Organic vegetarian pot stickers

I think I mentioned our organic site mate while we were in Morgan Hill.  She showed up one night after dark in the rain and set up a tent in the site next to us.  We both felt sorry for her but not sorry enough to invite her in.  When we eventually met we learned that she actually likes to tent and that her tent was some kind of super-dooper tent compound that stays dry.  Yeah, right – I can imagine how dry it stays.  We also learned that she had a perfectly good trailer, here in Rancho Oso as it turned out, but she had chosen to live there in the rain at Morgan Hill in a tent.

We met at Morgan Hill while I was repairing the TV dish after it blew over and broke during a wind storm.  She asked if I knew anything about satellite dishes and (foolishly) I allowed that I did.  As it turned out she has an internet dish that she had set up here in Rancho Oso but she has recently changed sites and she needed to get her dish re-aimed.  It turned out she was expecting delivery of a new Airstream trailer which had occasioned the move and subsequent re-aiming of her dish.

Today while I was reassembling the generator compartment after replacing the isolation mounts that I have been hauling around since Saskatoon T.K. came up and asked if I was from Canada.  Apparently the reason she hadn’t come around earlier was because she didn’t recognize the bus on her daily dog walks.  Once we had clearly established my nationality she smoothly segued into me setting up her satellite dish.  Since we are leaving tomorrow morning that left this afternoon for setting up her dish.

Fortunately we downloaded and ran it as shareware so when it didn’t work at least we weren’t out anything other than our time.

 

It was no problem to set up the dish using my computer but I failed in my goal to have her learn how to do it herself with her own computer.  I can’t take all the blame for the failure though because a large part of it – OK – all of it - belongs to her decision to be a Mac owner.  I’m sure that Macs do wonderful things but let’s face it – Macs are angle parkers in a parallel parking universe.  They don’t work particularly well, they don’t fit in and nobody cares.  So when it came time to find her the ubiquitous software that I use to set up my dish – well let’s just say that the Mac versions aren’t ubiquitous.  I did manage to find 2 pieces of software that should have been adequate to the task but one of them flat out wouldn’t run on her computer and the other one only had about half the functionality that it’s Windows counterpart, which I use regularly, has. 

Eventually I conceded defeat, aimed her dish with my computer and left her to ponder what she will do the next time she has to move.  I’m sure that buried somewhere in her trailer is the software that her vendor supplied her with when she bought the system but locating that today seemed to be out of the question.  And frankly it’s not my problem.

It is in fact Tom Mason’s problem.  Tom is the guy who showed up at our bus last year in Arcadia with a bottle of Pinch.  Mel & I detained him until his Pinch was gone and then cruelly released him back to Fran’s tender care.  It appeared afterward that Tom may have suffered for his decision to spend the night with the boys without first telling Fran what his plans were but Mel and I had a great evening.  We may have in some small way contributed to his difficulty by our response when Fran attempted to phone Tom to determine where the hell he was spending his evening.  As it turns out Tom actually sold the system to T.K. so I had an excuse to phone Tom this afternoon.  They’re back in Arcadia but I’m sure it’s not nearly as much fun without Mel & me.

Back to the potstickers.  T.K. was inordinately grateful for my assistance and expressed her gratitude by giving us a bottle of champagne and a bag of granola cruncher potstickers.  We had potstickers at Fern’s Christmas party and we have been meaning to buy some ever since.  I don’t think we’ll buy the vegetarian kind and I can flat out guarandamntee that we won’t be buying the organic variety – although they were very good - but we definitely will buy some.  We had already planned to have appies for New Year’s so the potstickers fit right in and the champagne capped the evening off. 

Tomorrow we’ve got a big 40 mile move down the coast to a beach location just north of Ventura.  We’ll get a hit of going to sleep to the sounds of the surf and then move on to Quartzsite.

A philosophical question involving balls

I can’t claim credit for thinking of this – SWMBO came up with most of it.  If you blow up an airplane and in the process light your knackers on fire, does that all get fixed when you get to wherever it is your whacked out mind thinks you are going?  After all, what good are 93 vestal virgins (or 87 or 803 or 2 for that matter) if your knackers go up in smoke in the process of getting there?  Once again we have a member of the non-violent religion trying to blow up a plane.

The only consolation in all of this is knowing that the shmuck in question must be in absolute anguish right now.  Maybe it will be enough to cause him to ask some questions about the brainwashing he received.  He lit his groin on fire – its hard to even imagine how much pain he must be in.  My guess is that the guys who want to question him won’t be real generous with the pain medication either.

The real tragedy is that the imams who brainwashed the poor fool won’t have their own crotches lit on fire.  And that the rest of us will have to live with ever increasing levels of non-security as our gummits pretend to deal with the problem.  Nobody needed to invent airline security after 9-11.  One phone call to Tel Aviv would have been sufficient.  But then we’d have been into all that messy profiling and would have had to accept that not all the travelling public is equally dangerous and we couldn’t go there could we.  As a species we’re too stupid to survive.

Locking the barn door ……..

…… after the horse is over the hill, through the next county and generally long long gone. 

So some Nigerian goes through what passes for security in that god forsaken country.  “Hey mon – where ya goin’?”  “Uh …… London!”  “Got any bombs man?”  “Uh …… no.”  “OK – that’ll be 10 bucks”  This is a country that could give a Quebec Liberal lessons in corruption yet we let them screen passengers to sit beside us on international flights. 

And how does North American airline “security” respond?  “Let’s further harass all the travelling public!”  “Oh that’s a great idea – we could start patting down the cute chicks”  “Awesome – and let’s make up some new crap – like – I dunno – maybe we don’t let anybody go to the can for the last hour of a flight?” “Naw – they’d never be stupid enough to go for that - - would they?”

Yeah, they would. 

Long before Sept 11 we were subject to pseudo-security.  That’s security in name only designed to make the stupid feel secure but most importantly designed to build little bureaucratic empires filled with the otherwise unemployable.  Take a good look around at airport so-called security the next time you travel.  How many of those fools would you hire, even to clean your bathroom floor?  Be honest. 

If we believe in evolution we have to understand and accept that some species don’t survive.  Homo sapiens may be one of the evolutionary failures.  We may be too stupid to survive.

More technology

Site #69, Rancho Oso Thousand Trails

One of my readers mentioned using something called Windows Live Writer to write weblog posts.  Being a confirmed techno-addict there was no way I could resist figuring out how that works.  And I think maybe it works pretty damn good.  I won’t know whether all this is working until they are published but right now they look better than I could have done without the technology.

I’m still struggling to find a way to easily caption the photos I use here.  So far all I have figured out is to put them inside a table and use a row in the table as a caption.  That seems pretty clunky but its all I have been able to figure out.  For all the WYSIWYG wonders of editing software, getting things to display properly on the web is still pretty hit and miss.  At least for amateurs like me it is.

