Roadtrip 2012 - Notes...

Blissfully warm, sunny days finally arrived in Aldergrove and what do Meg and I do?...we pack up the Subaru and head south on the I-5 ---> destination Santa Fe. The fact that the US temperature maps have coloured most of our route in the deepest red-orange (temps of 100F+) doesn't deter us...we can handle the heat! 

Cruising through Seattle we noticed our rather newish GPS was focused in one area of town and would not progress along our route. Reset, shutting it off and restarting, resetting to defaults wouldn't budge it so we hopped into Costco for a replacement. We chose the TomTom ... which, coincidentally, had a graphic on the box of a road in Colorado with an exit to Aurora...eerie, eh?

From Seattle we scooted down the I-5 to La Center, WA to visit Sheila, a neighbour from Cuyutlan, joined her on an afternoon jazz cruise on the Willamette River, watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, had a wonderful, restful sleep before hitting the road again. 

We followed the Columbia River east  - a very scenic route - stopping in Jerome, ID (temp 104F) Although we can handle the heat, it's a good thing the room had AC.

Sunday found us driving from Idaho and into Utah. It seemed to take forever to drive that tedious section Ogden - Salt Lake City - Provo until we left the interstate to drive through rolling hills, along creeks and eventually the yellow-orange-red rocks introducing us to Moab, UT. 

Last year on our road trip we toured  through Arches National Park just north of Moab. This year we decided to stop for the night to feel the Moab vibe. It was a great choice...Moab is a extremely vibrant town. Comparable to Whistler for outdoor activities -cycling, hiking, ATVing, rafting, shopping, eating, et al - but not the high end exclusivity. 

Since we had said that we would try to slow down, we booked a river-rafting trip on Monday morning and joined a slew of tourists - the majority from Europe - to spend the day drifting down the uninviting muddy, mocha-coloured Colorado River. Our fellow rafters for the first half of our river journey were a family of 5 from Paris and an undertaker, by the name of Kill, from Ohio and 2 of his teenage sons. He, his wife and 7 of their 9 children were on a road holiday in a van, travelling through the West and Southwest regions of the US. I had noticed their van in the lot in Moab...the entire back window was decorated with those vinyl stickies of hubby, wife, 9 incrementally-sized kids and an assortment of pets. Meg and I were both astonished by the number of families with 4 or more kids travelling through Moab. Not really my idea of a relaxing holiday.

The rapids were nothing compared to the ones we have in Hell's Gate but they did provide a little excitement and enough water to soak us.  In the afternoon, Meg and I stayed on the raft and were joined by another family of 5 from Paris and 4 young British women on an organized camping trek across the US of A. I found it difficult to understand what language they were speaking - their accents were so thick. All in all a very pleasant day.

That night we were entertained by a torrential thunderstorm that lit up and shook the building. I loved it! 

On Tuesday we returned to the roadways, driving south through Cortez, CO and on to Durango where we stopped at the Visitor's Center for maps. I got a chuckle when signing into the visitor's guest book. I can imagine that whomever signed in for the Littler family from Denver must have been suffering from the stresses of one of those large family vacations, answering the 'Reason for Visit' section with the word "Melodrama". 

At some point on our route we crossed the Continental Divide...

and, with the help of our TomTom navigator, after a little over 2600 km, ~1600 miles, we arrived at our destination, an estate just north of Santa Fe, just in time for cocktails.

Soggy Spring and other musings...

I have to say this has not been the sunniest spring on record. In fact I believe the weatherperson on TV said we have had a months-worth of rain in half the month so far. It's predicted to be the wettest June on the Lower Mainland, ever! Even the Farmers Almanac doesn't have good things to say about the next couple of months. Needless to say it's not great weather for golfing nor barbecuing and I would think a lot of seedlings have floated or rotted away with all this precipitation. Strawberry and raspberry crops are delayed. The Fraser River is overflowing its banks. Will Bedford Landing wash away? It's odd that an area, which routinely flooded when I was a kid growing up in Fort Langley, was developed for residential housing...hmmm? At least it's green around here and I doubt that we will see a lot of forest fires in the vicinity.


