Ian Rambles
While Fi and the boys had fun and games in Kamloops I drove to Seattle, returned the Caddilac and flew back to the UK. With a time difference of eight hours I avoided jet lag effects by staying on Canada time.

Flying to Kamloops would have been costly so, when I got back to Seattle, i caught the QuickCoach from the airport to Vancouver then the TransCanada train from there to Kamloops. I was very glad I did. The train climbs slowly into the rockies along the scenic route up the Frazer river and Hells Gate. We had quite a party going on into the night, sitting above the carriage in the observation car with all the lights out.

I arrived in Kamloops at 2:30 am. There was no-one to meet me! I didn't want to wake everyone at Sarah's by phoning - so I called a cab. The cab driver had to talk to his dispatcher at length before they decided where i needed to get to - and had to top up his fuel tank - but he didn't start the meter until we were all sorted out. He was a very interesting man and kept me amused for the forty minute drive.

As we pulled up behind the RV we could see Fi, in her nightwear ( I'll leave that part to your imagination ) dabbing her insect bites with anti-itch ( i didn't say it would be erotic ) - and she was entirely suprised to see me - thinking that I wouldn't be arriving for another 24 hours.

It was fun to walk into the house in the morning and spread suprise.

Fiona's Journal
Sat Jun 28:
This morning we picked up our RV, our home and our transport for the next month. The hire place in Langley was heaving with families, which we might have predicted as this is the first weekend of the long Summer vacation in Canada, so we spent some time wandering around the site in the baking sun waiting for our turn and looking at all the varieties of RV available.

Some of them are just huge, like long distance coaches and have every luxury imaginable inside. I am glad to say that we have hired a smaller, more basic model the size of a compact box van which I will be much happier to drive. It has a shelf above the drivers cab area which George and Harry will sleep on and a double bed at the back of the van for Ian and I and Arthur will have to create his bed each night out of the saloon table and the bench seats either side of it.

In the galley area we have a propane gas cooker with three burner hob, a small sink and, a full size (by English not American standards fridge with small freezer above. This will be such a treat after 3 weeks on the road with no means of keeping anything cool.In the heads (I seem to have reverted to boat terminology) is a loo, a basin and a shower over a tiny, sit up, bath tub.

We have also hired 5 bikes which we test for size before loading them onto the bike rack. With all the intricacies of the vehicle explained to us and many pieces of paper signed and the $1,000.00 deposit paid we finally take position of the keys and set off in convoy to the nearest supermarket.

We stock up with all the things we have been missing like fresh milk and real butter and bacon and eggs and fresh vegetables and head for an RV site only a couple of hours from Langley. I drove the RV (nervously) and Ian followed in the Caddy. The campsite was also heaving with young families but they found an overflow site for us and, while the boys swam and tested their bikes, I spent a happy afternoon “playing house”, transferring all our stuff from the car to the RV and stowing it in lockers and cupboards and generally organising our home for the next month.

Sunday June 29th
Ian got up at 5.30 this morning and, with just one small bag containing his lap top, a change of clothes and the books we have read, drove the Caddy back across the|US border to Seattle Airport. I got a text message about 10.30am to say he was in the departure lounge, awaiting his flight back to England, and “taking no advantage whatsoever of the airport's retail opportunities”.

We set off in a more leisurely fashion at 10.45 and I am pleased to report that I did remember to detach ourselves from the power and water supplies before driving away! Our first stop is only 500 yards down the road, to restow everything that has flung itself onto the floor at the first tight bend. It is clear that an RV is not quite the same as our boat - where you can get away with leaving a kettle on the cooker and a coffee mug on a non-slip mat in all but the roughest weather. Having restored order we head out onto The Coquihaller Highway (No. 5) and from here it is a straightforward 240km run all the way to Kamloops. I feel that I have got the hang of this vehicle now, in fact I like it better than the Caddy in many ways, especially the higher driving position

I am free to enjoy the scenery and reflect that Canada is definitely very different from America although it is slightly hard to define how. It feels somehow a bit more European, smaller cars, kilometers instead of miles, a dearth of massed enormous billboards.

We met up with my friend Sarah, and her 18 year old son Robbie, in a Petro Canada gas station on the outskirts of Kamloops, after a short unplanned detour when I accidentally found myself heading down the sliproad and back onto the highway instead of into the gas station forecourt! It was so great to see her again.

After hugs all round and the usual exclamations about how much our respective children have grown and changed ( I cannot stop myself doing this even though it is such a cliché) we set off following them back to their lakeside cabin home on Lake Paul, up in the mountains about 20km North from Kamloops.

