Something's Going On!

Short Version:
A night of luxury with Ted and Trudy, a ride in the forest (on a 57 Chevy), large animal impacts

Long Version:
We'd met Ted and Tracey in Whistler, and invited ourselves to come stay when we passed their way. Arrangements made during a couple of mildly bizarre payphone calls (Telus take note: $2 for a one-minute call to a town 100-odd km away is NOT good value) from Williams Lake, and we arrived at their farm at the same time as Ted, and a thunderstorm. We spent a lovely evening, clean and warm and dry, slept wonderfully, and ate like kings the next morning before heading north through Quesnel* and on to Prince George, which welcomed us with a giant Pinocchio and a parking space right outside Cycle Logic, where we acquired an oldish trail map and hand-drawn diagram of how to get to the riding. A quick stop at the nearby bakery for delicious baked goods and we were on our way, out of town to the Otway Nordic Centre, which is a cross-country ski trail network that, like Lost Lake near Whistler, doubles as a mountain-biking area in summer.

The map was an automatically-plotted GPS output printout, and was missing a few newer trails along with a coherent view of where to access the trail network. We started up a cross-country ski lane initially, but turned back when we saw the bear and her cubs parked mid-trail a hundred metres uphill of us. Soon as we did, we spotted the access point for the bike trails, and we were away laughing - literally, in Janine's case, as she surged up the Curves and Expresso trails and then powered off into the trail network. I was a bit tired, and a bit grouchy, and it took me a good hour or so before I started to really get into the swing of things. Once I did, though, I started carrying a grin nearly as wide as Janine's down trails with nice flowing rhythm and over challenging but rideable obstacles, including a derelict 57 Chevy and a 20-foot-long ribbed 4-inch monorail. Even the uphill trails provided great riding, with the occasional adrenaline burst when we heard noises from the woods. No more large critters though - just a squirrel throwing cones at us.

Three hours later we arrived back at the van, tired and dirty and wet, but grinning. Not sure the fat people who'd chosen the Otway parking area as the location for their in-car serious discussion were entirely pleased to have us back and bustling about the place, but we were gone soon enough, back through town and out to the east towards McBride, 200 or so km away. A quick stop at a rest Area near Dome** Creek yielded some scary statistics from an informational signboard:
- On average, there are 4-8 large animal impacts every hour in Canada
- Most of these occur between 7pm and midnight
- Most of them involve moose.
We've seen a moose. Mooses are HUGE. We don't want to crash into a moose. Bad enough harvesting another bird just after leaving Prince George, let alone something that's going to give as good as it gets on the damage front.

A Mustang stopped, and a fat man emerged, carrying a full bottle of Pepsi. Which he then emptied onto the ground. We left before things got any weirder, and made it to the LaSalle Lake campground with enough time before dark to set up camp, cook and eat dinner, and admire the views of the Cariboo Mountains reflected in the lake's mirror-like surface from a vantage point at the tip of a log-and-earth jetty near our lakeside campsite. Then bed, and a good sleep except for the two pickup trucks which drove round the campground loop and away at random times in the night, and one instance where Janine woke me up to tell me "Something's going on!" before lying back down and recommencing snoring action. Freak.









* = My list of noteworthy items from Quesnel reads: Robin's Donuts; Satan's truck; lots of flowers; pretty town; big mills

** = Always reminds me of the story of the IT guy who was called upon to help a woman having trouble doing something-or-other. He needed her password to complete testing the fix. It was "DOME." Job done, his curiosity got the better of him and he asked her why she'd chosen it. She blushed and refused to divulge the answer. After much cajoling and an eventual threat of perpetual IT issues for her if she didn't spill the beans she eventually caved in and said simply: "It's two words."