Arrival in Seattle / Tacoma and a side trip to Kent

Well I made it to Washington and the bus performed great. I managed to power up most of the hills but going through from Merrit, BC to Hope, BC there are some long freaking hills.  So I geared down and chugged along.  Cruising along the open road with a nonfunctioning radio you have a lot of time to think. 

One of the things that floated through my mindas the hills and mountains whipped by was something someone asked me at the Camper-Jam this year.  "What's your Bus' name?".  No I had always refered to my bus as the Green Monster.  Not really nice but up until now strangely appropriate.  I think the old bus and I have turned a corner in our relationship.  It's not quite a loving realationship yet, but it's getting there.  I think I'm at the point where the bus deserves a proper name.  I was thinking in honour of her original colour I'd call her "Marigold".  Thoughts? 

I'm not going to change the name of the blog, but that's what I'm thinking anyway. 

So I rolled into Seattle on Wednesday afternoon without any issues then I hit the wall of traffic on I5 heading South.  Holy cow.  It took me a little over an hour to go 24 miles.  This is when 2 issues cropped up.  First the window crank came off in my hand, which is no big deal.  One screw and it's easily replaced.  The second however caused me a little concern.  My oil light kept coming on.  Flickering on, then off, then on again.  Damn it!

I didn't panic.  I figured if it came on and stayed on I'd be in trouble.  I made it to my friend's place down in Tacoma, relaxed for the night and looked online for the nearest VW aircooled guy.  The next morning I headed out for http://www.franklinsvwwerks.com .  As it turns out one of my wires was grounding and casusing the light to flicker on and off.  5 minutes later it was secure and with a new window crank in my hand I headed out to explore. 

As I headed back towards Tacoma I was thinking how lucky I was to travel all this way and the only thing that went wrong was a $5 window crank and a loose wire (now secured).  If only I knew,,,

Epic road trip - BC, Seattle and maybe Mount St.Helens

Today is the day!  After work today I am packing up the bus and heading West. 

The tentative plan is to make it as far west as I can today before I get too tired or it gets too dark.  Maybe Vernon, maybe Kelowna, maybe Sicamous.  You never know.  Tomorrow I'll head South-west into Washington state and make my way to Mount St.Helens for a night or two.

Mount St.Helens has always held a wierd facination for me.  It was one of the most dramatic erruptions in North American history.  I still remember as a kid looking at the cover of National Geographic and reading their coverage.  As much as I love going to visit the Pacific Northwest I don't think that I could live in that close to an active volcano but on the other hand, when it's your time, it's your time. 

After a night or two in the shadow of Mount St.Helens I'll make my way back up North to Tacoma for a weekend hanging out with some friends of mine scuba diving and helping them celebrate their housewarming.  It should be a fun weekend. I have to confess that the two things I'm looking to most is camping at Mount St.Helens and going diving.  My hope is that while diving in Seattle I see a couple Pacific octopus (or two). 


The oil has been changed in the bus, and it's all tuned and ready to head out on the open road.  I just have to haul ass home after work today and get her all packed up. 

Snow again!

I think the weather has finally turned here in Calgary andwe have seen the last of the snow. Famous last words right?  I wantit to warm up but the sad reality in Canada is that we will likely get anotherdump of snow probably right around the May long weekend. That said the forecastfor the balance of this week actually looks good.  In the mid-teens and sunny throughSaturday.  For my American readers whohaven’t quite caught up to the rest of the World with the Metric system takethe temperature in Celsius and multiply by 1.8 and then add 32 which will giveyou the conversion.  So ( 15 Celsius x 1.8) + 32 is 59 Fahrenheit. 

 

Off I go on a tangent, don’t get me wrong I am not slammingthe imperial system… but it really makes conversions way more difficult than itneeds to be 

 

12 Inches = 1 Feet

5280 Feet or 63360 Inches  = 1 Mile

 

Oh and you use FRACTIONS of Inches.  Think back to your grade school math andremember how much you loved adding and subtracting fractions.  You didn’t did ya?

 

100 Centimeters in a 1 Meter

1000 Meters to a Kilometer 

 

Everything is base 10…makes adding and converting WAYeasier. 

 

To be honest I still struggle with the bus and the speedometerand odometer because of the miles and mph. More than once I caught myself ripping through a playground or schoolzome going 30 MPH not 30 KPH ( about 18 mph). Just glad Officer White wasn’t around to hand me a ticket.  

 

I’m hopeful that we have seen the last of the snow untilnext winter and I can take the bus out for a spin this week. 

 

Snow, snow and more snow.

Well it's January 14th and it's snowing in Calgary.  Again.  I think it was about this time last year that my thoughts started to turn to camping and heading out in the Westy.  I keep thinking that mid-march / early April I'll b able to fire up the old bus and take her out for another season.  I'm actually thinking of making a couple reservations for the May, July and September long weekends. 

I think the reason I'm excited to head out is one of the problems I had camping last year was that I never seemed to have enough kindling to start a fire.  Problem solved this year.  I was in Naton, AB and stumbled into a blacksmith shop.  they had this cool device for splitting wood and making kindling for your fire.  You can bolt it to a permanant structure (for your fire pit in the back yard) or you can strap it to a tree for when you go camping.  The guy actually appeared on Dragon's Den... I won't ruin it for you but here is his pitch. 

http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/2012/11/mr-quick-split.html

I'm also keen to try a new method of building a fire.  I got tired of having to constantly add logs to my fire and found myself  burning though a lot of wood (pun intended).  So this year my ifres are going to be build "upside-down".   Check out the handy link.... I'll let you know how the trials go. 

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/02/02/how-to-build-an-upside-down-fire/


Well that's about it for now.  I'll let you know if I make reservations so soon.  Right now however I'm dreaming of my Cuban vacation in a couple a weeks then another trip to Bonaire for some scuba diving shortly after. 


PS  Just a quick note... apparently you cant make camsite reservations more than 4 months in advance. I'll have to set a reminder in my calendar.  

Okay, I’m behind a little bit.  Lets rewind a couple of weeks ago for my first camping outing of the year.  I headed out to Two Jack Lake in Banff National park.  It was great, as always.  It was a fairly quiet weekend and there were loads of choice spots to choose from.  For a little while I was the only person on the entire loop.  I settled in, started a fire, cracked a beer then cracked my book.  The peace and solitude was amazing.    I’m not complaining but the peace soon ended as the RVs started arriving. 

Next to me a big RV pulled in and a really nice German couple were my neighbors for the night.  Christoph, Isabelle and Levi.   I invited them over to share the fire and have a beer.  Other than loving the Westy, it turns out that Christoph and the family are trekking across Western Canada and into the US, Alaska and into the Arctic Circle.   Apparently it’s been a dream of Chris’ to go that far north.  He’s been doing his own blog of sorts.  Check it out here http://trackmytour.com/Xg2sv .  They had a little trouble with the visa for little Levi and had to hang around Calgary for a little bit so I suggested they head out towards Drumheller.  They had a great time and even stopped into my place for some burgers and Smores for dinner one night before hitting the open road again.

That weekend I also had my friends Nicole and Linda show up.  It was really kinda fun.  We had a great meal, drank far too much wine and played Jenga on a picnic table that wasn’t quite level.  The interesting thing about the Jenga game was that it was the “Truth or Dare” version.  The red blocks were the Dares and the black blocks were the Truth.  Dares and Truths ranged from exchange an article of clothing with the person next to you, kiss the person next to you and so on.  It was fairly tame and we didn’t actually play the Truth or Dare version.  Maybe next time we’ll play and after a few more bottles of wine. 

Overall not a bad weekend.