All of Canada’s a BBQ, and I’m in the smoker

7/28/2017

I awoke to the wonderful smell of someone barbequing downstairs. Kind of odd to cook out in a hotel, in retrospect, but the charcoal and burnt wood did smell quite nice.

It was only when I made it downstairs that I realized that no one was barbequing, unless you count the entire province of BC. The smoke had blown in full force overnight, blanketing the town and infiltrating every building, likely causing everyone to very suddenly desire a nice grilled rack of ribs or hamburger. It smelled great, as long as you ignored the fact that the smell was a result of tens of thousands of acres of land burning out of control.

One such wildfire was near Kamloops and had last been reported as being contained, but I was a bit suspicious. So I hightailed it out of there down the Coquihalla Highway once more, heading for Vancouver.

I believe there's mountains back through there... somewhere.

The Coquihalla Highway is apparently known for occasionally being a bit vicious to vehicles. I couldn’t see why, as it seemed just like another normal highway to me. A bit rough in spots, maybe, and quite hilly, but nothing out of the ordinary. As I was thinking this for possibly the hundredth time (being extremely bored, as I couldn’t see any of the landscape through the haze), I heard an extraordinarily loud backfire come from Jane. No reason for it, just completely out of the blue. Heart pounding, I eyeballed the gauges on the dash real hard for a few minutes to monitor the breakdown that was surely impending. But Jane carried on without a worry, and I eventually decided that probably she had just scared the hell out of me to break up the monotony of the drive.

I stopped at a gas station and noted that my mileage was kind of crappy, but a few laps around the car showed nothing amiss so I carried on. Please remember this, as it will come back to bite me in a few paragraphs.

Anyways, we made it into Vancouver fairly quickly, so I stopped by for a drink with some friends of mine who live in the Surrey area (an eastern suburb of Vancouver) and hung out for a few hours. It was awesome to see some familiar friendly faces! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen anyone that I know, and while I’ve made new friends in a lot of places, it can get lonely when you’ve got no one to anchor you. It’s a bit odd, but since I meet so many people and spend a lot of time telling the “origin story” and not much else, I really appreciate being able to have a normal conversation about other things with people who already know who I am and what I’ve been up to.

Eventually, though, I had to scoot on, as I had US Customs to look forward to! Yep, back into the good ole States. I hit the border around 5 PM and sat in line for 45 minutes with my eyes glazed over until it was my turn. 

Goodbye, Canada! You've been kind to me.

What an odd assemblage of American landmarks to feature on this sign!

As I pulled up to the station, the Border Patrol guard asked me the normal questions – who am I, why am I driving this car, what the heck am I doing in Canada, am I really from Texas, did I really drive all the way here, etc. Friendly guy. But it was what he said as he waved me through the gate that stuck with me: “Welcome home.”

As a frequent traveler, I’m used to the constant feeling of displacement, of never really having a home base. It’s a perpetual slight unease, a bit of nervousness in the back of my mind, that I have just learned to push past. The world is huge, I want to see it all, and I can’t do it without leaping out of my comfort zone with aplomb. But those two words just really resonated and made me feel a lot better. Never mind the fact that I’m still a few thousand miles from ACTUAL home, or that I’m still alone, or that I’m still just one very small person in a sea of people in a big world. I just felt better.

You know, plus I finally had cell phone service again for the first time in ten days.

I stopped off at a gas station, excited to finally be able to measure gas in gallons again. But that excitement was short-lived as I realized that it was kind of actually peculiar that I needed gas. Normally I fill up at half a tank, which is approximately every 150 miles. But this time I was filling up at 100 miles. My thoughts leapt back to that single backfire and started going a million miles (not kilometers) a second, but again the gas tank filled up fine and all fluids were fine and Jane was fine. So I kind of just shrugged.

I sat there at the pump (the station was empty except for myself) and read a bunch of text messages for the first time in a week and a half, which took a while. And then I noticed that a stream was trickling past my foot. Not raining… suspicions return instantly.

I crawled under Jane to finally find the source of the bang earlier in the day. What had sounded like a backfire was, in fact, actually the tire somehow grabbing the gas tank vent and forcibly ripping it off of the side of the wheelwell where it had been comfortably housed for thousands of miles. Don’t ask me how or why this happened, but it did. As the gas tank vent valve was ripped off and discarded somewhere along the Coquihalla Highway, the hose that connected it to the tank was also displaced, drooping down onto the rear suspension.

I found that when the gas tank was filled, siphoning action through that vent hose then pulled the top 3 or 4 gallons out of the tank and deposited it straight onto the ground.

Hello, source of bad gas mileage.

I kind of ignored the potential ramifications of draining all this gas so close to the exhaust – after all, I hadn’t exploded – and instead clipped the end of the hose back up into the wheelwell, where it promptly ceased putting my gas onto to the ground. Hurray! As the hose no longer has the large valve at the end, it cannot be caught by the tire and get pulled down again. So, no harm no foul, though it is something that I will have to repair and reroute when I get home to make sure that it’s working exactly as it should. And I was happy to have found the source of the earlier noise, even if it was a perplexing kind of thing to happen. Jane does things like this sometimes, you know.

We puttered on down south for a ways, finally escaping the haze which appeared to have stopped at the border to check itself through customs. As the sun descended, the Pacific Ocean came into view – my first glimpse of the Pacific in a long time.

Eventually, we crossed over into a chain of islands north of Seattle - don’t ask me the name of that area, as I have no idea. I do know that I finally stopped for the night in Oak Harbor, where I settled for a motel in lieu of camping as there weren’t any reputable campgrounds in the area. My chosen motel was the Acorn Motor Inn, a cheap-but-clean place, according to the reviews. I had low expectations. What I got instead was a room filled with the NICEST furniture I have ever seen, ever. I’m talking intricately carved marble-topped furniture, no joke. I have no idea how it got into this little place but I loved it.

So here I am, ensconced in a little motor inn in a little town, living like a queen (or at least like a person who’s acquired a queen’s furniture), back in the States. Tomorrow, I’ll take the ferry over to the Olympic peninsula and see some more of the world. Until then… Kelly signing out.