Day 28: Kamloops, BC to Vancouver, BC (and finally, Victoria, BC!) (August 31, 2017)
Sunday September 24, 2017 (Canada)
Now comes the time to wrap up the blogging for this trip! Are you happy? I am. We're so close to the final destination! And I don't have to try to remember all the random stuff we did anymore!
From Kamloops it's less than a four hour drive to Vancouver. Our wonderful friends Eric and Nolan were kind enough to offer up their place in Vancouver for several days while we decompressed and prepared for the final jump on the ferry over to Victoria!
On the way to Vancouver, we stopped into Hope, BC. It's a small town nestled in the mountains, and seems like a super-cool place to live! The population hovers around 6,000, but the town has boatloads of charm. Cute cafes, lovely views, and… what's this? A cinema celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of Rambo: First Blood? A film shot almost entirely in and around Hope, BC? Can't do much better than that! And not only was Rambo shot here, but also the film "K2", where the geography of Hope stood in for the Himalayas! Nice one!
Hope also had a nice honey store where we had the opportunity to try some "mountain honey" from alpine bees! Apparently the colour and taste of honey is entirely related to the diet of the bees that generate it. So bees feeding on buckwheat give you buckwheat honey and its distinctive flavour. I won't lie: it all kind of tastes like honey to me. But Sandra can tell the difference!
From the lovely town Hope we continued on to Vancouver. Before leaving, we spotted a Mazda Miata. Sandra generated another pun-banger with the remark: "Get Miata here!". She's grown so much. I felt my eyes well up. On the drive, we had the wonderful (mis)fortune of arriving into Vancouver at 5pm. From the suburbs. If your guess for the amount of traffic was "minimal-to-mildly-inconvenient" you'd be very wrong. Almost exactly wrong. It was a living nightmare. Looks like we shouldn't have timed our arrival for rush hour. Oops. The film Rush Hour was not filmed in Vancouver. But maybe it should have been.
Once we'd arrived in Van we headed straight to Eric and Nolan's place. It was so nice to reunite with friends that we hadn't seen in quite a while! We're looking forward to living much closer to them here in BC! Our evenings were filled with wonderful food (Mexican!), drink (Port Moody growlers!), and games (Codenames!). Sandra surprised me with a belated birthday celebration including ice cream cake. I felt really lucky to be celebrating with friends, and it was an awesome night!
One particular activity of note in the Vancouver area was the Water Balloon Home Run Derby. The game doesn't actually have an official name (other than the moniker I just gave it), but it involves slow-pitching water balloons to a baseball bat-wielding comrade who swings for the fences. They make contact with (and subsequently annihilate) the water balloon, often soaking themselves and any onlookers in the process. Games don't get much more entertaining! Check out the action shots!
After spending the Labour Day weekend in Vancouver, it was time for us to head off on our own again! Destination: Victoria! Although it would have been great to take some "we finally made it!" pictures, we were greeted with another gloomy, hazy day for the ferry ride over. We were also so caught up in the last leg of the trip that we kind of didn't get around to it. Oh well! We'll have plenty of pictures here for the foreseeable future!
So this is it, for now! We made it. We drove a shade over 7,000km and took a month to do it, but we made it to Victoria! We can't wait to see what the future holds for us here, and we'll make sure to tell you about our next adventure!
Update: I wrote this draft way back when and totally forgot to publish it. It's now July 2018 and I think it's safe to say we're kicking some butt here in Victoria. That's a story for another day. But until then, enjoy these old-school pictures of the last days of our trip across the country!