On The Road With The Bradys

02/04/06 Saturday

I talked to my son, Sam, for about an hour this afternoon. During the conversation he motivated me to catch this log up to date and begin posting to our blog periodically. I will attempt to summarize the last few months in a series of short entries and try not to bore you to death. I’m writing this in February so forgive me if the detail is a little bit fuzzy as I address events from last fall.

09/09/06 through Mid-October

We left in the morning as planned. We wanted to be sure that we made it to the border crossing before dark. I think that our drive that day was perhaps the most beautiful scenery we saw on the entire trip. British Columbia is a beautiful Province.

After we had driven a couple of hours we decided that we were read for breakfast. We entered a small town and started looking for a place large enough to park our rig. That is the most important consideration in our restaurant selection. We found a place and as we pulled into the lot we saw a familiar Motor Home so we pulled over and parked beside it and went inside. Sure enough it was our friends Faye and Stan Guiles from Hattisburg, MS. We had breakfast with them and went on our way. We only made a couple of stops that day. Mary had heard of a gem shop which had good Jade and she wanted to look at that. We also stopped at a trading post South of Cache Creek just to see what they had. We didn’t buy anything, but we did go to the bathroom.

After that stop we passed through scenery that was unbelievable. I guess for about 40 or 50 miles we drove through the Frazier River Canyon. It was raining and the clouds covered some of the mountains, but Mary got a lot of pictures. We followed the river and in many places the canyon was just wide enough for the river, the road and a railroad. Some places there were tunnels through the mountains because there was not room enough for all three. I think we went through about seven tunnels. We were within 20 miles of Vancouver when we left the canyon and turned south toward the US border. I guess it was about 3:00pm. We went into the duty free shop at the border and bought some stuff which didn’t have Canadian taxes on it. That is not small matter: If you think Canada’s health care is free, just go up there and check out their tax system. We knew that if you had receipts you could get back some of the taxes you paid. The nice lady in the shop told Mary if she would bring her receipts she would help her sort out what could be refunded. We didn’t have all of our receipts, just the credit card purchases but we still were able to get back about $35.00.

As we left this shop we saw another familiar vehicle. It was Francy and Bill Garrett from Coral Springs, FL. We visited with them awhile and resumed our journey. We got through the border alright and went on until we got to Interstate 5. When we got to the first town with a Wal-Mart we pulled into their parking lot to sleep. Shortly after we got there Bill and Francy drove in. Without discussing it we had both decided to stay in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. As we were discussing where to eat supper a guy came and gave us a paper telling us we could not overnight there. I had never heard of a Wal-Mart not welcoming RV’ers to overnight. Mary checked her Next Exit book and found a rest area on the Interstate so we drove there and dry camped. Bill and Francy were parked beside us so we did not worry much about security because they have a Doberman that weighs about 100 lbs.
We left while Bill and Francy were still sleeping the next morning. We traveled through Washington and Oregon and into northern CA. I have to tell you, the mountains in Southern Oregon and Northern California are not the highest which we crossed, but they were perhaps the toughest pull we had on the trip. Our coach handled them fine. That 400 HP Cummings is a powerful engine. We decided that we would drive until dark and dry camp in a Flying J Truck stop that night. When we were just South of Redding, CA we heard a lot of horn blowing and Bill passed us. I did not have our CB on and they were trying to reach us. I turned on the radio and we talked about our plans to stop at the Flying J so they decided to stop with us. We were on our way to Fresno and they were going to San Francisco to meet their kids. We went into the restaurant at the truck stop to eat supper. While we were at the buffet, Bill told me that they had caught up to us three times and if they caught us again we had to adopt them. Fortunately our routes of travel separated a few miles down the road. We got to Fresno about noon to visit Mary’s sister Lois who we visited on our trip up to Canada. Lois had been taking treatments for Lung Cancer and she was very ill for three or four months. We stayed about a week at their house. The last day we were in Fresno, Mary went to the Dr. with Lois for a scan. We got a call about three days later with the news that the cancer was no larger, had not spread and appeared to have become encapsulated. Everyone was very relieved, and we still are because she gets a scan about every month and the cancer is smaller and she appears to be in remission.

09/08/05 Thursday

We have today to prepare for our departure from Canada. A great two months are coming to an end. We have made a lot of friends on the trip and we are not sure if we will ever see any of them again. If we don’t, we will all have some really great memories to keep for the rest of our lives. Some people are eager to be on the road back to the US and plan to leave and travel some tonight after our final function as a group. We are having a final dinner at the Prince George Curling and Golf Club.

The Club where we had our dinner was just like country clubs at home. The food was good and the service was better. We had a cocktail reception before dinner and some of the people would have been happy with anything they served after that. There was a program and a lot of “awards” were presented. Some of that was pretty funny and no one escaped being slightly roasted. Mary and I were given two very practical awards. I got some clothes hangers because we complained when we went to Nome and stayed in a hotel that had no hangers and we had to hang our clothes on hooks on the wall. Mary was presented with a large plastic bowl. You may have read in an earlier entry, that when we were in Anchorage Mary was getting soft serve ice cream from a machine and could not get it stopped. If I had not shut it down Mary would have had her shoes full. They felt that she should have a large bowl so she could salvage the overflow.
We returned to our RV Park and got everything ready to depart early the next morning. We have said our goodbye’s and will leave about 6:00 AM probably without seeing anyone.

This is not the end of our adventure, but we will not post the notes of the remainder of our trip for some time.