With not much incentive to venture outside, Meg and I have been reorganizing our humble abode. It sure is a good thing that Meg knows how to build. She has constructed a slew of cabinets and shelving units to help organize our 'stuff'...well, mostly my 'stuff' since I still cannot part with my 'treasures'. It's a long learning process and you just never know when I might need something, eh? Once of these days I will have to get into some of my 'newly organized stuff' and start splashing colour onto canvas to create some Marni art!



Another way that I have discovered to while away my time as I rust is my Kindle Fire. Although it is exclusively a US product (which proved to be very frustrating at first), there are ways working around the restrictions to download apps and use the Fire in Canada. Then it becomes a really nifty tablet! My favourite apps, so far, are TuneIn Radio, 5-0 Police Scanner, Netflix and Anduko2...and although I have downloaded many books, I have yet to read one on my Fire...perhaps someday soon, when I've grown weary of suduko.

The highlights of the month continue to be visits with grandbaby Taegan. She grows more adorable everyday and definitely brings many rays of sunshine to everyone around her.

With baby smiles, giggles and hugs, it's not that soggy a month after all.

Eye Feel Much Better....

Back in January, whilst chipping away at some concrete, armed with my trusty chisel and hammer, I paused briefly to wipe the sweat from my brow and clear my safety goggles of said sweat. Spying a peak in the concrete I took another swipe with the hammer and chisel and, as fate would have it, a fleck of concrete broke away and flew into my left eye. Immediately I flushed my eye with water and eye drops but it felt as if I had something under my lid. I contemplated making an appointment with an ophthalmologist in Manzanillo or Colima but figured that daily drops and lots of blinking would clear my eye. I called my ophthalmologist in Langley and made an appointment for April 18. 

Since that day I have woken to a crusty eyelid and an irritation that didn't go away with eye drops. I noticed that I had double vision in that eye...chalking that up to the irritation from whatever was under my lid.


So I got to see my doctor last Wednesday. What a shock for me to find that the irritation wasn't under my lid but was a tiny shard of concrete embedded into my cornea. Since I lived with this shard for 3 months I was a little surprised when Dr C walked me to the reception area and waited for her receptionist to make an appointment with another ophthalmologist ASAP. 


The following day I met Dr McF who checked on my eye...said, 'yes,indeed' I did have a chunk of something in that eye...about 2/3rds into my cornea. I could easily get and eye infection and lose my eye in a day...although I had had this for 3 months. Lucky for me, perhaps, that I swam daily in our chlorinated pool. He warned me that pulling it out could cause a hole in my eyeball and fluid might leak out but he had ways to detect a hole and he had glue. He proceeded to give me some freezing drops, get me settled into that contraption that eye doctors have, cautioned me not to move and started to pick at the piece with some little tweezers. After a few minutes he had a minute bit out. Re-examining my eye he was dismayed to find the chunk had broken...2 pieces were still in there. So he got me settled again, added more drops, unwrapped a needle and began probing my cornea for the errant fragments. 


It reminded me a lot of the first radial keratotomies I had back in 1983 when my doctor used a scalpel to make many incisions on my corneas. Things were different then, though...the freezing was introduced by a needle plunged slowly into the eye socket, crunching through tissue till it reached the optic nerve. It was, needless to say, a tad painful. At that time I could see the shadow of the scalpel cutting through my cornea and noticed my vision was altered by the  pressure of each cut. Fortunately, now, the freezing drops worked...there was no pain. Each probe distorted my vision a little but it wasn't frightening. After a few more minutes he had the two little bits out. Success!! It pays to be stoic. 


The next day I had a followup appointment. I was surprised that my sight had improved... the double vision was not as pronounced and it didn't hurt to blink. Unfortunately Dr McF discovered that there still was a small piece left in my eye. Darn! I wasn't prepared for another session with the needle so have postponed the next surgery for a few weeks. 

The moral of the story is I should have listened when Meg told me to always wear my safety equipment when messing around with flying debris and/or working with potential hazards. Eye am very fortunate. Eye do feel much better now!

