Shit Flows Down Hill

Mile 2321. Pocahontas Campground in Jasper National Park, Alberta. No cell service, no Wifi.

We successfully entered Canada on June 15th. Twenty minutes to cross. No search. No kids selling Chiclets or climbing on the car to wash the windshield. All the expected questions except one – when was your most recent trip to Canada? For some reason this question stumped us both. LOL, I was in Vancouver for a girl’s trip last June yet I couldn’t bring it to mind as having been my most recent. The customs lady listened patiently as I rattled off in no particular order and without any dates all my trips to Canada. I cannot for the life of me recall the year in which I was married, much less my visits to Canada.

Welcome to Canada…..now stop and have a glass of wine, or three. Less than a mile away from the border and we’re in what appears to be the agricultural region of British Columbia. The road is littered with vineyards and wine tasting rooms as well as apple and cherry orchards. We stop immediately and buy what we could not buy in WA – freshly picked cherries.

Banbury Green RV Park, our stop that night, is our favorite campground to date. After days of hot, hot weather we’re dying for a body of water that we can swim in. Banbury Green, as luck would have it, is on a large recreational lake. Skaha Lake is very calm, very swimmable, and our campsite is on its shore. A small section of rocky beach is assigned to us. As soon as we unhook the trailer and set up camp we are in the water. After such hot days it is bliss.

Later a freshly baked Fireball Apple Pie is delivered to our campsite by the baker. I saw her flyer for fresh baked goods in the campground office as we were checking in. We happened to be there on one of her two weekly delivery days. She requests you call in your order 24 hours in advance, but I figure what do I have to lose. Pies were going in the oven when I called, including a few extra, so I scored.

We re-stocked our bare refrigerator at the local Walmart. I confess, this is another first for me….Walmart. Admitting this makes me sound like a snob, I know. My perception of Walmart is the joke everyone makes it out to be, but as it turns out their employees were super nice and the store had everything we needed.

Finally on our way out of Banbury we stopped at the Sani Dump. Emptying the black and grey water holding tanks is normally a drudgery job not worthing reporting, but here Mark had the opportunity to mentor a man who had just purchased a Class C RV. It was the man’s first time dumping. He was vacationing with his twins and had instructed them not to do anything but pee in the RV in order to avoid a mess should his first time dumping be problematic. Believe me, it can happen. Mark read a story on another RV site about new RV owners screwing up their first dump and making a mess all over their shoes. Anyway, this man was a local guy, friendly and chatty and had witty jokes about the process, but who also asked questions and watched Mark with great interest. And perhaps with relief as well, as he learned a few useful pieces of information that he was not able to gleen watching You Tube videos.

We’ve been five consecutive days on the road, which we both agree is too much. Here in Jasper we rest and replace our road warrior hats with our tourist hats.