This park will definitely turn into one of our favourites.  The scenery is gorgeous and its really quiet.  Even now when its running close to capacity its still very quiet and relaxed.  More importantly, everything seems to work.  We have discovered that working facilities are noteworthy in the Thousand Trails system.  More so in some parks than others.  Last night we sat in the (working) hot tub and dissed the park at Morgan Hill with some San Jose residents who know the park well.  Apparently it is such a popular park (because of its location close to the bay) that it fills up despite the fact that about 20% of the sites have dysfunctional power and the sewer dump is routinely out of order.    We’ll probably go back there because its so handy to visit San Francisco and Fern but we sure won’t spend any more time there than we need to. 

Cheap is good

Right after we bought the bus we installed a Black & Decker undercounter toaster oven. The undercounter mounts are actually really hard to find but we had one in the house and liked it so much so we looked all over and finally found the mounting kit. It came with a rube goldberg bracket that hooked to the oven and a really substantial heat shield to keep from lighting the cupboard above the oven on fire.

This winter that original B & D oven finally failed. I took it apart and figured out that it was the door switch that had broken. Calling it a "switch" is a little rich - what it actually was is a piece of very light gauge metal that bent to make or break a connection whenever the door was opened or closed. After enough bends in the same place the metal eventually fatigued and the piece fell off. I soldered a jumper across so that we could use the oven but that mean that it no longer shut off when you opened the door. Which wasn't a great big problem but was kind of annoying since we were used to it working the other way.

We started looking for a replacement with an undercounter mount and quickly found that, while in theory they exist, in practice they aren't on the shelves anywhere. I came up with a plan that involved continuing to use the existing heat shield which let us shop for the cheapest oven possible. I love those bins at Home Depot or True Value where they have the assorted aluminum angle and flat iron - some of them even have aluminum square tubing now. I'm their most regular customer. This time I used 4' of 1" x 1/8" flat to make hangers for each corner of the new oven. Then I pulled off the little rubber feet and screwed the new hanger straps where the feet originally attached. We ended up paying less than $20 for a new oven and it works just fine - better than the original in fact but that may just indicate how old and worn out the original was getting to be.

The point of all this - and about bloody time that I should get to the point - is - how the hell can they sell a toaster oven for less than 20 bucks? The packaging alone has to be worth close to 2 bucks - it was a pretty elaborate box and there was a multilingual operators' manual included as well. And then there's shipping - it was no doubt assembled somewhere in the orient so it had to get to North America and then get through distribution here. Its not a fancy piece of electronic technology but its not dead simple either and it works really well. No matter what anyone says about outsourcing and offshore manufacturing I'm a big fan of it. A really big fan of it.

I hate computers

I expect I use a computer as much as anyone I know & I fancy myself pretty handy at getting them to do what I want them to do but sometimes I wonder. I used to warn my staff that some morning they might come in to work and discover a computer sized hole in the front window with a pile of glass and plastic lying on the ground outside.

I just went through an incredible ordeal with blogger trying to get it to post this photo with the previous post. After it deleted the photo four times running I finally gave up. I have no idea why some miserable piece of plastic or more likely some piece of computer code refused to allow that picture to co-exist with my previous post. And at some point you just stop caring. It takes forever for a file up upload on our satellite connection and then just when I thought I had finally succeeded in getting it to up upload Windows would give me some stupid error message and the whole mess would start over. Of course Window would very solicitously ask if I wanted to report the error to Microsoft. What I'd really like to do is grab the scrawny teenage programmer at Messysoft by his pubescent adam's apple and shake him while I scream at him for a while. That's never an option on the chirpy little message boxes that pop up on my screen.

We didn't eat at the pelican restaurant in Santa Barbara but it seemed like they thought that was a good place to eat at.

Santa Barbara

We're pretty remote here, despite being less than 10 miles away from Santa Barbara.

View Larger Map

Fortunately we had been forewarned so we knew enough to disconnect the micro-truck before starting up the winding, switchback filled trail to the gatehouse. I wondered if we would be able to see through the trees to get a satellite signal but as you can see we are in a clearing in the middle of a forest. I had some serious difficulty last night trying to get the internet satellite online and finally had to give up. I'm still not 100% sure the problem is fixed but I was able to get online this morning. I had an excellent signal strength but there is a step in the setup where the Hughes satellite checks to see if my transmissions might interfere with other transmissions (called "cross-pol")and I just couldn't get past that step. Normally its no problem but this time it was a major problem & the "solution" eventually was for me to reduce the accuracy of my aiming. When I had an 80+ signal strength I simply couldn't get past the cross-pol step but when I pointed a little off the satellite so that my signal was in the low 70's then I was able to pass cross-pol.

We arrived here close to a week ago, on the 18th, but neither of us has been very active for the past week. Marilyn caught a bad cold about 2 weeks ago now and of course she shared it with me. I managed to stay clean until last weekend but it has hit me hard this week. We both felt good enough yesterday to make a trip into Santa Barbara but that pretty well played us out. We did manage to find a small turkey yesterday so the trip was worthwhile. The turk is in the oven right now - today will be our turkey day. We're both more in love with turkey leftovers than we are with the first time round turkey so we decided we would arrange it so we have leftovers for Christmas day.

I just by god love it

I realize that the global warming apologists will argue that one or two data points don't make a trend, and rightly so. But you just have to love what the weather man is serving up for the attendees in Copenhagen.

I had an email from my brother-in-law last week wherein he argued that editorials are not journalism. To that I would counter that all journalism is coloured by an editorial opinion. Journalists would like to have us believe that they are objective, without bias, pure as the driven snow that the warming apologists tell us is no longer falling. Well folks it ain't so. We all wake up with opinions and some of us are more willing than others to share those opinions. Journalists by their very nature want to see their thoughts publicly exhibited and that includes their opinions about the world around them. Some of them are more successful than others at acknowledging different opinions from their own but the whole works of them have a bias.

In general human beings like to be well thought of by their peers. The combination of wanting to have your views visible to the world and wanting peer approval is a dangerous situation when it comes to journalism. It leads to a herd mentality. Right now everybody "knows" that global warming is real. Just like everybody used to "know" that we would run out of oil by 2000 and just like we used to "know" that an ice age was approaching.

The reality is that we don't "know" any such thing which is why it makes me really happy to think of all those earnest protesters in Copenhagen shivering in the (unseasonably) wintery weather. I hope they all forgot to bring their parkas and toques.

And it seems I'm not the only global warming sceptic around. Its great to see that some of the worst liars on the planet are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. The photo comes courtesy of CFACT - you can read more about them here.

