Tag Archives: Covid-19

The Wunder-Lusters Origin Story – Epilogue

Read part 1 HERE, part 2 HERE, part 3 HERE.

In the immortal words of Sophia Petrillo, ‘picture this’ … Kamloops, the summer of 2022, the middle of summer 2022. We’re sleeping with blankets and hot water bottles. It was bloody freezing!

A bit of authorial musing ..,

… what started out as a simple recounting of the path of our Wunder-Lusters Adventure has ended up including so much of what has gone on throughout the entire world over the last handful of years. Political, climactic, environmental, metrological, virological, social, etc.

But these are the times we live in, the times we have to live through, probably for the rest of our lives. The butterfly effect of our appetites has turned into a cyclone, sweeping all up in its path, will-we-or-nil-we, and to not acknowledge that, even within the confines of the story I’m telling, feels inauthentic, perhaps even dishonest.

Our world is a beautiful place, full of terrible wonders and beautiful dangers…

And so, to continue my weather report of the past handful of years.

It wasn’t until the very afternoon before we were due to leave Kamloops we found our next camping spot. Turns out campgrounds throughout the length and breadth of British Columbia fill up very quickly when a long weekend is nigh. Who knew? (I think Mrs Widds and I were too knackered at that point to pay attention to such minutiae)

The very last campground on our list of ones within a reasonable (4 hours max) drive had a spot available.

We hitched up ol’ Bessie and off we pootled.

For the next two weeks we called iRVins RV Park and Campground in Valemount, our home.

Two cold, glorious weeks.

Glorious, because I could see snow-capped mountains everywhere I looked, and cold, how cold? One morning we discovered that our ‘city water’ hose had frozen overnight.

We figured two weeks, (where at the very least it wasn’t raining all the time) was long enough for us to rest and gain an appreciation for what we’d actually accomplished, rather than just be so fucking exhausted that we could barely put one foot in front of the other at the end of the day. After we’d done that, we estimated a few days at the most, (hah!) we’d take a look around Valemount and see what we might see.

It wasn’t until about day 3 that I noticed how long I was sleeping each night and realised how far into total exhaustion I’d pushed myself. I was ready for bed by 7pm, sometimes earlier, and I wouldn’t wake until well after 9am. I averaged thirteen hours sleep for almost the entire time we were at iRVins (that’s how they spell it) Even when I was up and moving around, I had so little energy that walking across the campground each day to have a shower took all the strength I could muster. (if you’ve ever tried to have a decent shower in a very tiny ‘shower’ in a very small RV then you know why I made that trek)

Throughout our last days there, we reevaluated our priorities.

Our dreams of those early years, to travel the country, perhaps the whole of North America, and beyond, had crumbled beneath the harsh realities of the Covid pandemic, an on-rushing climate crisis, and a culture, a society, of increasing scarcity, that inexorably polarised (to the point of violence in some instances) on just about any issue, real or imagined, and more and more, we felt held no place for a couple of old woman nomads. (although, the nomad community is far more accepting of ‘oddballs’, like us than than the ‘traditional’, one) We had to find our own place, make our own place.

So, what to do, what to do?

We certainly weren’t going back. We’d come too far and struggled too hard to leave, to even contemplate that option.

We couldn’t stay where we were. (for longer than our allotted two weeks) Valemount in the summer of 2022, was defined by snowcapped mountains, (which I absolutely adored) and a complete and utter lack of housing options or long-term camping due to a natural gas pipeline construction running the entire length of the Southern Yellowhead Highway and soaking up every site it could for its workers.

There was only one thing for it then. North, Miss Teschmacher. (gold star if you get the reference. I’m looking at you, Admiral Hutson)

Prince George was our first stop, a mere three hour pootle up the road, (Hwy 16) where we restocked our supplies. They had a Costco – our favourite store!  … and a Nissan dealership, which we desperately needed because of ongoing brake issues with our trusty steed. (the truck) That fix took longer than we anticipated, and along with other time-devouring delays that sucked up the very last of our contingency funds, we decided to stay in place for a wee bit longer than we’d initially planned.

Enter the BeeLazee RV Park and Campground, run by an octogenarian couple who’d owned the place for the last fifty years. Once upon a time it would’ve been a showcase, but time and wear-and-tear catch up with the best of us eventually, and the old gal was showing her age. There’s a charm in run-down rustic, and in contrast to the almost sterile campground in Valemount (not counting my beloved snow-capped mountains, of course) it was a welcome change to the senses.

Mrs Widds fell in love with it immediately. Me, not so much, I was still grieving my snow-capped mountains … and it finally had warmed up enough for the mosquitoes to come out of hiding and do what they do best – try every way possible to drain me of blood, to which they were more than moderately successful.

The strain of living in the RV, getting in and out of it, and generally moving around it, had taken a grievous toll on my knees as well. That coupled with the strain I placed on them during the move meant that I could manage a hobble, leaning heavily on my cane, on a good day. I came to appreciate the tiny shower in our RV. At least there was always a wall close at hand for me to lean on.

-oOo-

Summer, such as it was, (cold-and-rainy with a few sunny-and-warm days here and there) was slipping through our fingers like fine-grained sand.

The thought of not having a home base to over-winter in, in a region where the snow depth can often be measured in meters, and winter temps well below freezing was not something either of us found at all attractive. Even if we did find a campground that stayed open all winter, our little RV would turn into an RV-cicle at the first hint of snow.

We would have to find a place with four walls instead of four wheels.

Enter Craigslist.

