If you’ve never driven a 40 foot vehicle that is 13 feet high you wouldn‘t completely understand the dilemma we had this morning!
We had spent 2 nights in Hope at the Wildrose RV camp. The campsites were extremely tight together and even though we were in a “pull through” site, our challenge this morning was the tree closest to us on the right of the RV. Richard did not have enough clearance to pull Newman fully forward (as there was another campsite and trailer in front of us) and he had to make sure he didn’t hit the tree as the RV’s back end turned. Richard asked me to get out and help him navigate his way around the tree to make sure the back end was fully past the tree before he started to turn the RV.
And we made it and we did not create that skid mark in the dirt! You can see how tight it is though with Richard having to encroach on the campsites in front of us to get out. As we were leaving the campsite another Newmar owner (from Manitoba) said to us it was his first time staying at this park as well, he was there for the winter and he didn’t like the narrowness of the sites either. So we live and learn! Don’t go into a site if you haven’t already figured out an exit plan!
We had to stop for diesel this morning at the Flying J near the RV park. Unfortunately they didn’t have propane and we wanted to fill up our propane tank (for heating) before we headed to the island.
After finally getting out of the RV park, and filling up we were on the road about 10:50am.
It was a dreary, drizzly, grey day at +4C when we left Hope, B.C. We knew there were mountains somewhere behind those clouds, but they were well hidden today!
I had to take a call from the office and the time seemed to fly as I got caught up on the goings on back at work. I’m still not officially retired yet, so the office scuttlebutt is still of interest to me and I still need to get on my laptop and do a bit of work this evening after updating the blog.
We seem to fly through Chilliwack, Abbotsford, and Langley and found ourselves in Surrey going through an area of suburban Vancouver that neither one of us had ever seen....the very industrial, seedy under belly of Vancouver! It certainly makes me appreciate how busy the ports of Vancouver are when you see the shipping containers stacked as high as they were!
What I’ve learned to appreciate on this trip is how valuable the railroads are to Canada. In every Province we’ve been through the railway is the lifeblood of the shipment of goods. From the railcars in the Prairies through to the ports in Vancouver and on to Halifax and beyond, the railway moves so much that keeps Canada in business!
Rail cars in the Prairies
Port of Vancouver rail lines.
We received a phone call about 12:30pm from Colin at Tsawwasen RV Resort implying that we weren’t coming because of Covid and as a result he was cancelling our stay! Knowing how booked up everything is in Vancouver for seasonal RV sites, we assured him we were coming and we would be arriving in 30 minutes. That phone call sure shook us up! We had originally booked 5 nights in Tsawwasen as a “buffer” in case we got delayed with weather or needed a repair to the RV, but we are actually on schedule and arriving today into Tsawwasen as we had originally planned way back in July when we first started drawing up our trip itinerary. As I had mentioned we use a software program called RV Trip Wizard to plan this trip. I had spent many days while I was laid up with my broken femur, learning the software, calling and emailing RV parks for reservations. It seemed to take weeks to finally get all of the confirmations in place to then update RV Trip Wizard, so we would have a complete itinerary for our big cross country adventure!
Once we arrived at the RV park in Tsawwasen Richard checked us in and asked where we could find propane for the RV since we hadn’t passed anywhere on the road that we could see to get propane, since we left Hope. We were given a map to the Co-op in Ladner which was about a 10 minute drive away. We dropped Jerry in the RV parking lot and headed out solo with Newman to fill up on propane. Along the way we saw the cranberry bogs being flooded to harvest the cranberry crops.
After getting back from filling up with propane we stopped quickly for take out Thai food which we ate in Newman. It was getting onto 3pm and that served as lunch and dinner for us!
After we drove to our site in the Tsawwasen RV “RESORT”...and I use that word “RESORT”loosely...we had to manoeuvre between more posts on both sides of us into a very sloppy wet RV site. Richard looked around and said “THIS PLACE IS A DUMP!”...the guy in the spot one over from us is encroaching on the empty site next to us in his dumpy old Winnebago and his site is so messy he looks like an RV park HOARDER...!!!!
While Richard was dealing with the electric hook up and water and sewer hook ups I made the Executive decision to call the next RV park we are staying at on Vancouver Island to see if they could accommodate us any earlier than our planned arrival of next Saturday. Luckily for us, our reserved spot is available starting tomorrow. I then called BC Ferries and switched our sailing to tomorrow at 1pm from Saturday at 11am. I called back and confirmed with the RV park outside of Victoria we would be arriving tomorrow for 7 nights instead of the originally planned 3 nights... So off to the Island on the ferry we will go tomorrow!
And no this won’t be us tomorrow...finally after 3 weeks of going cross country we will be on the island tomorrow!
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