Geriatric surfers and other weirdness

You don't usually think of surfers as old guys. At least I didn't. And I guess to be perfectly fair, geriatric is a slight exageration. But most of these guys were older than me so they weren't kids either. We stopped for lunch on the way down the coast - can't remember whether it was southern Oregon or northern California but it was real pretty whichever it was. It was kind of a dull wet day but these guys were out enjoying the surf nevertheless. They don't really "do" much. Mostly it seemed like they hung out sitting on their surfboards and visiting, just outside where the waves were breaking but maybe that's not a bad way to spend a day either, specially when you have a view like this.

Today the turkeys came around again. They came again a few nights ago but by the time I got their attention it had started raining and then lost interest in my turkey calls. I downloaded a couple of turkey calls and managed to figure out how to pipe them through the speakers on the radio. When I turned the radio up and opened the driver's ticket window I managed to get their attention. There's a lot more somewhere - the flock that was around the other night was at least 30 but today there was only about 6 of them.

Faggoty fags & wet weather

Its been raining more or less non-stop since we arrived here. Some days it rains harder than other and some days it clears off for a while, like it did today, but generally it has been raining since we arrived a week ago.

Last night we were invited to a Christmas party at Marilyn's cousin's place so we drove into San Jose in the evening. It was a pretty major house party but it started about the time we normally think about going to bed. That is one of the features of living on bus time - we often find that the local residents are out of step with us with respect to time. We had as good a visit as could be expected with 40 other houseguests taking up Fern & Larry's time and we will likely connect with them again in the next couple of days.

This morning we had plotted a course to take us to Pier 39. The only place I have found in North America that sells Aegean caps in size 7-3/4 is Pier 39. That is a bit inconvenient but they are such good caps that it is worth making a few sacrifices to get back there to buy some. They didn't have any in grey this year but I got a navy blue one and a black one so I'm good for a couple of years again.

The skies cleared briefly while we were downtown and we had remembered to take our umbrellas so we had a great trip. We rode public transit from downtown San Jose so as to avoid all the traffic and parking hassles. We had planned to take the bus from Morgan Hill into San Jose but it didn't seem to be running this morning. We may just have missed it but San Jose is pretty close so we just drove in there and caught the bus.

I should have taken more pictures of the old trolleys that they run along the waterfront but I did catch this one as it arrived to pick us up. As near as I can tell they have collected them from various heritage trolley systems in different cities around the world. I assume that the only heritage part of the trolley is the shell and even that was pretty heavily modified but its still a pretty cute idea.

Riding public transit is educational no matter where you do it. During commuter hours the travelling public is pretty conventional but after hours and on the weekends is when the real colour appears on public transit and San Francisco definitely has some local colour.

Its cold here this morning

Morgan Hill Thousand Trails Preserve

Well maybe not real cold but cold nevertheless. There's a clear blue sky overhead and I'm sure it will continue to warm up as the sun gets a little higher. It was -1.2 when I got up and the water hose must be frozen up but it is up to -0.5 now so we're having a little heat wave.

It must be the morning for black idiots in suits on TV. First we had some lying SOB from Copenhagen weasling on about how it might not actually be getting warmer this year but overall he was convinced that it was going to get warmer and it was all the fault of us rich nations. Hearing that from a resident of the most corrupt continent on the planet didn't fill me with confidence. Now we've got another black man in a suit telling us how he has single-handedly rescued the world from the brink of destruction. The chosen one is in trouble down here. I think his approval rating is actually worse than GWB ever got to and he's only a year into his reign. I'll bet the Dems are thinking that Billary looked pretty good now.

Right now I'm reading "Krakatoa - The day the world exploded" by Simon Winchester. Its a fascinating blend of history and evolutionary science that combines the story of the exploding island with continental drift and the life stories of people like the man who inspired Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace. It really is a remarkable world that we live in and our feeble understanding of what happens around us is not much better than that of our primitive ancestors who attributed everything they didn't understand to some God or another. The current obsession with blaming mankind for every "bad" thing that happens to the planet is no less ridiculous than our great x 43 grandfather blaming his cold on his wife's impure thoughts and thinking that killing his goat would cure it.

We're in wine country --- finally

It seemed like we'd never get here what with our border crossing issues followed by our truck spindle issues followed by a wheel falling off. Oh - wait - I hadn't mentioned that last little detail had I?

Evidently the guys that put the front end back together on the micro-truck never got around to tightening the lug nuts on the curb side. Obviously I should have checked them but I thought I had more than 100 miles to do that in. I was wrong. There we were tooling down Coastal 101 minding our own business when I saw the by now familiar flashing lights in the rearview mirror. "Not again" was our instinctive response but no such luck. It wasn't quite as bad as the first time - this time the lug nuts just broke off and dropped the truck onto the rotor and we stopped relatively quickly so we likely could have salvaged the rotor. The Ford garage we got towed to was more worried about their own liability than they were about my chequebook so I agreed to replace the rotor. It took them 24 hours to round up some studs & nuts which is a sad commentary on the level of parts in the system now but they eventually got them and we got back on the road.

We didn't get on the road until late in the afternoon which meant we got to experience a bit of San Franscisco's rush hour and a full blown hit of San Jose rush hour. We're getting used to arriving at Thousand Trails parks in the dark and I must say we're also getting really good at finding satellite visible sites in the dark. It was blacker than the inside of a cow when we arrived here and the park is pretty heavily treed. It hasn't been particularly warm yet so I haven't taken any pictures but we're surrounded by tall oaks and some kind of evergreens. Nevertheless we were able to find a hole in the canopy in the dark and get set up. Yesterday we were visited by the camp turkeys but they didn't get close enough to the bus to be worthwhile taking their pictures. There appears to be a flock of about 25 wild turkeys that live here.

Now we'll settle in for a spell. We still need to get a wheel alignment done from the incident in Oregon. I want somebody to have a good look at the right side where it got dragged to make sure there isn't another disaster lurking there and I need to buy a pair of tires, having lost one to the broken spindle and another one when the wheel departed for parts unknown. I spent a while tramping around in the bush where it ran off but with no luck. Its amazing how quickly something as foreign as a tire and rim can blend into thick bushes. Several years ago we lost a wheel off the boat trailer that we bought from Bill Jones. We lost it west of the junction of #6 & #41 highways but east of Taylor's steel. I know exactly which bluff of trees it went into because I saw it leave the boat trailer. The bluff is less than an acre in size and it looks like you can see right through it but we never found the wheel. Down here I was searching on about a 45 degree incline with vicious thorns and some kind of short trees that the deer had beaten a path under but that I could barely claw my way through. Not surprisingly I didn't find anything.

