Calvin's Weblog

The end of the road

Another week goes by, and I finally find myself, between bottling beer and laeving for rehearsal, with a few extra minutes in front of the computer... oh joy! I can finally finish the blog entry about my roadtrip.
Ironically, the only reason I even bought the digital camera was so that I could get picture online and into the blog with a click of a button ... no scanning, no developing - and yet, it seems it's actually MORE work now, cropping, colour correcting, sharpening... ah well, we pay the price for technology don't we...

So this is how the last half of the trip panned out:
It was already about 5PM when we left the dam and headed back toward Hudson Hope. We knew that if we headed to Tumbler Ridge, it would probably be about dusk when we rolled in, but what the hey.... Tumbler Ridge is the town that was for sale a few years back ... when the mine shut down, the whole town closed up - how hard could it be to find a place to spend the night in a ghost town, anyway??? LOL, I'll get to that...
But first we passed through Chetwynd:

From there, it was straight to Tumbler Ridge, but my camera batteries died, so there are no pictures. It was a beautiful drive, and we actually even checked out a campsite by a lake, just before getting to the town, but figured we'd see what ammenities the town had first before hunkering down for the night. Wow. so much for the ghost town! Apparently, since the oil and gas industry has been doing so 'well' (forgive the pun) lately, the region has absolutely exploded with exploration - and as a result, every motel room, hotel room, and every place to stay was booked up by oil workers - a bustling community indeed! It's very modern, has great amenities, it's no wonder that the whole thing was bought up so quickly ...
So now that it was starting to get dark, we figured we'd plow straight through to Dawson Creek again, since it's less than two hours straight up a road we hadn't taken yet - by the way, that completes the big cirlce we had planned for the day...
Now, we had started to see a lot of deer on the road as soon as it got to twighlight, and I was actually SAYING to Tim "I've got to really pay attention to the road - as soon as it gets dark there are going to be animals ALL over the place" when we both yelled "Moose!!!!" as one jumped into the road about 50 feet ahead of me. Hitting the breaks as hard as I could, left about 10 feet between the hood of my car, and the mooses' kneecaps. Them suckah's are BIG! I then said, as we looked to the left and watched the moose dissapear, "You know, I'll bet more accidents happen when people just miss an animal and then they're still looking at where it's going, when more animals jump into the road from the other side..." Although, I don't recall if I finished my sentance, because Tim was yelling "Deer! Deer! Watch out!" - I hadn't even got back up to 50km/h yet, and I was stupidly looking left at the moose and talking, when 3 deer hopped up on to the right side of the road. More brakes, and another near miss.
"Okay, oaky! I'm paying attention now!" - that was one hell of a DARK and nerve racking ride. In 100 killometers, we counted over 100 dear at the sides of the road - fortunately there weren't any more close calls. Well, okay, there was one.
About a half an hour after the first moose incident, I saw that the taillights that I had been seeing off and on for about 15 minutes way off in the distance (maybe 4 or 5 km... they are long, straight roads...) turned to brake lights, seemed to shudder sharply, then stop. Headlights came into view, heading my direction, and they seemed to swerve and stop right where the tail lights were stopped. Then it looked like the taillights backed up a little, stayed still for a while, then left again. The headlight also headed toward me once again. About three minutes later he passed me, and flashed his hi-beams at me. "Do you think there are cops there?" asked tim "Or did he think you have your highbeams on?"
"No," I said... "I'll bet ya anything there are a bunch of animals on the road" - we'll just watch out for them. As we got near the spot where we say them stop, it was apparent what the hullabaloo was about ... a freshly struck moose lay prone in the very middle of the road. Head to butt, it must've been 8 or 9 feet long... I could barely get around it! Anhd this wasn't even a big one - t had no antlers...
Man, the damage that must be on that vehicle that was in front of me! We wondered... but as it turns out, when I finally caught up and passed him, it was a semi truck with a big cattle guard on the front. Other than some fur in the grill, no damage at all.
So maybe another 45 minutes after that, we were back in Dawson Creek and looking for a motel. Surprise, surprise. same deal as Tumbler Ridge - no vacancies! Luckily, the clerk at one of the motels phoned around until she found us a room- so we headed straight to the place she told us about, and checked in. Joy of all joys, it was kareoke night in the bar downstairs... and rather than sit in the room drinking beer and watching TV, we decided to go down and check it out. It was really rather fun to watch actually! Who'd have thought that there are only three types on music up north... Country, AC/DC, and Whitesnake. I must admit, that wasn't what I was expecting. Some people were really good, some were really bad, but in the end it was a pretty nice way to relax after a fourteen hour drive.

