Maps
For some reason the maps at the bottom of my posts often don’t show up right the first time. A page reload usually fixes it. Will investigate when I get a chance.
Underway
Road trip post for August 9, 2011.
Not much to say about today. Other than the June outing to Long Beach, this is the first day of my big trip. Uneventful; I got off to a bit of a late start and except for a few short breaks, drove all the way through until 7:30pm.
Stayed at the Three Valley Lake Chateau, that picturesque resort with the red roof between Sicamous and Revelstoke. It’s pretty nice. No cell service here though, and I couldn’t get the wireless working with my laptop, hence the delayed posts.
There’s a big “Ghost Town” tourist trap next door that I’ve always eyeballed on the way past. Since admission is half price for resort guests, I’ll check it out in the morning.
Today’s GPS track (no music because I was driving with the window down all day due to the heat):
[gmap width=”80%” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110809.kml” zoom=”auto” type=”satellite” center=”files” visible=”true”]
Backing up a bit
I actually started (and, in a sense, finished) this road trip back in June, when I took a short vacation at Long Beach. Living in Vancouver doesn’t put me on the west coast proper, so I thought it would be more correct to film my timelapse movie starting and ending at Tofino. It also served as a road test for my new timelapse recording technique.
But more importantly, Long Beach is where I began. In 1971, my parents were living with a small group of hippies in Schooner Cove, which is just south of Tofino. My parents had built themselves a tree house out of driftwood, and that’s where I was conceived. I went back to try and find my spawn point.
Schooner Cove is still somewhat isloated. There is no road and no established trail going there anymore; you have to walk on the beach, and high tide cuts off access so you have to be careful about timing.
There is no sign of former habitation; the houses that were there were removed, and everything else is overgrown. I believe I did locate the old trail head that led to my parents’ treehouse though – the house would have been a short walk in here, just to the left of the stream:
And here is the view of Schooner Cove looking south from this point:
Beautiful. No sign of life. Just the sound of the wind and the waves. I could totally see camping out here.
See that rock just left of center? My father crashed his Morris Minor there. He was driving home across the beach when a wave swamped the car, and he wasn’t able to extricate it. He had to abandon it, and the waves tore it apart. When I was young (12, I think) my mother brought me back here and there was still a lump of rust there that would have been the engine block. No sign of it this visit though – if anything remains, it was under five feet of sand.
I love Long Beach, but my memories of it are recent – a few from that visit when I was 12, and most from visits in the last few years. My parents left the area before I was born – living on a boat north of Sechelt for a while, then around the time of my birth living in Vancouver. I was born at St. Paul’s hospital downtown Vancouver, where by a sad coincidence my friend Erik Torstensson was treated just before he passed away a couple of years ago.
Coming back toward Vancouver, I passed through Coombs, home of the unjustifiably world-famous “place with the goats on the roof”. It’s just a tourist gift shop with that one gimmick, but I lived there for a while. I think it was related to the Long Beach visit when I was 12. A friend of the family had offered my mother a job staffing a booth at the tourist mall going up next to the goat place. Here’s what it looks like now:
It wasn’t as well developed back then though – still early days, with just wood boardwalks on mud. Anyway, we lived in a camping trailer next to the goat place while this business tried to take flight, and I was bored out of my mind. Thankfully there was an arcade here at the time, and I spent much time playing Trojan (still have the first-level music memorized), but money was extremely tight and I really had to beg for that occasional quarter. I was really glad I had brought a few of my favorite comics with me.
After a month, things didn’t seem to be picking up and no money was coming in, so we bailed out. It kind of soured our relationship with that family for a while, but before we left we stayed with them for a a few days and I got to play with their Coleco Adam (only time I ever got my paws on one) and that was also the first time I got to play the excellent Pitfall II on the Atari VCS – spent many hours on that game.
And here’s the result of a little program I cooked up to correlate my GPS track with my iTunes recently played list, and mark up my travel maps with the music I was listening to at the time:
[gmap type=”satellite” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110626.kml” visible=”true”]
Memory Lane
Tomorrow I embark on the longest trip of my life so far: driving from the west coast of Canada to the east coast and back. I have traveled a lot in my life, but never this much at once, and I’ve been unusually non-nomadic the last ten years.
I’ve been talking about doing this for a few years. Actually, going back and looking at my painfully ’90s pre-blogosphere website, I first mentioned the idea of this trip in 2001. At the time my friend Phloem described the idea as “Travels with Samantha Lite”. (TwS is a good read, BTW. Go!)
So ten years I’ve been planning this. Wow, time flies. But while the specific route I intend to follow has meandered a bit since 2001, the goals have not changed at all. I waited this long because now I’m eligible for my employer’s sabbatical program – I get an extra seven weeks of paid vacation this year, and that really helps; this is going to be an expensive trip.
The timing kind of works out well in other ways too – for one thing, Labrador just completed their first through road last year, which opens up the possibility of driving through that pseudo-province. For another, I turn 40 next year, so this can count as my mid-expected-lifespan semi-crisis extravaganza. I didn’t actually think of the trip in that context until just recently, but the intended theme does fit:
The main point of the trip is to revisit all the places I remember from my youth. I want to rephotograph old photos, photograph places I remember but don’t currently have photos of, and generally just refresh all those old memories and steep in nostalgia for a while.
As I wrote when I first described the idea: “I don’t want to become like a goldfish, only able to remember being as I currently am. Change is core to my life. Forgetting who I used to be is a kind of stagnation.” My memories are most strongly keyed by places; my hope is that revisiting old places will remind me of parts of myself that are, at present, buried.
Thinking of it from the midlife context, it will also serve to nicely summarize and cap off my life so far. I’ve been thinking I want to change my direction, so this should help get some closure on my larval stage.
A secondary purpose of the trip is to do some tourism stuff – visit places along the way that I haven’t visited before. That takes a definite back seat to the primary purpose though.
I will also be attempting to film a time lapse movie of the coast-to-coast drive in both directions. I did one for the trip between Vancouver and Calgary a few years ago, and learned a bunch from it. This one will be better, provided the equipment can take the punishment (digital camera shutters are not rated for the number of operations that will occur on this trip).
I’m very excited about this trip, and also a bit scared. I’ve actually been having intense dreams and not a few nightmares about it for weeks now. There is so much that could go wrong. I could have an accident or a breakdown. Some kind of financial setback. I could get too sick to drive, or even just too sick to enjoy the trip. By far the most likely problem is that I could simply get too exhausted to go on; I have sleep trouble even at home and especially tend not to sleep well in hotels.
But I’m not going to let any of that stop me. I’ve got too much invested now, and I’d intensely regret backing down. I’ve taken all possible precautions and my past travel history is spotless, so I tell myself my fears are unreasonable and press on.
Bloggination will be perpetrated here as time and net connectivity permit. I do not expect to be booking any face or plussing any googles while on this trip.