On the road again

We ended up staying two more nights at Humbug Mountain because somebody screwed up on the truck repair. The guys in the shop worked all weekend so they could have us on the road Monday. I had told them it didn't matter but evidently they wanted to work so they did and in theory we should have been mobile again around noon on Monday. The story was that somebody transposed 2 digits on the parts order so the stub axle that showed up was about 8" too short. It seems unlikely to me that transposing 2 digits in a part number would just coincidentally end actually being an axle so I'd say there's more story than what I got told. Whatever the cause, we weren't on the road yesterday. We decided that we were likely not going to get an early start today, even if everything went well, so we paid for another two nights. It really wasn't that hard a decision because this place is so beautiful and it is really cheap too.


We're trying to get our average nightly site cost down into the $12-15 range. Right now we're at just a little under $24 per night with everything in since we started on the road two years ago. We had our cost down to $19 per night when we bought the two campground memberships. The purchase cost of the memberships plus the costs to transfer them into our names pushed our average costs up but over time they will pay off. Going forward our cost on the Thousand Trails membership is $12 per night for the first 50 nights and $5 after that. The Holiday Trails is a bit harder to figure but it is a fixed cost of $500 annually with unlimited stays so it should easily be under $10 per night. This place is $12 per night so its a pretty good deal in the big scheme of things.


We have had a reservation at Morgan Hill, just outside San Jose, ever since we left BC. We've been moving it back as the various holdups in our travels have arisen. Right now we're rescheduled to arrive on Friday but that could still change. Leaving aside the possibility of additional disasters, we still have to get through San Franscisco in order to get to San Jose.


Now we're hooked up ready to hit the road at sunrise. I crawled under the frenchy-bus today and greased the front end that got missed when we were at Aidrie. I can't remember exactly why I didn't do the front end there - it may just have been that the weather was getting so bloody miserable that I didn't want to crawl underneath the bus.

We love State parks

The US State parks and the Canadian provincial parks are some of the least known outdoor treasures of both countries. Right now we are parked at Humbug Mountain which is a worthwhile stop if for no other reason than its name. Forget about the name - this place is gorgeous and would be worthwhile stopping at no matter what it was called.

Right now there's us and one camp host all alone among over 100 sites in this gorgeous location. Our site is less than a 5 minute walk from a wonderful beach. The only possible negative is that we are just a bit too far to fall asleep listening to the sounds of the surf.

And they're not expensive. The provincial parks tend to be a little higher priced. They're usually good value compared with the private parks but the US State parks are downright cheap. The picture is of one of two showerhouses. Inside there are clean modern and free showers with lots of hot water. Anyone who has ever showered in a campground knows that you don't always get all four of those attributes and often you consider yourself lucky if you get 2 out of 4.

We had a bit of trouble finding a site that would give us a view of the satellites. The park is deep in a valley with a high mountain (Humbug Mountain I guess) to the south. My align-a-site sighting tool actually told me that we are looking at the tree tops but the dish locked in with a 62% signal strength. The mountain keeps us shaded until late in the day and we don't actually get much sunshine but that's OK. We just have to think about the snow and freezing temperatures back in Saskatchewan and this doesn't seem too bad.

Bah humbug

I debated calling this "The Kindness of Strangers" but I resisted the temptation. The Christmas ads have been playing for some time now on the Canadian stations. The US has been wrapped up in anticipation of Thanksgiving which appears to me to be every bit as big a deal for them as Christmas is for us, if not more of a big deal. Yesterday we were in a WallyWorld somewhere along the coast where they had a full staff on despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving. The staff were placing pallets of black wrapped merchandise in preparation for today - what they call Black Friday - which apparently is the biggest retail sales day of the year. To all of which I say "bah humbug". On the other hand......

Yesterday we got rolling around 10:00 and headed south down the Oregon coast. I had checked the forecast and hoped that we would drive out of the pelting rain that made life miserable for us while we were breaking camp and hooking up but alas that was not to be. We never shut the wipers off all day and rather than letting up it actually got heavier as the day went on. We stopped for lunch at the site of some ancient Tsunami which was actually a great relief to me. Everywhere we go along the coast its Tsunami this and Tsunami that and Tsunami the other thing - parks and streets and restaurants. Not to mention the ubiquitous Tsunami Evacuation Route signs. So it was actually a relief to know that they really did have on here - a long time ago mind you - but there is apparently some real risk.

About 4:00 we crossed a bridge on some Elk River and as I was climbing the hill on the south side a truck came racing up in my rearview, started flashing its lights at me, passed me and waved me to the side of the road as he got ahead of me. I briefly thought we might be about to be victims of some roadside robbery because it was a pretty remote area but I pulled in behind the truck and by the time I got stopped the kid driving had hopped out, run over to my window, told me I had a "huge problem" and continued running to the back of the bus. All this in drenching rain. I got my coat on and walked to the back of the bus and he was right - we did have a huge problem. The driver's side front spindle had sheared cleanly off leaving the tire and rim dragged back underneath the truck. The kid said we were setting off a spectacular light show & I'm sure we were. Apparently it happened as we crossed the bridge, he saw the truck fall and immediately took after us.

We dragged the truck a little further off the road and then Marilyn got on the phone to roadside assistance while I tackled getting us disconnected. Over the next 2 hours while we waited for a tow truck to arrive no less than five kind hearted souls stopped to check on us. The first guy that came along told me who to call locally and where to take the truck for repairs. One young fellow stopped once and then came back to tell us that he lived right at the road we were stopped at and that we could park on his lane for the night. So that's what we did because we were by no means certain that we were going to find a tow truck at that time of day on Thanksgiving.

Just after dark we saw yet another person walking up to the door so Marilyn went to answer it and was met by the mother of the young fellow that lived there. She had a cut off cardboard box with two plates of Thanksgiving dinner in it (complete with apple & pumpkin pie). Marilyn burst into tears but all the woman said was that her son had told her to bring it because we were stuck there alone with no dinner. Which wasn't completely true in our case but I guess there was no way for him to know that.

About the time we got done supper - by then it was really dark - an unmarked cop car showed up. He whipped in behind the micro-truck and I thought "oh boy, here we go". I walked back out to the highway and an affable gentleman in a raincoat introduced himself as the Port Orford police chief. Evidently Good Sam roadside assistance had been using the shotgun approach to obtaining a tow truck, phoning literally anybody anywhere close by and leaving messages for them to call back. Somebody from over 50 miles away had called the police chief to see what was going on - no doubt assuming that we had been in some kind of accident. Of course the police chief didn't have clue one about what was going on so he just hopped in the cruiser and went to have a look for himself. We both stood out in the rain watching the tow truck that it turned out had been dispatched to us drive merrily by and keep on going. Then we walked back to the bus where we explained what was going on.

The chief had recognized the local tow truck and it seemed too coincidental that it wouldn't be coming to us so he phoned the driver. As it turned out once I got to know the driver it wasn't a great surprise that he had driven by. As Eddie Myers used to say, put a pail over his head, point him west and he'll drown in the Pacific Ocean. And this guy wouldn't even had had to walk all that far. With great difficulty the cop finally convinced the driver that he had not only driven by his tow, he had driven by it despite the fact that there was a cop car complete with flashing lights parked behind it.