We are greeted effusively by Bisket the young Newfoundland and Freedom the beautiful crossbreed (who looks like a black Coyote) and by Sarah's husband Keith and there is a feeling of homecoming after 6 weeks of non stop travelling. Here we will spend the next week while Ian is in England, a sort of holiday within a holiday.

Monday June 30th to Sunday July 6th
This has been a restful week of catching up with old friends, meeting their friends, socialising and swimming and mucking about on the lake. We have been sleeping in the RV but otherwise living in the house with Sarah and Keith and Robbie, the two dogs and Rodeo the cat. It is so nice to be living with animals again, even despite Biskit's copious drool which regularly adorns us all after she has had a good shake! I didn't realise how much I missed having pets around.

Rodeo is a great cat who hides behind the shower curtain and ambushes you when you are having a pee and regularly allows himself to be washed all over by Biskit, which leaves him absolutely sodden.

On our first day we all went out on the lake on S & K's dock, which has an outboard motor fitted to it so that you can unmoor the dock from the bank and use it as a simple flat rectangular motor boat. Several other neighbours were out there on their docks and had met up in the middle of the lake for a picnic, roping all their docks together to form one big floating platform. We joined them and all swam off the dock and ate and drank and talked until the sun went down.

Another night we had delicious home-made burgers at Licie and Rick's house (Keith's sister and her husband). Barbecues feature largely in social life here).

July 1st was Canada Day and we joined the celebrations in Kamloops' riverside park. We all had our first taste of bannock, a deep fried dough which I believe is a Scottish dish originally but seems to have been adopted by the Canadian Indians or First Nations as they seem to called here. Then the boys went off and amused themselves very happily all afternoon on $10 apiece, which I thought was a bargain, while Sarah and I browsed the many enticing stalls. I could have bought many things but restricted myself to a pair of earrings, bearing in mind that whatever I acquire has to be transported by me around the rest of the world.

The evening of Canada Day we had a really exciting storm which we could see approaching up the lake. It started with rapidly rising winds which turned the normally placid lake water into a white-capped turmoil in no time at all. The waves were trying to lift the little speed boat bodily up and onto the dock so Keith and Robbie leapt into it and unmoored and shot off up the lake to tie up in a little sheltered inlet on a friend's property. By now the rain was lashing down and Sarah and Arthur and I battled to secure the jetty which had broken away from one of its fixings. We managed to get a rope around a tree and back to the jetty as a temporary anchorage and secure the dock a bit better using a wake-boarding rope and carry a kayak ashore to prevent it being blown away. Then we retreated indoors to watch the lightening and count the interval to the thunder claps that followed. Almost at once we had a power cut and so the evening continued by candlelight, which was particularly beautiful within the warm reddish varnished wood walls of the cabin.

One night Arthur went out with Robbie and some of his friends and was brought back at 2.00am after a 50mph collision with a block of concrete but no doubt he will write about that!

We have spent several evenings watching reruns of old British TV programs which seem to feature regularly on Canadian TV – I had forgotten how funny “Jeeves and Wooster” was and I am amazed how very young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie look in it! We have also watched Sarah's favourite film, which is full of wonderful actors and somehow I managed to miss it completely in the UK. It is called “Death at a Funeral” and it is basically a classic English farce. I though it was hilarious (even the title sequence was brilliant) and I would urge everyone to see it.

All in all Summer life at Paul Lake seems to be leisurely and sociable and fueled by generous quantities of alcohol, mostly cold beer and rye whiskey. Oddly you cannot buy alcohol in the supermarket over here, or anywhere except the licensed liquor stores. They tend to be rather seedy looking places with blacked out windows, as though buying alcoholic drinks is a shameful pursuit but that does not reflect the view of the people I met! Recent legislation also means that cigarettes can no longer be displayed so there are empty racks in many shops and then packets of cigarettes are produced surreptitiously from a drawer behind the till on request. Despite all this, drinking and smoking seem to be continuing unabated in this land.

Somehow I got confused as to when Ian would be back from England so I was all poised to pick him up from Kamloops station at 2.00am on Sunday but, lo and behold, he turned up outside the RV at 3.00am on Saturday morning. I blame jet lag by proxy. Poor man, after travelling a third of the way round the world twice in six days and attending his mother's funeral in between, he doesn't even get met at the station. Luckily he is an easy going man, and he had a very amusing taxi driver to bring him up from Kamloops, so I am forgiven.

On the Saturday morning I met up with Sarah's vet Matt, at his surgery. We chatted over the operating table while he did an advancement flap reconstruction on a Golden Retriever's foreleg, from which he had removed a nasty tumour. He and his wife are English and both are veterinary surgeons. They moved out here just a few years ago for the lifestyle and the space and are both partners in this lovely friendly practice.