Back 2 BC

Meg and I spent a week in Tempe,AZ getting a little 'rest and relaxation' - definitely a foreign concept - checking out a couple of future vehicles, readjusting to life above the border 

and grooming my newly acquired 'Little Pony' collection. 

On Monday we repacked Rusty, pointed her north and set out from Tempe on the US portion of our journey. After many trips along back and forth from Mexico, I find driving the Needles - Barstow - Bakersfield - I-5 route gets really monotonous so we chose the Phoenix - Kingman - Boulder Dam - Las Vagas route diagonally across Arizona. I love seeing the seguaro cacti, Joshua trees and other desert plants and the colourful ravines and canyons on the way, plus it's a nice, new highway to drive.

On previous trips following this route we left quite early in the day but were delayed in takeoff. The novelty of this relatively new route soon wore off...it seemed and did take hours to reach the AZ/NV border. We drove on through Vegas and pulled into Beatty, NV for the night...not our longest drive (~700km and 8 hours).

Waking up to overcast skies, we felt a very noticeable drop in temperature from the balmy sunshine in Tempe and the tropical heat of Cuyutlan the week before. Yikes...it felt like a 'real' winter! The thermometer was probably hovering just about freezing as we hit the road early that morning. Mile after mile of scrubby desert vegetation was not enough to entertain us this time through. It seemed to take forever to get out of Nevada. 

Once into California we headed up Hwy 395 through Susanville and Lassan National Forest. 

We were both a little surprised to see fresh snow on the sides of the road...

and through the forest...but what were these snowflakes doing on our windshield? I figured we may see snow near the Siskiyou Pass in Oregon but I had not counted on driving into the white stuff. My plan of taking Hwy 89 to connect with the I-5 near Weed was starting to fade as we heard from the travel advisory station that due to a 'current snowstorm' chains were mandatory for the last 10 miles of our route between MacLeod and the I-5 junction. Drat, we were so close. We had to turn around and backtrack, driving in heavy sleety rain along a slow, twisty road to Redding. A tough day's drive ~900 km and 12 hours. It was a very dark and stormy night! 

From what we heard the next morning, it was a good thing that we didn't attempt to plow through the snow at the Mt.Shasta summit. It was quite some snowstorm up there.

Morning brought blue skies and sunshine and a clear route up the I-5. There was plenty of fresh snow at the summit and through the Siskiyou Pass but the road was clear, traffic flow was steady and Rusty was chomping at the bit to get home. Fortunately we breezed through Portland and Seattle - thanks to HOV lanes - and were through the border by 8:30pm. It was a long slog that day - a little over 1100 km in a little over 13 hours. It felt so good to pull up to the house and settle back into our familiar digs. No more long road trips for awhile...

Rusty's rusty...

Last Thursday Meg and I re-sorted and reorganized all the many things that we had decided to take back to BC and carefully Tetris'd them into Rusty, our trusty 2000 Dodge Dakota. Around midnight, not being able to sleep, we unpacked and repacked Rusty so the weight was distributed more evenly and the front end did not lift off the pavement. The next morning we bid farewell to our colourful casa, the pounding waves of the ocean and the balmy tropical breezes and headed up the road to Ajijic...the beginning of another 5000 kilometer adventure.

The drive to Ajijic along the Colima-GDL highway was tense. Since the road is under expansion, there seems to be more jockeying for the front of the line by the innumerable loco drivers - a feat made even more dangerous by the lack of shoulders in some stretches and inevitable oncoming traffic. Yikes! Nevertheless, we had an uneventful drive to Ajijic to overnight with our buds, D y E and their ever-welcoming menagerie.

The next morning we left fairly early, managed to skirt around GDL and were on the road north to Tepic only to get caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the outskirts of Guad for 10 km or so to a military checkpoint. It's amusing, and also annoying, when encountering a traffic slowdown in Mexico, to see a 2-lane highway all of a sudden turn into a 4-lane highway. Shoulders on both sides become lanes with cars squeezing past other cars, side mirrors playing tag, drivers looking for the glimmer of a chance to get to the front of the pack. Once past the checkpoint it was smooth sailing.