A lot happened after that which isn't really material to the story. Likely the bearing went out of that front hub, got hot and eventually seized up taking the spindle out. Ford in their infinite wisdom has gone to sealed bearings for the front end of everything. I had those in my 1-ton and had one go out going through Strathmore one night. I felt something in the steering, stopped and couldn't see anything in the dark. I went a few more miles until I was sure something was wrong at which point I jacked the front end and sure enough the wheel was loose already. So when that sealed bearing failed it could easily have heated and taken out the spindle in a matter of minutes, let alone hours.

Oregon Coast

Today we are parked in Humbug State Park which is absolutely gorgeous, a 5 minute walk from the ocean, quiet and virtually empty. Life is good.

The wet coast

Oregon undercarriage wash service

During one of our frequent Saskatchewan droughts I swore that I would never complain about rain as long as I live so this is clearly not a complaint. I would however like to observe that I am getting more than a little sick of the sound of raindrops falling on my roof.

Yesterday as we were travelling south on the Oregon coast their department of highways very kindly arranged to provide an undercarriage wash for the bus. We most certainly appreciated their thoughfulness, particularly as it came so shortly after our ordeal entering the country. Our trip over the Coquihalla and the Okanagan Connector a couple of weeks ago exposed us to salt so getting a chance to wash all that off was very convenient. Some of the smaller vehicles likely weren't so appreciative when the state trooper stopped and turned them around but he didn't seem to think we were in any danger of floating away.

Approaching Astoria Oregon

North shore of the mighty Columbia

I just checked Streets and Trips again to make sure that actually is the Columbia River that we crossed yesterday. Its so wide that it is hard to believe it is actually the mouth of the river but that's what it is. The bridge structure at the south end of the causeway is really impressive - a snapshot through the bus window doesn't begin to do it justice.

A year ago now we agonized over whether we should shell out the money for our Thousand Trails membership but we've been really happy that we did. Pacific City is probably the nicest one of their preserves that we have been at yet although Verde Valley would be a close second. Last night we arrived well after dark, tired and stressed out from our earlier ordeal and were met by a smiling "Buddy", the park ranger who was still on duty waiting for us to arrive. We damn near got lost wandering around the trails in the dark but he gave us a perfect reccomendation for a site and we got set up with no real trouble despite the howling wind and rain. The big site selection issue for us is always getting south exposure so that we can use our satellite dishes but Buddy's advice was spot on and we are once again online.

Oops – big detour in the road of life

Monday morning we hung around Thousand Trails at Cultus Lake until what we considered late in the morning. One of the hazards of life on bus time is that we are often in situations where the locals are completely clueless about what time it really is. At Chilliwack for example, when it is really 10 AM the locals still think it is only 8 AM. So that meant that we couldn’t pick up our mail until after 10:00 and we wanted to get it one last time just in case BC Health had finally got around to reviewing our health insurance application. Turns out it didn’t really matter but at the time we didn’t know that.

What with picking up the mail and getting a few last minute groceries at Costco we didn’t get to the border until about 11 AM (which of course the local yahoos thought was 9:00 but that’s really not our problem). When we got to the border there was a moderately long line – maybe 15 cars in each of two lanes – so we had to sit a while before we finally got up to the window.

Everything seemed normal, the kid in the shack who looked to be about 13 asked where we were going, for how long, what fruits and vegetables did we have – the usual stuff. Then he wandered back to get the license plate off the truck and wrote it on a little orange slip of paper. “You’ll need to pull over there and park while we do an agricultural inspection”. No biggie – we’ve been through that before, including one memorable return from Mexico when a short armed border cop couldn’t reach one runaway potato in our fifth wheel corner kitchen.

We went inside the station and were briefly interrogated by an agricultural guy. Then another officer came over and started asking us about our travel plans and particularly when we planned to return to Canada. I said something about when it warms up and evidently that was the wrong answer. At one point he shouted “YOU HAVE TO NAME AN EXACT DATE!!!!” And it went downhill from there.

For the next 2 hours they bounced us from one officer to another and generally treated us like the TV cops treat skells. Nobody actually assaulted us but they might as well have. Clearly none of them believed that we didn’t plan to work in the US and a couple of them went so far as to suggest that we had no intention of ever returning to Canada. They kept insisting that we needed to provide proof of employment and that we needed to have a residence in Canada. Several times we heard that “you folks have everything you own with you” which of course was clearly bullshit as anybody who has seen our cubevan can attest to but they were more interested in talking than listening.

Eventually the bottom line turned out to be taking me into a small office where I was fingerprinted and had my mug shot taken. At that point they informed me that we were being sent back to Canada. I kept asking for access to a supervisor but that clearly wasn’t going to change anything and wasn’t going to happen until they had bounced our asses back to the north. Which is exactly what they did after they had fingerprinted Marilyn.

Before actually kicking us out of the country we did get a few minutes with McMillan – that’s what his uniform said his name was. It was like nailing jello to the wall trying to get him pinned down as to exactly why we were persona non grata. All he would give up was that we needed to provide more information about our ties to Canada, our employment and our travel plans. As far as what that looked like – no way was he going to tell us. I pointed out that we have most of our information in files on the bus and the balance available online. We suggested that perhaps we could put something together and come back in the afternoon and he allowed as how that might be a good idea.

So that is what we did. We dug through our files and found some banking information, our Holiday Trails campground contract and some invoices that we had issued to clients. We didn’t have access to the internet so there was a lot that we couldn’t provide but it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. One of the fundamental principles of logic is that you can’t prove a negative and what they really wanted us to do was prove that we weren’t going to work in the US. At least that’s what I think they wanted us to prove. We were outright lied to so many times that I hesitate to say with any certainty what they wanted from us.

Late in the afternoon we took our envelope of stuff, walked back across the border and presented ourselves at the counter. One of the officers stuck his head in a small office and we heard him say “those people are back.” McMillan eventually appeared and took our package. After we had sat for an appropriately long period of time on their hard bench he came back to tell us that we needed to provide more information about our ties to Canada, our employment, etc. etc. At one point I said “I don’t think it is possible for us to provide what you want.” He was quick to claim that he disagreed but clearly he didn’t think we could either. For what it was worth he encouraged us not to give up hope and somehow we ended up agreeing to come back in two days. I think the logic was that he would be back on shift in two days.

By the time we got back to Chilliwack we were already regretting agreeing to come back. Implicit in our return was the idea that we were going to bring more complete information for him to review and we had already realized that nothing we could provide was likely to change his mind. Furthermore there wasn't a lot more we could provide other than what we could access online. However a deal is a deal – once we had agreed to meet him we didn’t feel that we could stand him up.

