Storyline: Westward Ho!
It’s not exactly stolen or borrowed, since I was already writing of “The red sun”. But I am months and many posts behind.
When the sky and the sun turned red in Kelowna, a city in BC we passed through while camping in the Okanagan area, an article in The Globe and Mail newspaper read “The summer the sun turned red”. Could not have been more precise and also close to my post title. Thus, I adopted it for my final overview of our otherwise fantastic trip.
Writing this in September and posting it in October I have to say that our campervan Doranya is no longer with us. It was her final Trans-Canada trip. In the last 3 years, years marked with the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns, frustration and incorrigible times, she served us well.
The previous two summers, she took us all the way east to Newfoundland, where she drove through every province east of Ontario.
This summer she drove us through all the provinces west of Ontario and the Yukon Territory. There is only one territory that’s accessible by roads she hasn’t set in – the Northwest Territories. But as I write this, wildfires are still raging there and as previous posts mentioned we were cut off from the initially planned northern routes.
I am sad for selling Doranya, but it was the right thing to do. Her new owner kept the name and we hope he’ll enjoy it as much as we did. The Covid era is now behind us (or permanently with us – A).
We have resurrected our international travel plans and hope to fulfill them in the next few years. Health permitting.
No point for Doranya to sit in our driveway, lonely, rusting and, more to the point, depreciating. We’ll miss her.
This time, as opposed to the previous two years, we reached our planned destination before turning for home. Still, we had to change our itinerary and rush home, but this was when we were already on our return journey.
The return itinerary changed completely due to the wildfires. Glad it didn’t happen on our way to YT. Instead of 87 planned days we completed the trip in 74, overnighting in 44 places.
Of these, 2 were homes we were visiting, 12 were hotels/motels/inns induced by weather, and/or wildfire smoke and one storm-forced boondocking. We didn’t do more boondocking mainly because of the heat at places we though we’d do it. We needed to run the AC. Thus, some of the hotels were because of heat when we wanted to actually just park somewhere and call it a night. The rest were campgrounds.
Below are some memorable moments enroute:
Best evening: paella around the fire with family in Haines Junction
Wild beauty: Muncho Lake
Mystic photogenic: Lake Louise
The best campground as we experienced it:
Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan and
Dinosaur, Provincial Park, Alberta
The funniest place: The Dirty Laundry Vineyards
Alex:
While the dash home was anticlimactic and our daily driving hours were well in excess of our target of 3-4, we were happy that we’d done the trip.
I do enjoy driving and find it relaxing.
Diana, with her tendency to motion sickness does not usually enjoy motor vehicle travel, but she enjoyed much of this trip. However, we both agree that we aren’t likely to make a road trip of such a distance again. There are now too many potential issues to consider: climate change that is bringing hotter temperatures and overall, more extreme weather patterns; wildfires; increasing prices and decreasing availability of campgrounds as the volume of Rvers and campers increases while in many areas campgrounds are closing due to lack of staff and owner retirement. We are both getting older and have to face the fact that with age and medical conditions we find ourselves less resilient to all those factors. Besides, it may now be possible to complete some of our deferred pre-Covid travel plans abroad. Tomorrow, as always, is a new day with new challenges, opportunities and adventures in store.
This is also our last post from the Vanlife series. Unless, in the future, when we’re done with international travelling, we buy or rent another one. I’d (Diana) love to revisit the Maritimes. Seafood there is amazingly fresh, distances are short and there are many places we still want to visit.
And as I am posting this our carry-ons are packed (as you know we only travel with carry-on luggage, that we may decide to check in on our way home if a few bottles of wine end up in it). We are ready for our fall European tour and eager to see some friends there.
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