For the most part the cuota (toll) road is well paved and as straight as possible for the terrain but there are some rough patches and many twists and turns through the mountains.


Rusty performed very well under her load but Meg commented that there was a bit of play in the steering and the steering column was getting noisy again (a problem that we could not get solved with the resources available by our mechanic).


In the afternoon we drove into Mazatlan, had a bite to eat and rolled into the Xtasis hotel-motel on the north side of town.
Hotel-motels are a common establishment in Mexico. They provide a room with parking in an adjoining parking spot, usually with an automatic garage door, offering discreet privacy for clients for variable hourly rates. We chose the 12 hour rate rather than the 6. We were in for the night. The Xtasis wasn't as posh as other hotel-motels that we have visited. This one didn't provide free cervezas but there were slippers, a shower cap, lotions and lube...and the standard porn channels on the TV. Our one mistake was to pick a Saturday night for our sojourn. Around 2a.m., a very loud and inebriated party of two clamored into the suite next door and proceeded to boisterously sing along to Spanish tunes on the radio as a mode of foreplay.


Our wakeup call came at 5a.m. (there was a time change somewhere along the road) so we had an even earlier start to the day.  I find the drive north from Mazatlan, although scenic at times, can get a little monotonous with the miles and miles of corn and tobacco fields and endless greenhouses. I even took a turn at the wheel - Meg tends to fade after 6 hours or so... I noticed that Rusty's steering had quite some play but I tend not to drive that much so didn't think a lot about it. It was a long day of driving from Mazatlan, the sun was setting, so we pulled into Santa Ana for a rest.

For some odd reason we had not planned our wardrobe for the cold weather which caught us by surprise on Monday morning. Here we are, dressed in shorts, tanktops and flipflops and it's just about freezing in Santa Ana. Back into Rusty, heat cranked on, driving through light rain/snow...well it is the last day of winter, isn't it? About an hour later we got to Nogales and the frontera. We mistakenly chose the 'fast lane', passing a long line of vehicles waiting on the other side of the barrier. It was too late to turn around so once to the front we got escorted to a break in the barrier, inched into line, saving ourselves at least an hour's wait...it only took 35 minutes to get through the border...no problema and we were in the US of A.

In 3 hours we were in Tempe at the home of Juan y Pat, grateful that the skies had cleared and the temperature was pleasant.  It had snowed in Tempe on Saturday.

Meg was uneasy about Rusty's steering issue so we trucked on over to Tempe Dodge for an assessment.

The inspector took her for a spin then checked her out on a hoist. He returned to us with a sullen expression on his face and would not allow us to drive the truck. His diagnosis was the mid-shaft steering column was holding together with a shard of steel...the rest of it had rusted away due to Ontario salt, Cuyutlan salt, potholes, bumpy roads and time.
At any point in our drive, one dastardly tope (speedbump) or pothole or rock could have lead to the whole shaft breaking -> no steering -> no control -> pretty scary consequences...I shudder to think!! Anyway, Tempe Dodge was very attentive...got the part shipped in overnight and fixed Rusty...yippee!!

We can now enjoy the wonders of Tempe and outlying areas and then continue on our on-going adventure. Feliz viaje!!

Vitamin T, my fav (0:

 It's amazing how fast time flies when you are having fun. Last week Erin, Mark and little Miss Taegan arrived for a relaxing vacation at our casa and, sadly, they are gone already.  Over the week we managed to get into the ocean for a little bogey-boarding, rested by the pool, caught some rays, ate well, had a few libations, ate some more, played some Mexican Train, and best of all, Meg and I got a healthy dose of Vitamin T...

 Cute, eh?

 ...posing in her  new suit...

 ...sunset with Daddy...

 Jolly Jumper workout...

 ...swim lessons from Oma...

It's too bad some unexpected torrential rain started yesterday to cut in on Erin and Mark's tanning time but did prompt more games of Mexican Train. The casa seems so quiet now that they have headed home. We could never get enough snuggles with T but we will get to see her and her Mom and Dad again in a month or two. 

Gracias por su visita, senorita T...!!