So yesterday we spent the day cooling our heels on the parking lot at Walmart in Chilliwack slowly coming to terms with not being able to travel in the US as long as we want to live this lifestyle that we have chosen. We couldn’t go back out to Cultus Lake because the terms of our membership require us to spend 14 days out of an individual park after we have checked out. It was a hard day but by bedtime we had more or less adjusted to the thought of spending the winter on Vancouver Island. It’s really not that great a hardship – lots of prairie dwellers would gladly change places with us – it just was a hard shift from the Arizona desert and Mexico.

Today we had to cool our heels until 3:00 (when the locals thought it was 1:00) before we could go back to the border. We each took a vehicle because it is easier to get around that way. Initially we had planned to leave the bus on the parking lot at Costco (about 2 miles north of the border) but we ended up parking it and the truck in whatever the little town on the Canadian side of Sumas is called. From there we walked back across the border with our big package of stuff from Monday plus whatever else we had been able to round up in the interim.

One of the recurring themes in our interrogation had been that we supposedly had all our worldly possessions with us. Leaving aside the fact that we still own some significant property in Saskatchewan it’s simply not true that we travel with everything else we own. To prove that, I went to the storage lot on Tuesday and took a picture of the van with the door open as well as one picture of the boat. We had those attached to the storage contract along with some additional banking information. We were a lot more relaxed than we had been on Monday – mainly we wanted to get the ordeal over with so we could catch the morning ferry to Victoria.

We got to sit on the hard benches again and we got the stern look from McMillan again and then he took our material away again. While he drank coffee and we waited for him to return we talked about how we can replan our lives to remove the necessity of travel through the US and it’s really not that hard if you are willing to be even a little creative. We’re probably not quite ready yet but the time is rapidly approaching to get ourselves FM3 status in Mexico. Neither one of us is enamored of Canada’s so-called healthcare system. What we have seen of the Mexican system has been positive and it is accessible for a reasonable cost. So it’s not a large leap for us to consider just chucking the Canadian residency and moving completely to Mexico.

If you have stuck it out this far then you can possibly imagine our surprise when McMillan returned to tell us we could continue our journey into the US. The subsequent border crossing an hour later was anti-climactic. We had to wait in line for a while and there was yet another black uniformed “CBS” officer to deal with at the window. He had the orange detention slip all filled out and was ready to send us back inside when McMillan dispatched two of his flunkies to straighten things out.

Computers will eventually be the death of us and I suspect that they were somewhat to blame for our troubles this week. We changed our vehicle registrations from SK to BC at the end of last week so they had to show in the database as new or perhaps they didn’t show at all. That may in fact have been the reason for the 2 day delay. It may simply have given them time to confirm that we were who we said we were. One thing I know for sure – we observed enough outright lies to convince me that the only way we could be sure they weren’t lying to us was if they weren’t actually talking to us.

The final holdup at the crossing shack was that the computer wouldn’t allow the guy at the crossing to do anything other than give us a detention slip and send us inside. McMillan must have decided that we had been through enough already. The last we saw of the border was three guys in the shack holding our orange detention slip and peering into a computer screen.

W e still don’t know whether we were detained by a computer, whether our lifestyle really is too bizarre to fit the system, whether the kid that initially detained us over-reacted and his supervisor had to back him up or whether our ordeal was caused by some perverse witch’s brew of all of the above. All I know for sure is that last night I was cool with spending the winter in BC and tonight we are parked in a casino parking lot in Washington.

And by about 2 hours into the ordeal on Monday I knew it was going to make a great story no matter how it all turned out.

We eat a lot of chicken

............ which means we have a lot of chicken leftovers to deal with too. I like making a creamy lemon soup out of the leftovers and recently I discovered a great addition to it. I started using Red Split Lentils thanks to a contract I'm working on. Whole lentils (called futbols in the trade by the way) take too long to cook up. That's a benefit if you want to retain the shape and texture of the lentil. Accordingly you have to reduce your cooking time for the RSLs if you want them to retain their shape but I have now discovered that RSLs are a great way to thicken my lemon chicken soup. They will have completely disappeared into the soup after about 3/4 of an hour.

- put whatever leftover chicken bits you have in a pot with some water & boil them
- I always use the leftover gravy which means that my soup automatically has at the very least rosemary spice. If you don't have gravy then spice accordingly but at a minimum add some pepper, parsley & rosemary.
- add whatever is in the fridge for vegetables - my preference is carrots and/or celery
- add rice - I like to use basmati rice because of the slightly nutty flavour and because it stands up to a longer cooking time which is better for soup because it lets the flavours blend
- add a small amount of RSLs for thickening - we're talking about the amount you can hold in a big handful
- you may have to adjust the order of adding the bits - if you are using regular rice or leftover rice then I'd put it in last with the lemon juice
- once the lentils have disappeared completely, add a couple of glugs of milk and a squirt of lemon juice. Go easy on the lemon juice at first because you can't back up - taste it as you go - the goal is a slightly creamy taste with just a hint of lemon.

Enjoy.

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).

The reason for our unpopularity

One of the first lessons a new bus owner learns is: when phoning for campground reservations YOU DON'T HAVE A BUS. You have a motorhome - a 40 foot motorhome if asked - but always a motorhome.

This is the reason why.

"That" is parked across the road from us tonight at Thousand Trails, Cultus Lake. Now there may be some fine people living inside that contraption but when campground owners hear "bus" that is what they immediately assume is arriving. It doesn't show real well in the photo but there is a 5 gallon pail more or less centred under the closest side of the bus which I hope is only catching the dishwater.

This morning we brewed up some tea and coffee. Then we headed over to our hosts for a pre-departure visit. They are getting ready to leave themselves but they probably won't get away until the end of the week. They are headed for a spot north of Puerto Vallarta. We visited them there two winters ago & I could drive back to the spot but right now I can't remember the name of the place.

This is the same park that we were in this spring when we first got out here. Then it was full of people and kids - now it is almost deserted. They stay open year round but the woman at the desk sounded surprised when Marilyn phoned to make a reservation this afternoon. We didn't want to reserve too much ahead of time because we first had to get over the 97 Connector and the Coquihalla. The forecast was for 8 cm of snow overnight but there wasn't anything on the ground this morning. BC Dept of Holidays has this wonderful webcam service for many of their highways. Last night I checked the cams for the Connector and the Coq and then again first thing this morning I had a look as soon as the sun got up. I couldn't see any difference in the snow overnight so I concluded that they hadn't got any snow in the passes. I could see on the cams that the sky was about half clear so I figured the highway would burn off once the sun came up and that is exactly what happened. We ran into a little bit of slush in the passing lane a couple of times but most of the trip was on wet pavement and we even ran into some dry pavement. Of course everything was sanded so the rocks were flying every time somebody went by.

