April 28, 2005

April 28, 2005

Hope to Princeton, B.C.

DAY 315

 

Today was sunny and warm. I think it was warm. It's kind of hard to tell when high up in the mountains where the air is quite cool.

We left Wild Rose Campground this morning and drove into Hope to find the NAPA Auto Parts store that Joanne looked up in the Yellow Pages last night. We found the store, and I exchanged the wrong license plate light bulb socket that I bought in Powell River, for the correct one. We headed east on Hwy. 3 which follows the Skagit River first, then the Similkameen River. The road passes by the Hope Slide area just outside of Hope, where in 1965 a huge chunk of mountain broke off and slid down onto the road, killing many. It climbs high up into the mountains, through a couple of high altitude passes. For a few miles on each side of the Allison Pass summit, there was snow on the sides of the road. We pulled over onto the shoulder, and got out of the truck with Bo to allow him to experience snow for the first time. Bo doesn't "get" snow. I threw some on him. I tossed him lightly into it. He doesn't "get" it. Stupid, little Alabama dog ! So I threw a snowball at Joanne. HA HA HA ! I tried to convince Bo to pee in the snow, by telling him that it was a very Canadian thing to do, eh ?

As we were driving along, Joanne suddenly shouted at me to stop. She had spotted 3 large deer grazing on the side of the road. By the time I got the rig pulled over and stopped, we were a couple of hundred feet past them. We got out of the truck, and walked back towards them a ways, watching them. A buck and 2 does. We also saw a muskrat, and a couple of woodchucks today.

We stopped in Princeton to refill with diesel, and found a nice, inexpensive municipal campground on the banks of the Similkameen River. We decided to stop driving earlier than usual, and stay here tonight. We don't really want to rush too much heading east. The weather in Manitoba doesn't seem that great yet. I took a nap, we took Bo for an obedience training session, then I worked on updating my investment data files. I picked up a B.C. based RV magazine at this campground. In it there was a letter from the owner of the campground in Richmond that was no longer in business, that caused us such grief a few days ago in Vancouver. The land that their campground was located on is being used to build the 2010 Olympics Speed Skate Oval.

DSK