Hanging BC tin

We weren't dealing with the stupidest person in the world this morning. As far as I know that distinction is reserved for the guy at Km 22 south of Nogales who never actually got around to issuing me a vehicle import permit 2 years ago. He peered into his computer, poked morosely at the keyboard, periodically wandered around asking his fellow computer pokers questions and occasionally started all over again. I'm sure we'd still be there if a shift change hadn't come along. The woman we were dealing with this morning could possibly have been his sister though.

We drove into town with the intention of registering both our vehicles but we didn't really know what a licensing office looked like so we ended up at our UPS store thinking we could pick up our mail and ask the owners where we needed to go. They weren't open yet - one of the hazards of us working on bus-time and the foolish residents of BC being on some other time zone - so we wandered across the parking lot to an insurance broker that I noticed there. She claimed that they could issue licenses but from the subsequent performance I'm not sure she had ever actually done it before. At one point she turned to me and asked "what GVW do you want on the truck?" "It's an Explorer - it's a passenger vehicle - maybe an SUV - why do you need a GVW?" "Oh no, its a truck because it has a box." She segued from there into how she had never heard of or seen an Explorer. I explained to her that as far as I was concerned it was a notorious piece of shit but it was a very popular piece of Ford shit. She kept worrying away at how she'd never seen another one like it until Marilyn said "there's another one right now!" and pointed out the window.

After it took close to 2 hours to register Ford's best selling SUV in the morning there was no way in hell I was going to drive the bus back into her tiny parking lot in the afternoon. That was a big surprise for us prairie imports. In Saskatchewan they ask you "is the vehicle currently located in Saskatchewan?" and you answer "Yes". Then they give you the plates. But out here they apparently have to lay their beady little eyeballs on the vehicle in question. I'm not sure what that's all about but it's a major pain in the ass figuring out how to get a 40 foot bus into a license issuer's parking lot. On the way back home we stopped at a Save-On Foods store that had an Autoplan insurer in it. They assured me that they could issue plates and I figured it was impossible that they could be any stupider than the one we dealt with in the morning. My grandmother always said "don't wish for the death of the devil - you might get a worse one in his place" but in this case I think that was simply impossible. They also had a huge parking lot which was pretty much of an attraction.

In the afternoon we left separately so that Marilyn could take Jorgito to a vet on the way to the afternoon vehicle registration episode. I got unhooked and drove into Save-On Foods. By the time I got there Marilyn had finished up at the vet. Apparently our furry little son is obese. That's no real surprise to us but its going to be a rude shock to the four-legged fiend. He already thinks he is perpetually on the verge of collapsing from starvation so a further reduction in his rations will not be met with enthusiasm.

It took at least another 2 hours to register the bus but it wasn't because we were dealing with a fool. In Saskatchewan they used to ask me how much my vehicle weighed and base the registration on whatever number I told them. If I had ever been stopped and weighed more than I was licensed for then I would have been ticketed. So I told the woman this afternoon to license us for 38,000 pounds because we have weighed that much on the road but that wasn't good enough for ICBC - we had to go get a scale ticket. She sent us to the town dump where I'm not sure whether I caught the scale operator on an off day or whether they are always assholes but there was no way they were going to give me a weight today. So then it was off across town to a Esso station with a trucker scale where I waited in line until it was my turn, got cut off by an impatient trucker and waited some more and finally got my scale ticket - for 34,480 pounds. In other words, if ICBC had been willing to take my word they would have got to license me for an additional 3,520 pounds. Serves em right. Mind you, mother Evans didn't raise any fools either. As soon as I realized how they were doing things I opened the dump valve on the fresh water tank and by the time I actually got on the scale I had dumped at least 2000# of water. It just happened that we were also nearly empty on the waste tanks and carrying about 1/3 of a tank of diesel. Even the propane tank is low so we were at about our minimum road weight when we got weighed. Except for one overweight cat.

Tonight we're tucked back into Thousand Trails at Cultus Lake where we will stay until Sunday or Monday. Its actually pretty pleasant here right now. There are still lots of leaves on the deciduous trees so there is good colour on the hillsides. The night before last some folks moved in behind us and they are campfire lovers so we have somebody to sit around a campfire with (and somebody to light the fire in the first place).