By the time we got to Hope there was an occasional green leaf left on the trees and when we got to Cultus Lake there were green cedars and some of the maples still have their red leaves. As we found this spring, one of the biggest challenges of this place is getting a good satellite shot. Even after picking a site specifically for its southern view we still had some "issues" with getting the dishes aimed. Our neighbour to the north went out of his way to assure me that it was impossible to get a Starchoice signal in this site. (not only is it possible, the Starchoice signal was relatively easy - the Hughes signal was bit more of a challenge but obviously possible or you wouldn't be reading this)

A very productive week

We arrived here a week ago tomorrow with non-functioning Jakes and one whole side of our clearance lights dark. I didn't know the clearance lights were out until we did the safety inspection but there was no doubt about the Jakes. I had the Jakes working by Monday afternoon and yesterday I finished off the clearance lights. We now have LEDs all around, including the one at the top middle on the driver's side that hasn't worked the whole time we have owned the bus. I don't like driving after dark but we'll have to do it at least once so people can see how beautiful we now are.

Last night we cooked up a mess of chicken wings in oyster sauce for our hosts:
- as many wings as you need to feed your crowd, cut them at the joints
- brown the wings in oil with some garlic
- drain off most of the oil and add some red wine
- add some soya sauce and some worcestershire sauce
- add some oyster sauce (you'll find it with the stir fry sauces)
- simmer the wings for about an hour and a half. You may have to add water, depending on how much plonk you used to begin with.
- I like to add some chopped onion and a few chopped carrots but they aren't essential. Sometimes I add parsley too - depends on my mood.
- before serving thicken the sauce with some corn starch

We like to serve the wings over basmati rice prepared according to the recipe one of Marilyn's Iranian tenants gave her:
- partially cook the rice
- slice some potatoes as thinly as you can
- oil a frying pan and warm it
- place the potato slices around the edge and across the bottom of the pan to cover it completely
- spray the inside of the potato slices with cooking oil
- gently place the rice in the pan
- add water sufficient to finish cooking the rice
- place some paper towel on top of the rice and put a lid on the pan
- cook gently for at least another hour

The goal is to have the rice steamed fully and have the potato slices crispy and golden brown when you turn the rice out of the pan. If you do it right the potatoes will provide a golden covering to the rice when it turns out. I used our low sided cast iron pan for the batch we made for the Kirkwoods. I peeked at the rice when I thought it was cooked & I didn't like the looks of the potato slices so I cranked the heat up for a couple of minutes. You have to use your nose & ears to tell you how the potatoes are coming along because you can only see a bit of them around the edge of the pan and the important part is under the rice where you can't see it.

Today I ripped out our non-functioning DVD/VCR combo and installed a $39 DVD player we bought at Wallyworld yesterday. We debated buying the fancy Blueray model but then said "who are we kidding?" We buy all of our DVDs in the bargain bin for a max of $3 so it will be a while before the Blueray discs are in those bins and by then the players will be $39 like the one we just bought instead of $279 like the one we didn't buy. Of course in addition to the DVD player I had to install another box (another $39.95) to convert the multi-wire signal that comes out of the DVD player to the single coax that our TV demands. Can somebody explain to me how it is progress to go from one wire to 3? We looked and looked for a DVD player that had a coax output but they apparently don't exist anymore. Presumably our magic box will still work when we can buy a $39 Blueray player.

Taking the bus back to its roots

The day we picked up the bus from Clarence & Sylvia I followed Bryan St. George back to his home and backed it part way up their very steep driveway. Last Sunday we moved from Chilliwack to Kelowna and once again parked in Bryan's driveway. It's hard to appreciate just how steep and winding that driveway is from the photos but there was no way I was going to back around any corners 6 years ago. This time it was a piece of cake. Bryan was outside calling the signals and we could have put it in his garage if the door was tall enough.
We had a pretty exciting trip over the connector from Merritt to Kelowna because the Jakes picked this trip to quit working. The Coquihalla and the Merritt Connector are two stretches of highway where you really don't want to have a runaway. There's 6% grades on the connector that run for over 10 miles with no let up. I finally ended up in 2nd gear because that was the only one that would hold without regular brake applications. I only got the brakes smoking hot twice but that was more than enough. The Jakes turned out to be a pretty simple fix. One of the wires on the curb side of the engine had broken loose at the solenoid and was shorting out under the valve cover. Once I traced the problem to that side of the engine I decided that I was brave enough to pull the valve cover to see what was going on. That side isn't too hard to get the valve cover off - the other side with the turbo is a whole 'nuther matter. As soon as the cover was off it was obvious what the problem was and easy to fix.

On Tuesday Bryan and I headed off early in the morning to Central Valley Truck Service where Bryan had me booked in for a vehicle inspection. Despite the fact that the bus has previously been registered in BC we still need to have it inspected prior to registering it out here. The inspection went well with one notable exception. I hadn't bothered to check the clearance lights before bringing it in and I clearly should have because I had lost one whole circuit of lights. I think what likely happened is that when we put the awning on we must have pierced a wire along the roof line and now that circuit is shorted out. Of course I couldn't quickly fix that during the safety but they very kindly passed me anyway with my assurance that I would get it fixed. I spent yesterday working on it and have most of the lights back on. I've located the stretch of wire that has the short in it and all the lights on powered side of the short are working but now I have to figure out how to get power to the "other side" of the short.

The mechanical portion of the inspection went well, aside from the clearance light problem but putting the results into ICBC's computer was a huge problem. Whoever the genius was that decided to computerize the safety inspection records obviously never thought about the fact that the inspection technicians by and large are 60+ year old mechanics. It was beyond painful watching Billy try to type the results into the computer but it wasn't entirely his fault either. The application was, to be generous, less than user friendly. They ended up making at least 5 phone calls to ICBC and eventually ended up phoning Victoria to get the original registration number from when Clarence and Sylvia owned the bus. I was pretty nervous during that process because one false move and we could have easily ended up on some list that required us to have semi-annual inspections. No doubt we could have fixed that later but the problem might easily have popped up while we were in Mexico or Arizona and fixing that kind of problem over the phone might have been really hard on my blood pressure.

Right now we're parked in a very pretty spot in a yard belonging to some friends that we met in Mexico a couple of years ago. Their address is Peachland but to me it seems like we are closer to Westbank. When you were seeing those pictures of the Glen Rosa fire last spring they were taken just over the ridge that we look at out the front window. We've been trying to get here all summer but never quite made it until now. Later today I'll get a picture of our parking spot posted.

