Day Two

Ruf Ruf wakes up, to face a new day

This was our campsite, in the light of Day 2. It was a closed road, beside a field which had been used to store logs for an old sawmill. The mill had long since shut down, but the road remained. We had our first taste of Gypsy life, as we got our cool new camp stove fired up. It has two burners on top, with a little oven below, all powered by little propane tanks. The night before, we had been running so late, we grabbed a pizza on our way out of town. For breakfast, we had eggs and back bacon on the cooktop, and used the oven part to heat up our pizza. The eggs were a hit, but the pizza was so hard, it went largely uneaten by the kids.




Everyone had slept well. The night was cool, and virtually bug-free, thanks to the dry weather near Osoyoos. But our morning was…slow. It took forever to get the van re-packed, because to make enough sleeping room, we had to dump everything onto the side of the road, in a tarp. Making breakfast, eating, letting the oven cool. All told, we woke at the crack of dawn, but didn’t leave until 11 a.m.

Mike's "shortcut"

To save time, Mike decided to try a “shortcut” to Grand Forks. The roads there wind around the hills, but on the map, this dirt road plowed right over one, and promised to turn a 45 minute drive into 15. Our shortcut wound up taking an hour, as we got lost in the maze of back roads and dead ends. We stumbled into a junction of three roads, with no markings whatsoever, so stopped to get our bearings. Right there, in the middle of no-where was a little cenotaph for a fallen WWI veteran from the area. And luckily, as we were there, a local fire warden passed by, and stopped to see if we were alright. He gave us directions, and we were on our way.