On The Road Again 2017 #15

It was just mid afternoon when I was let out by my German tourists at Sicamous which is about 130 kilometres east of Kamloops. That meant that I should have been/could have been in Kamloops well before supper time. With any luck I could have easily been in Hope before dark. If the gods of hitchhiking had been smiling upon me in a particularly magnificent way, I could have even be at the ferry terminal at Horseshow Bay - ready to catch the first ferry the following morning. Unfortunately such sometimes beneficial gods were ,if not ignoring me, certainly looking the other way as I stood on the highway watching the cars go by.

It was a long and sometimes frustrating 130 kilometre trip. I had at least four rides - three of which promised to get me to a better spot - just down the road. All of my drivers were male, two of them had an a passion or at least some skill in fixing cars, two of them went out of their way to drive me that just a little bit further to a perceived safer part of the highway, two of them were somewhat chauvinistic and bombastic. Perhaps if we had had more time together, I would have got to know them better but 10-20 kilometres in a vehicle is barely enough time to say hi. Standing on the road was hot, it was a bit boring and at least two of the spots that I ended up at, it felt dangerous. Part of the problem was that much of the traffic was local. The drivers were not going very far and most had no desired to pick up a passenger for few miles ride. The other part of the problem was that some people were driving really fast - some were clearly driving fast because they wanted to get ahead of the next person (before the highway reduced to two lanes) and others seemed to be driving fast because it was fun. There were, for example, a number of expensive looking sport cars that appeared as if they were racing each other.

It had been a long day. In terms of sleep I had not had any since my night in Portage 40 hours earlier. I had only eaten once in the past 24 hours. I had enough water - but I just wanted to sit down in a nice car, have a friendly chat with the driver and get somewhere reasonably quiet for the night. As it became clear that I would not get to Hope and perhaps not even to Kamloops that night, I started to look around for a place to sleep. I was standing beside a field that had a van with a for sale on it, a small wooden shed that advertised garden sheds for sale and tucked into the far corner a number of Canada Post rural mail boxes. It was a busy site but it felt as if it would quieten down at dark and I could put up my little tent and get a good night's sleep. I had got to the point where I was almost wishing it would get dark quicker so that I could get into my sleeping bag. However the gods were not done with me and I finally got a ride to Kamloops. The driver was perhaps a bit of a chauvinist, certainly like to talk and drove faster than I do. But he went a bit out of his way and got me to an exit on the south end of Kamloops. For that I was very grateful. I could see a big Petro-Canada truck stop just across the bi-pass and if I could not get a ride quickly, I knew I had a safe place to eat and to spend the night.

I had a few offers of a ride but they were all just going a bit down the road - I had heard that too many times in the last few hours and wisely declined those rides. It was getting dark, it looked like rain, so I hoisted my pack up for the last time that day and walked to the truck stop. It was a big station with a large convenience store. However the restaurant was a Wendy's and there was no food offered that I could eat. I grabbed an egg salad sandwich from the store along with a cranberry juice, walked around for a bit looking for a place to sleep, used their bathroom and then set up my bevy sack on a narrow strip of grass, under a pine tree with a entrance/exit roads on either side.

It was a bit surreal sleeping in a spot where truck and car head lights frequently flashed upon my shelter. Because I was under that tree and in the shadows I don't think they ever noticed me. If they did, they didn't say anything. It was not a great night's sleep, but it a lot better than I had had the night before - so I was grateful.