He showed me his state of the art digital xray machine and the astonishing quality of the radiographs it produces and I am jealous. It cost about $80,000 Canadian, which is about £40,000 - pretty much what we will have spent by the end of this trip. Would I have foregone our adventure for the sake of equiping my surgery with a digital xray machine, given that choice again?? Not a chance! But it will be high on my priority list for future investment.

Being back in a veterinary practice was lovely, I have to say. This is almost the only time, so far, that I have felt a twinge of homesickness!

Arthur's Log:
RV time, we went to pickup the RV and after waiting a few hours for someone to show use. Its pretty good I think mum could drive this thing ok, cause it not really that big.

The RV park we stopped at was jam packed cause it was the first weekend since the summer holidays started and everyone was there with their kids. However it meant that we got parked in a overflow part which meant we were ten yards from the pool and right next to the loo block so we had the best water pressure, wifi signal, and electric hookup of them all.

29th
Dad drove the the Seattle very early this morning to drop of the car and fly to England for Gran's funeral.

Mums rather good at driving the RV I think she prefers being higher up and looking down on the road.

We had arranged to meet Sarah and her son Robbie in a gas station just outside Kamloops. For those who don't know, Sarah is mums best friend since she was seven, and I knew Robbie when he was still living in England five or six years ago. I thought I would barely remember Robbie but it was like meeting a old friend when we spotted him and there was no shy hellos. So we cruised back to their house and met Keith and people, we took the dock out into the middle of the lake were we found a heap more people and swam and talked bla bla bla until we got hungry and went back.

30th
Caught up on sleep the first half of the day and then went to meet some of Robbie's friends in the after noon. Via a few places we went to Bryce's house were Robbie tried as hard as he could to get me hammered. After a while of talking to Bryce and Courtney and people (sorry I met a lot of people very fast and can't remember most of their names).

Robbie got a phone call from, Brad I think it was, saying they should meet down at the gas station. So Robbie, Courtney and I met Brad and some of his mates and went down to the quarter mile. Brad and co pulled ahead and about a fourth of a mile down the road they pulled over and span their car round so they were parked on either side of the road with their headlights on facing backwards.

Robbie thought it would be a good idea to turn his lights off drive through the middle of them then sneak up behind them as a joke. So we crused through the middle of them at about 50mph and then found out why it was called the quarter mile. A metre or so behind their parked cars were three huge concrete meridians (three foot tall one foot thick concrete barriers) Robbie didn't even have time to brake. We hit them head on at 50 and were dead still five meters or so farther, according to Brad we had cleared a meter or two in the air.

Me and Robbie were mainly fine but Courtney being lighter had been flung out of her seat smashing head first into the roof. She was a little concussed but not enough to stop her saying “fuck Robbie” about a hundred times. Robbie got it into his head that it would be a good idea to report the truck stolen but I didn't really care at the time. Brook came and collected use and drove us home (thank you) after dropping of Courtney and dropping in on Bryce. The only thing that happened after that was basically, flop, sleep.

1st July
Woke, my hands have swollen to double the usual size, I think its from were I punched a hole in the dash to stop my head making the hole.

By mid day, I wasn't to confedent about Robbies idea of lying to the police. mainly cause we had met a odd 40 people that day and the chances of one saying something that would counter Robbies lie is high. If they do find out Robbie could get a year plus in jail. However Keith talked him out of mainly by explaining what some of the other inmates might want to do with his bottom.

Its Canada day today and we ended up in Kamloops park, I did what i useally do at these things and walked round thinking "I really shouldn't buy any of the crap" (i didn't)

Sarah has a fetish for saying "were the fuck have you been" in or out of context. Apparently she got it from a film called "Death at a funeral" It is now a must see for me because she says it all the time.

2nd
A storm whipped up on the lake. You could see jetties and cool boxes etc. floating down the lake. The line to the main anchor of the jetty broke letting the jetty spin a quarter turn into the rocks. Over half an hour we got it back in place but the whole thing is rotting and is not going to last.

A chilled day other wise

3rd
Watched "Death at a Funeral" it was one of those movies were it just get worse and worse. I liked it, but it wasn't what i was keyed up for. In other words if receved so much hype from Sarah it didn't give the full efect.

A even more chilled day today.

4th
Ok enough chilled days

5th
Early this morning Dad just walked into the RV quite undramatically. But it suprised the hell out of mum cause she was planning on picking him up tomorrow. Basically because the plan was so early in the morining, mum had thought when he said 5th he ment the night after the 5th.

So dad caught up on sleep and we prepared to leave tomorow.

6th
We were delayed a day, don't know why.

George's Musings
Enjoyed swimming in the lake until everyone started talking about leeches so I ended up lying on the couch all week watching Jeeves and Wooster