Tonight we're having supper with one of Marilyn's brothers who lives here. This weekend we'll probably move back out to Chilliwack. We're getting pretty close to ready to head south. We've actually got a reservation at a campground outside of San Francisco starting on Nov 29 so it feels like we are ready to leave. We're still waiting for our BC health cards to arrive and it wouldn't hurt our feelings if we were able to get vaccinated for the pig flu before leaving. I don't suppose there's a hope in hell of that happening though. I'm afraid the epidemic will be over and done before our government ever gets around to vaccinating the white anglo-saxon taxpaying members of the population.

The greatest show on earth

I'm in the middle of "The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins. Its an irreverent and thoughful look at evolution. I didn't expect to run into Monty Python but there he is, or more accurately, there is Eric Idle. For those of you who don't recognize the name he's the author of such classics as "I'll Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio" and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". I just have to quote the entirety of his "The Lord God Made Them All" parody because it's too good not to share:

All things dull & ugly
All creatures short and squat
All thing rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot

Each litte snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings

All thing sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all

Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All thing scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all

We gotta get out of this place ...........

Murray & Jill's yard doesn't look too bad in this picture but that's mud to the right. The mud is left over from the snow that covered the yard a few days earlier. So it seemed like we were living on borrowed time. We got an early start on Friday morning so that we could travel on the frost. Their yard is at the end of about 20 miles of gravel - the bottom sides of the bus show evidence of the gravel & mud on the trip out to their place. We took a shortcut down to highway 7 and our plan to travel on the frost worked. Then we headed west for Airdrie.

But then Airdrie was a whole lot worse when we woke up Saturday morning to this crap and more falling. I checked the internet and Camiel checked his $4000 airplane Garmin and we decided that we would likely drive out of the gack at Cochrane which is exactly what happened. We had a glorious drive through the mountains.

The only time the weather intervened was at the top of Rogers Pass and that didn't last long. Once we got west of the pass we got into autumn leaves and even the occasional green deciduous trees. We got to Sicamous as it was getting dark. It was strange driving south down Mara Lake with no boats on the lake and none in the slips. We briefly debated spending the night in one of the rest areas along the lake but decided they would be too noisy so we carried on to Grindrod.

It was getting pretty dark by the time we pulled into town but the park was open so we pulled in there and spent a quiet night beside our favorite river. This morning we got a leisurely start, had lunch in Kelowna and ended up coming all the way back to Chilliwack where we found our Holiday Trails membership park was still open. We both thought it closed on Oct. 15 so this was a great surprise. Our Thousand Trails park is open too but we like this one better. We're also limited to 50 nights a year in the Thousand Trails system before we have to start paying $5 per night compared with unlimited nights in the Holiday Trails system so we might as well use the nights on the Holiday Trails system if at all possible. So tonight we're tucked into a 50 amp site at Holiday Trails listening to the warm rain fall. Life is good.

(Monday) The rain is over, the sun came out, the temperature is about 10 degrees higher than what we left behind. We should have done this a month ago. Tomorrow I'll get the boat out of temporary storage and get it winterized. I've been worrying about it for the last month.

Counting the days now

We're back west of Saskatoon in Murray & Jill's yard counting the days until we can leave Saskatchewan. Marilyn got back from her last trip up north and shortly after she got home we got kicked out of 16 West. They said they were closing for the season and they made everybody leave but they lie. We left there on Thursday and today when I went by the owner was still camped there but I guess he must be happy because he is all by himself.

Today I got the 2nd muffler hooked up on the genset. I'm not sure that it made a whole lot of difference in the racket that the gennie makes but it must have helped a bit. Grandma used to say "every little bit counts like the old lady said when she pee'd in the ocean". I've got some soft mounts to put under it that should take out some of the low frequency vibration noise but I think I'll wait until we find a warmer place because that project could quickly turn into an ordeal.

I've got a contract through BDC Consulting that I am working on right now. I made a roadtrip to North Battleford and I've got a meeting with one of the principals on Wednesday and then I think we can leave here. If the weather doesn't go completely to hell we'll pull out Friday morning and go as far as Airdrie that night. We'll drink some wine with Al & Camiel and then be on our way through the mountains, probably arriving in Kelowna sometime Sunday afternoon.

Tomorrow we are headed for Regina to check up on father. He's back in the hospital because of a bedsore that has turned into a major issue. The details aren't important and they're too messy to include here but suffice it to say that our so-called healthcare system has so far failed miserably in its feeble attempts to treat this latest indignity. The owner of his care facility put her foot down last week and forced the system's hand so he is in the hospital until they get the wound to at least start healing. In a nutshell the problem is that the care facility isn't allowed to change the dressings and the (taxpayer paid) staff that is tasked with changing the dressings won't come often enough to actually cure the wound. Meanwhile father is caught in the middle with a deteriorating and debilitating out of control bed sore. Thanks a bunch Tommy Douglas.

Not evil - just wrong

This is too good not to share. Turns out there's a Irishman named Phelim McAleer who has made a movie called "Not Evil - Just Wrong". Phelim calls himself an environmental journalist but don't hold that against him because this guy might just have it right. He's taken a direct run at Al Gore. You remember Al - the guy who invented the internet that makes it possible to read this weblog. You may also remember that he made a pseudo-documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth" that has made him a bunch of money. Its also made him the darling of big environment and that was what brought him to a convention in Baltimore where Phelim was able to ask a question. That's newsworthy because apparently Big Al is too much of a celebrity to actually answer questions anymore.

Apparently a British court has been asked to rule on the veracity of Al's movie because the schools want to use it to brainwash British children and it turns out ................. wait for it ............. there's some mistakes in Al's movie. I know - it's hard to believe but apparently it isn't as pure as the driven snow that Al claims is no longer falling. Those mistakes were the subject of Phelim's questions to Big Al and Al was squirming. He didn't answer the questions and the organizers cut off Phelim's microphone but I think that was probably Phelim's objective. He wanted some publicity and I'm happy to do my little bit to help him out.

Not Evil - Just Wrong is the web address but don't be surprised if you can't log in because I think they are experiencing a lot of traffic.

Debasing the coin of the realm

The morning after the US dollar closed at roughly $1.05 Canuck bux it is somehow completely appropriate to wake up to the news that the promised one has been annointed with a Nobel Peace Prize. Leaving aside the fact that he would have had to be nominated within weeks of taking office at a time when he clearly had done less than he has now this is a very bad joke. The Nobel committee has become nothing more than a UN cheerleading squad. I've heard comparisons to the Academy Awards this morning but that does ill service to the Academy. They at least provide employment and some measure of entertainment.

So far all the annointed one has done is not be George Bush. He hasn't implemented any policy domestically let alone internationally. What he has done is promise to spend money on a scale never before seen and the world has rendered its judgement on the wisdom of those announcements. That judgement can be seen in the chart above.

So it seems appropriate that the man who is debasing the greenback is now also debasing the Nobel Prize.