Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Canada
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
A beautiful day in British Columbia. Woke up around 7:00 (yes, I know it is early for vacation but I need to get ready for the inevitable "back-to-school" thing). I also woke early to relax by the lake on this sunny warm day. At the start of the trip, I bought along a bunch of back magazines that I did not have time to read during school. But until this time, I really have not had that much time to read due to keeping up with this blog - it takes a lot of time since I also do all the driving on this 12 to 13 thousand mile trip. I wish we could have stayed here a few days with this weather and just relax. But our main trip was to Alaska and we'll have to spend some more time in this area on another trip. Around 10:00 we started to pack-up but I fears came true about our dry-camping: lousy battery. The battery was close to dead even though we used little power last night. The battery is not that old, either. So I plugged the truck to the RV with the truck on to get some power to the RV battery. I pushed the button for the three slides to go in and it was REALLY SLOW
. I didn't think the slides were going in and we would be stuck with no power. But it just barely made it in. Then we had to put the landing jacks up and they too went very slow even though I had the truck turned on for more power. This was a close call. So our little experiment with Dry Camping almost bit us in the bum. I guess in this rig we can only dry camp with a generator. I'll probably get one before our next big RV trip which will be in 2010 or 2011 to the east side of Canada or a huge trip around the west. Many dry camp sites have some of the best views and that is the main reason I like camping. Just after 10:00 we were off for a long 300 plus day drive to the center of British Columbia, in a town called Vanderhoof. Nothing special about this place except that I knew I could not drive much farther on these two lane roads. The drive was long but not so bad. We passed more mountains (more at the start of the trip and less at the end), but we saw hundreds of lakes all the way. We did stop at two places to get some diesel - one at 1.51 a liter and another at 1.44 a liter. For lunch we stopped at a nice little rest area overlooking a valley with some mountains in the background. I had a salad (in which I put lots of Italian Dressing, Feta Cheese Bits, and Bacon Bits in it) and the old camping standby - Indian style Ramin Noodles. Since the day was so nice I ate outside in my easy chair - felt so good to relax. Then it was on this two lane road again. When your one these roads, you pay attention to the surrounds more than the usual US interstate. British Columbia so far has been a great place and will be well worth an independent trip on its own. But for this trip, we are just passing through. We reached Dave's Campground just outside the town of Vanderhoof just after 6:00.