The next day, I filled up with gas (again) - and by the way, I totalled my gas bill for the trip, and it was $465. Yowza. At the gas station I also bought batteries for the camera. Of course, it wasn't until an hour later when I actually tried to take a picture that I found out that all the batteries I bought were completely dead. Dang. I did manage to squeeze a couple off though, by combining old half-dead batteries with one new half-dead battery.
We headed back through Chetwynd, then down toward Mackenzie.
Here are some mountains during that drive - it's kinda nice to be back in the mountains again!

And here's the Mackenzie claim to fame... Yes, you read it right, the world's largest tree crusher...

Well, there actually were a couple of other "interesting" things about Mackenzie, not the least of which is that they've got an IRLP node - that's the Internet Radio Linking Project - and while that might be self explanitory to people like my borther, to the rest of us, that means you can use a HAM radio to dial up the internet, then you can punch in the code for any other HAM IRLP site in the world, and blammo - you're instantly talking into your handheld radio in Canada and yet you're being heard over the airwaves in Australia, or South Africa, or wherever you chose toy call. Nothing so glamorous for Tim though, he just wanted to call a friend in Penticton... and he actually got through!!! pretty damn cool - from the highway, he's talking to a repeater 30 km away in Mackenzie, which is turning his conversation into digital packets, routing them through the internet to a repeater in Penticton, (or was it in Vernon? I forget...) but anyway, his friemd in Penticton actually hears him and picks up, and starts chatting, clear as day. A cool story indeed, but not the most noteable thing about Mackenize...

Okay, so how to begin... Tim had been driving for about four hours, and we finally pulled over at a rest stop, a mere 20 km before Mackenzie to stretch our legs and switch seats. I was trying to get a picture of a huge bear holding up a sign that said "Mackenzie, 20 minutes ahead" - but I couldn't get the camera to work (though it DID work half hour later for the tree crusher photo... go figure) so anyway, I had just buckled up, and pulled out of the rest area. I was going about 100km (yes, in a 90 zone, but hell... this REALLY IS the middle of nowhere.... we probably passed 10 cars in the last hour) and I had been driving all of about three minutes, when a car came over the crest of the hill in the distance. I wasn't sure if it was a cop, but I thought it might be, so I checked my speed, figured there was no way I'd get a ticket for going 98 in a 90 zone in the middle of bumfuk nowhere, so I ensured that my seed was steady as the (sure enough) cop came closer, then passed me. I look in my rearview mirror, and, you guessed it, he stops, turns around, and comes after me. By this time, I'm over the crest of the hill and he can't see me, so I make sure to slow right to 90 as he comes up behind me. for maybe another minute he just tails me and I'm thinking "okay, he's running my plates - he'll see that I haven't has a ticket in over 13 years, and he'll go away." - but instead, he hits the lights, and I pull over right away.
"Licence and registration"... blah, blah, blah. "You're from Coquitlam. What are you doing out here?"
"We're just taking this weekend to see some of the parts of this fine province of our that we've never been to before."
"And what's to see in Mackenizie?"
"Well, for one, we really just want to drive every road in BC, and we've never been here before - but also, I've never seen the largest lake in BC before, and I think everyone should do that at least once."
"Uh-huh." He walks off to his car, and comes back in about 4 or 5 minutes.
"Step out of the car please sir." I get out. "May I please talk to you back here, sir". He takes me back behind the car. First of all, I'm giving you a ticket for speeding. You were going 98 in a 90 zone." I flash him my best 'get the fuk outta here...' look. "Have you ever had one of these before?"
"Yeah, I haven't had any tickets in well over a decade though."
"Well, payment and dispute information is on the back. But would you mine sticking around a few minutes to answer some questions for me?"
"Sure, no problem - I'm not in any hurry..."
"Uh huh...", he says, looking at me skeptically... "If you don't mind me asking, what do you do that you drive a car like this?"
"I work for the phone company."
NO SHIT - his gaze turns to a glare, he grips the handle of his billy club and says "You freely admit that? You're not afraid that we're going to beat you senseless in the middle of nowhere for your lousy service"
"Um, " I stumble, "Should I be?" as visions of "squeal like a piggy, boy!" and "you's gotta purdy mouth..." popped into my head...
"What do you do for the phone company?"
"I'm a computer and network security specialist. I work with law enforcement - I go after bad guys trying to break into, defraud, or damage our networks or our customers"
"So you go after hackers? You're in IT"
"Well, I used to be in IT, that's where I started out, but now it's just security. The information security people go after hackers, I deal more with the telephone lines - you know, toll fraud, 911 calls, tracing bomb threats, protecting our assets, and the phone service in communities just like yours."
Convinced that I'm probably not trying to bullshit him, he losens the grip on his club and says "the reason I ask is that we get a lot of rich lower-mainland drug dealer types up here in their fancy cars, bringing drugs into our small communities. You... wouldn't... have... anything like that in your car, would you?"
"Geez, absolutely not - people come all the way up here just to sell drugs? Are you serious? What a waste! No, we definately don't have any drugs!"
"Okay then. You can go - just watch your speed, or you'll be getting a lot more of those before you get home." Yeah, whatever, I'm thinkin... back home I can pass a cop going 98 in a 60 zone and not worry about getting pulled over...

