Goodbye, Civilization!

Short Version:
We head north, on some awesome roads. We meet some natives and are quite helpful. The moon is pink, or isn't.

Long Version:
My fork came back from the warranty repair place. Finally. So I toddled on down to the bike shop and borrowed tools, stand, and overseers - everything I needed to put it back on the bike. Took about twice as long as it would have if the guys in the workshop had done it, but they only had to rescue me from disaster thrice, which is way less than it could have been.

And then it was Thursday, and we had a mad scramble to try to get all our chores and trip prep done before departing northwards, especially with the insurance stuff for the missing bag thrown into the mix. Our original proposed late morning departure was always doubtful, and we missed a couple more forecast times before finally getting on the road late in the afternoon for the run through to Goldbridge, in the Southern Chilcotin region.

Mr Google told us we had 100-odd km to drive after Whistler, but didn't mention just how absolutely appalling the condition of 60-some of them. We stopped to assist some local First Nations* women who had a flat tyre on their enormous pickup truck - they'd torn a gaping hole in the massive tyre's thick rubber, which we figured meant they must have been driving pretty bloody fast. They'd managed to get the jack in place and work it fine, but couldn't crack the wheel-nuts free of the wheel. I jumped up and down on the tyre-iron until the seals broke.
"I never thought of that," the fat one said.
"No shit," I thought. "If you'd thought of it, you'd have tried it, and you look like you weigh more than me despite being shorter than the women in Janine's family" (Hi Rhona and Diane and Susan!).
She was already dusty from getting the jack in place, so the jobs involving rolling around on the ground stayed hers. This may not have been the smartest disavowal of responsibility I've ever made, as it meant that she lay back down on the road on her side, reached up above her head, and etched indelibly onto my brain the sight of her belly lying on the ground next to her, exposed to air and sight by the riding-up of her shirt, and covering a good square metre of ground. It lay there, quivering slightly, looking for all the world like an enormous blotchy pink thick-walled balloon full of porridge. I felt violated.

At least the fat one had a clue, though; she'd figured out how to use the jack, and had even put rocks under the rear wheels to stop the truck rolling away in the event of brake failure. Her slim companion, on the other hand, was totally useless. She said she'd had to change out of her white dress in order to assist with the tyre-change (ie stand around, smoking). I really wanted to ask why on earth she'd picked a white dress to wear on a mission to deliver beer and cigarettes to their father, who was hiking out over the 20-million cubic metre Meager Creek landslide to meet them, but I was a bit worried about what the response might be. As Janine remarked later, it was nice that both of them had made such an effort with their appearance before heading off on their rescue mission, even if what that meant was applying purple eyeshadow with a trowel.

Our road and theirs diverged shortly afterwards - theirs dead-ended 50m past the turn-off at a "Road Closed" barrier** - and we found ourselves on the Hurley Forest Service Road (Hi Hurley Clan!), which bore the same sort of similarity to an actual road as a wheelchair does to a modern automobile. I found myself reminiscing fondly about the gravel- and dirt-roads of NZ's Coromandel, or East Cape. It was pretty bad. And we had forty-something kilometres to drive on it. Sigh.

As icing for our awesome-road cake, we found that the rearrangement of our possessions into different containers had worked well for increasing available space in the Reaper, but had invalidated everything we thought we knew about how to stop stuff shifting during maneuvres, so we had boxes and the contents thereof flying around in the back of the van every time we dodged a pot-hole or a protruding rock. Which was often.

Still, we made it to and through Goldbridge, and found the Gun Creek Campground just before dark, where we ate delicious foods and settled in for the night with the sound of the very-full river acting as white-noise-maker for our sleeping pleasure. Which was handy for getting back to sleep after Janine woke me up to demand that I look at the moon, because it was pink*****.






* = Canada's native peoples are now collectively referred to as being First Nations peoples - an umbrella term which has replaced "Indians" in the accepted, politically-correct vocabulary. This has not been universally-accepted; we've met folks who think it's a bunch of arse, and a waste of everyone's time and effort, and who contine to refer to them as Indians. There's a raft*** of controversial pieces of legislation around Federal dealings with First Nations groups, many of which have their roots in the exemption of First Nations folks from pretty much all Provincial and local governmental legislative efforts, so long as they're ensconced on their Reservations... which are mostly within Provinces**** and often sit smack bang in the middle of a Municipality or District. Recipe for conflict? Absolutely

** = Which I assume they were planning to ignore and somehow circumvent

*** = Not a group of otters

**** = As I understand it, what used to be the Northwest Territory is now Nunavut, a separate Provincial-level First Nations entity

***** = It wasn't. But I did feel it necessary to make sure there wasn't a bear doing some nose-to-window snooping before I went back to sleep.