t go in expecting explosions and car chases. There is bowling, though.

View all my reviews

A haiku for a soggy summer start

The rain falls in June
I know the sun will return
Burn my arms again

Which is true. No matter what I do I always end up with some degree of sunburn on my arms, it’s like one of the laws of the universe. This year I’m using sunblock to see if my body is actually resistant to active sunburn prevention.

I will provide photographic evidence as needed in the near future to demonstrate the outcome of this.

Brainstorming in the USA

Actually, Canada, I just like riffing on “French Kissing in the USA” whenever possible, because it’s a goofy little song.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done any real brainstorming, but I love lists, I have a brain and it’s often stormy in these parts, so I have all the ingredients in place.

The goal here is to plant a few (dozen) seeds and see if any of them grow into big beautiful stories or writing exercises while I ponder other projects.

Here we go.

  • a story based on the song “Eat to the Beat”
  • what if they really are lizard people?
  • three wishes/Invisible Weekend redux: getting to try out as a shapeshifter or some kind of shapeshifter story
  • worst superpower ever
  • a talking duck (walks into a bar?)
  • when the line between waking and dreams blurs completely–how risky do you become in your actions?
  • a monster that feeds on hope and optimism (no, not Trump)
  • angry trees
  • the world is suddenly depopulated by 99.6% (30.4 million people–about 7 million less than the population of Canada)
  • getting stuck in the past
  • a bar walks into a man
  • a haunted playground
  • a Stage 4 cancer patient acquires a time machine–can traveling to the future lead to a cure?
  • seeing a person on the train, but only as a reflection in the window

The next task: pick one of these and turn it into a lovingly handcrafted tale of thrills and adventure that tugs at the heartstrings (which sounds pretty unhealthy when you think about it).

When The Onion comes to the local mall

I was in Metrotown this past weekend and as always it is a bewildering experience, as there are about five thousand stores and a hundred times as many people buzzing through the mall between them.

I did get a pair of glasses and prescription sunglasses at Lenscrafters, though. The experience was surprisingly easy, the woman who helped me was knowledgeable and a couple of promotions made the two pairs (eight eyes, lol!!) decently affordable. The only downside is they won’t be ready until I am partway through vacation. My own fault for waiting so long to get my prescription updated.

While there I spotted an outlet that is Coming Soon® and did a double-take, because it seemed more like something you’d see in an Onion story than an actual retail store. But no, it is real:

I especially like the guy on the left looking like he is about to plow into some meter-high pink monster cone.

It turns out Sweet Jesus is a chain that started out east and is only just starting to open locations out west, like the one above in Metrotown. Their menu seems to be based primarily around frozen treats containing 32,000 calories each. I’m not necessarily objecting.

It’s kind of a ballsy name, though. Do Christians feel good about going there for sundaes? Is it sacrilegious or sacrilicious?

I’ll find out this summer, because I’m definitely going to try…something.

Bad design: Paving over the (wrong part of the) environment

(Technically this is not paving, but pouring concrete.)

Here’s something you sometimes see in cities or any urban area that has decent foot traffic. For the most part people walk along sidewalks and stick to them because the alternatives are unattractive for varying reasons–trespassing in someone’s yard and getting eaten by a dog, walking into the street and being run over by a bus, and so on–but sometimes there are routes off a sidewalk people will take, when that route is more direct and without risk of dogs, buses or other obstacles.

This is the sidewalk in front of the Burnaby Public Library on Central Boulevard.

Walk which way?

There are a pair of roundabouts here that bisect the sidewalk. Here’s an image from Google Maps that shows both of them (the one in the photo I took above is on the right):

A decision was made to have the sidewalk in front of the library not line up directly along the street, as would normally be the case. As you can see especially from the photo, people who come from either intersection, where the sidewalk does align next to the street, continue to walk in a straight line, ignoring the sidewalk directly in front of the library altogether.

The unnatural foot path (so to speak) becomes quite muddy and slick in winter, but it’s perfectly fine for most of the year, provided you’re not especially susceptible to tripping on small, exposed tree roots.

Anyone who understands human behavior should have anticipated the development of this foot path when looking at the plans for this block. Sidewalks that deliberately steer you away from getting from Point A to Point B are bad design. People will always take the shortest route if it’s easier and safe to do so.

The fix here would be to add a stretch of sidewalk where the existing foot path lies. The tree roots complicate things, so that may never happen, but the roots will eventually get ground down by the traffic on them, anyway.

Sometimes this bad design, while not anticipated, is still fixed later. Such is the case in Thornton Park in Vancouver. When the park was rehabilitated as part of the redesign of the nearby Main Street SkyTrain station, several pedestrian-made paths were converted into permanent sidewalks. It’s always nice to see recognition of real-life usage and adapting the environment to it where it makes sense.