Recuperating

Posted on Jun 16, 2015 in From the Road, Travel Tales | 1 comment

To continue on from the last post describing our hair raising experience on the Duffey Road, yesterday morning we were still quite stressed.

You will see that we were partially recovered…We thought we would give our solar panels a try, since we had paid a lot for them and we were “dry camping”, and make our morning coffee in our electric coffee pot. The panel kept switching off and it was very frustrating. We could see that there was actually a draw on the batteries and there shouldn’t have been.

Fortunately, we had wifi through my Rogers Netgear so I looked up the specs on the manufacturer’s site, GoPower by Carmanah Technology, but couldn’t find anything that made sense to us in this situation BUT I found a 1-800 number to their tech department! I called and the tech on the line told us to do a number of things to the inverter and then he concluded that it was defective. He fedexed a replacement to Quesnel to Chemo RV for arrival on Wednesday.

Needless to say, we made our coffee old school by boiling water on our propane stove. 🙂

We mentally prepared ourselves for the further trek down the mountainside to Lillooet. It was only about 3km to go. Fingers crossed, crawling at a snail’s pace, we began. YES! we made it down without smoking brakes! Little did we know about what was to come ahead.

Lillooet is in a valley. What goes down, as I always say to myself when hiking the Kludahk Trail, must go up. Yes, we had to go up and that meant that at some point we would have to go down again!

Everything was crossed, fingers, toes, legs, arms and eyes, as we crept up a narrow steep incline with a long dropoff on the outside edge. Ahead of us with a sharp 90 degree blind corner, was a concrete “bridge” structure to go under and then the sharp turn. And we were starting downhill, too. As we were inching our way under, a motorhome comes up around the blind corner. There was just barely enough room for us to make our turn! I am sure they were just as surprised and frightened as we were.

We continued on down. We could see where there must have been a landslide or collapse of the road below us, a rough gravel stretch with yet another blind 90 degree corner. As we inched downward, Don happened to spot a tandem gravel truck coming up. There was just enough space along the mountainside before the corner for us to get over safely and wait for the truck to come up. Inches to spare going by us. Remember, we are a short 50 feet all together!

Gradually the incline grew less and the ups and downs were not as extreme. Whew! The brakes weren’t even smoking. Don had done some more adjustments to the electric brakes before we left and that must have made a difference. We had let an 18wheeler hauling plywood ahead of us so we would have something to “hit” in case our brakes failed. Thinking ahead…fortunately everything went well.

We made it to 100 Mile House and tucked into 100 Mile House RV park which is right behind the 100 Mile House RV Motel. We will leave tomorrow morning for Quesnel. We just needed the extra time to unwind and let that Duffey Lake Road experience fade into bad memories. We can do our laundry, dump our tanks, replenish our groceries and do a little exploration of the area today.

We were getting bummed that we were having so many problems but are thankful that they have happened here in BC and not somewhere in rural Quebec where I would have to practise my bad Parisian French.

My lesson this week, as Mom used to say, there is a reason for everything. You just have to look for the good through the bad. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes not.