After a crazy final few days of preparation, we finally wished the house goodbye and set off. Kirsten had spent the whole day inside packing up the final things in each room and making sure the house was empty. I spent my day doing dump runs, recycling, picking up the final forgotten items, and packing the vehicles.
Everyone had been run pretty thin by the end of the day. We had planned to leave around 1 pm, and it was now 6:30 pm. We all very much appreciated our A&W in the driveway (which we finished while as we set off). There wasn’t much in-town navigation to get from our house to the highway, so the trip started smoothly.
With the trailer loaded now I could really feel the weight behind the truck up hills. Apparently this really slowed us down because somewhere between Merritt and the Coquihalla summit it became quite clear that we were cutting it close for the check-in time for our first campsite. When we got cell service, Kirsten called the camp ranger and was able to set us up to arrive late. But as we continued our trek up and down those giant hills, we just kept moving further from our ETA target.
Eventually, just outside of Hope we decided we weren’t going to make our extended deadline, so it was time to start looking for an alternative place to spend the night. Of course, we had no cell service at this time, so we were really just looking for rest areas and trying to brainstorm things we had seen along the many drives we had done on this highway.
We remembered that the Chevron in Hope allowed semis that had fuelled up to stay overnight. We figured we are close enough to being a semi that it must be fine for us as well. And so that’s what we did! We fuelled up on arrival and found ourselves a nice spot at the back of the parking lot with a lamp post beside us which gave us extra room to push out our slide-outs.
We weren’t sure what to expect, but our stay overnight turned out to be surprisingly pleasant! A couple trucks came in through the night which I heard, but it wasn’t enough to keep anyone up. The next morning we woke up and walked across the parking lot to have breakfast at Ricky’s (which was great) and we continued on to our campsite, this time much more casually than the stressful day before!