So anyway, when I got home and wrote my cheque to Victoria for the $108 fine, I printed neatly in the memo field "fine for driving a nice car through a shitty town". I really wanted to laugh at the cop and say "$108? Ha! I'll make that much before my first coffee break Monday morning!" - but somehow I figured that really wasn't going to help the situation, so I refrained...

Back on the road, and the foul taste of hillbillydom now a distant memory, we B-Line it for Prince George - um, with the cruise control set on 91km/h the whole way (there's still a little rebel left in me)

Tim bought another pack of batteries in P.G. when I filled up with gas again, so I was able to take more pictures!
First one, more mountains - somewhere between Prince George and Tete Jeune Cache.

Then sometime thereafter I slowed down to shoot some more deer (with my camera, silly!)

From there, we had a choice of a short jaunt to Jasper (No! Been there ,done that... full circle!) or a long jaunt through to Kamloops, then back to my parents for the night. We chose the Kamloops route, though it wouldn't get us in until about 11pm - yikes, another 14 hour day, and I drove all the way since Mackenzie...
I took probably another 15 pictures of mountains, but won't bore you with them... other that this one, late at night, somewhere around Blue River (where we live for a year when I was in grade one) - this is some sorta fire on the mountainside - the picture doesn't really show that, but it's still a cool picture - big fire!

Later that night, we started tuning in AM radio stations from all over the place - it was a clear night, and because of the phenomenon of AM, skipping off the atmosphere and bouncing around, we were getting stations from crazy places - we were making a game of it - trying to get station identification from the farthest away places... we got Oregon, Oklahoma, Salt Lake City, Montana, Seattle, but the coolest - though not the farthest, was actually getting NEWS 1130, the Vancouver station that I listen to every morning on my way to work for the traffic and weather report... their signal is so weak that I can barely get it in Coquitlam, and yet, here, a thousand miles away, we were getting it crystal clear - and we got it for HOURS too! Really neat.

But anyway, I'm tired of typing, and we're finally almost there - the rest is just a drive in the dark, south through Cache Creek, Lone Butte, Kamloops, then back through Chase to Sorrento where I had a GOOD nights sleep.

The next morning, a measely 400 (or so) km and I was back home.... ahhhhhhhh....

Posted by Calvin at October 22, 2004 04:32 PM