Are we there yet??: Lake Louise to Vancouver

We are adjusting to the ‘variable’ spring weather! Snow falling in the mountain passes, brilliant sunshine in the Okanagan Valley, snow again in Princeton and full on Taranaki rain in Vancouver with a stunning sunny day in the middle. We have added umbrellas to our kit – hopefully sometime in the next few weeks we will be using them as sunshades!

But where the weather has been a bit lacking in consistency, the people we have met along the way have been great. Okay2stay provided us with two contacts in Vernon in the Okanagan Valley. We met up for lunch with an expat Brit and his family and then parked over for a night with another Okay2stay member a little further down the road.

A few years ago Jenni, Kathy and Katy all worked at Silverstar, a beautiful ski village close to Vernon. We visited to see where they had worked and played. I shed a tear or two, but mostly I was able to imagine the good times they had enjoyed there.

Because we are such avid freedom campers at home, we looked for something similar in Canada/Alaska and found a site called ‘Boondockers Welcome’. It is a community of RVers who have a bit of land or a driveway and are happy to have other members park over for a night or so. We struck gold near Princeton (a couple of hundred kms east of Vancouver). We were invited to stay by an enterprising couple, Bob and Pam, who are clearing, draining and developing a couple of hectares on which to build their new house. It is covered with several feet of snow all winter so they head south in their RV to Baja California (Mexico) equipped with a webcam. It obviously helps with security on the property, but most importantly though, the webcam tells them when the snow has cleared and is time to come home! They sold a business in Vancouver and bought themselves an excavator, two tractors, a back hoe, a dump truck and a portable saw mill to work their land. There are no male/female roles in this partnership and Pam is as at home using all this equipment as Bob is in the kitchen. She is also the ‘registered’ builder overseeing the construction of the house. Really hospitable, salt-of-the-earth people.

Mostly, though we have been staying in campgrounds as proper freedom camping isn’t so easy in the more populated parts of BC. While writing this (13 April) we are in Whistler, the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics and it is the most expensive yet - $52 per night – with useless internet and they still want to charge to use the showers! In comparison the two nights we spent in a Vancouver RV park right next to Lions Gate Bridge were brilliant.

While in Vancouver we were well looked after by Sue Boutwood, another friend from the happy, hippy 70’s. Twenty-five years ago Sue bought a little apartment in a relatively undeveloped area near the waterfront. It is now one of the most desirable and has wonderful views over the waterways and parks. Sue showed us around all the sites that we would never have been able to see otherwise. On a fine day it is a beautiful city – and we were very lucky to get one of those!

Vancouver has a lot of similarities to Auckland – scenic waterfront, high property prices, rapid immigration and traffic congestion. However, they do have a very efficient and well used skytrain and ferry system. We wandered through Gastown and China town, and visited the Science Centre. (It was okay, but once we had paid and were inside, we realised that it was mainly for kids. Never mind, it kept us amused on a wet day).

So that is the end of big cities for us for some time. The next one of any size is Anchorage and that is over 3500 kms away. Time to put that big V8 engine to good use!