Mrs Widds found our home on Widder Island via a Craigslist ad so we were cautiously hopeful that the odds were in our favour this time too. (they were – but that’s another story) Which was just as well because La Nina, that pesky Pacific weather phenomenon, (she who had kept summer at bay until well into July) was forecast to smack us with a Winter colder and longer than usual, once she’d finished chilling the ass-pidistra out of Spring and Summer.

-oOo-

And so, our great Wunder-Lusters Adventure has come to a close for the season.

We have no idea what the future holds, but here’s what I do know …

I estimate that I’ve probably taken five to ten years off the lifespan of my knees. Time to find an orthopedic surgeon.

Mrs Widds and I are far stronger and more resilient than we ever thought we could be. (we had inklings but now it’s confirmed)

Always carry duct-tape and a roll of wire, and a water bottle, at all times.

People are far more willing to be of help when one is ‘travelling’. It’s the nature of our species I suppose when we encounter those outside our ‘tribe’, to offer assistance, and help them on their way.

For all the stress and tears, laughter and awe, for every kilometer we travelled, and didn’t travel, for all that the world is irrevocably different now than when it was when we first conceived this madcap idea, I wouldn’t’ve missed a moment of it.

-oOo-

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The Wunder-Lusters Origin Story – Part 3

Read Part 1 HERE, and Part 2 HERE

The summer of 2021 was also when our little Widder-cottage started to experience electricity ‘brown-outs’.

Here’s the thing with old houses, when things start to go all agley-googly, they really go agley-googly. In this case the electrical wiring, still the original stuff from when the house was built in the 1970’s, was in serious need of updating.

Over time we’d gotten used to using only one appliance that produced heat, the microwave and the kettle for instance, otherwise the circuit-breaker for that particular area would be tripped. That was OK, but when the ‘brownouts’, started, (also during the infernal summer of 2021) it was a horse of an entirely different kettle of kittens.

When we ran any major appliances at the same time, like the clothes dryer and the oven for example, (in different rooms and on different circuit breakers I might add) half the house would be without power until an electrician could be called to replace a major, and very expensive, fuse, (not expensive for us, thankfully, but certainly for our landlady) which sometimes took a couple of days. (different from your average fuse that we were able to replace ourselves)

In spite of our best efforts we blew that bloody fuse three times.

Even our little cottage, that had sheltered and nurtured us through all sorts of trials and tribulations and celebrations and laughter, was telling us it was time to leave.

That hellish summer of 2021 ended, as summers tend to do in these uncertain times now, with a sudden shift in temperature. The long lingering evenings of yore (the stuff of fairy-tales – be they film, book, or spoken around a campfire) are almost gone from the land. All is abrupt and extreme, and suddenly it was Autumn.

Covid numbers soared and provincial health region borders were again sealed.

Also, it started to rain.

Well, I lived in a temperate rainforest, what did I expect?

Ah, but we were also living in ‘interesting times’, and the rain didn’t really stop. In fact it just got heavier and heavier … then heaviest,  as a new weather phenomenon entered the collective consciousness, ‘atmospheric rivers’.

As our little blue marble of a planet warmed up, the atmosphere (now all toasty and warm) was, and is, able to hold more moisture. Unfortunately, what goes up must eventually come down, and with the help of another atmospheric event called a ‘pineapple express’, (so called because it usually originates near Hawai’i) down it came.

Drainage ditches filled up in the blink of a eye. Creeks and rivers overflowed their banks. Water, with nowhere else to go, pooled in low-lying farmland. Still the atmospheric rivers kept coming, and more and more land, and people’s homes, kept flooding.

The annual ‘melting of the snows’ regularly produced such freshets throughout the Fraser Valley, (where our little island was, and still is, of course) so most folks in the usual at-risk areas were well prepared for such events when they occurred in the appropriate season (late spring through summer) but in Autumn? No-one was prepared.

This was the extreme weather event that did indeed show up on our very doorstep. We were on a flood evacuation alert for over a week. Waiting, like so many people in and around our little island, and indeed throughout the Lower Mainland, for that knock on the door, and be told to leave immediately.

We’d winterised and covered our RV, just a week before, those ‘rivers’ started drenching everything, so with practiced ease, we dewinterised (which consisted mainly of draining the ‘anti-freeze’, out of the water systems) took the cover off, prepped our escape supplies just in case, and waited, and waited.

Like some sort of slow-motion train-wreck, the floodwaters rose higher and higher. Low-lying parts of the island disappeared underneath the silently creeping brown floodwater. (once you’ve seen that particular colour of water you never forget what it means) People were evacuated with barely enough time to gather their long-prepared belongings and head for higher ground. Neighbours helped neighbours. Shivering dogs were rescued in the middle of the night by volunteers who waded from house to house to make sure everyone got out.

Our little cottage was on a slightly higher part of the island, but the uncertainty of not knowing if or when we would receive that dire knock on our front door was nerve-wracking.

The knock never came. We dodged a very close bullet there. Others were not so lucky.

The torrential rain did however, wash out parts of every access road, highway, logging road, railroad track, bridge and tunnel into and out of the Lower Mainland. No road or rail freight, or traffic of any kind was able to leave or enter.

With the entire region basically marooned, gasoline rationing was introduced.

-oOo-

For reasons I won’t go into here, the one thing guaranteed to give me the ‘willies’ is feeling trapped …

Surrounded by floodwaters – check.

Floodwater only centimeters under the only bridge off the island – check.

Gasoline rationing, so even if we left, how far could we get? – check.

Not able to leave the Lower Mainland anyway, because of Covid, and destroyed infrastructure – check.

Yep, I had the willies.

(I’m amazed I actually got through these years with my sanity, relatively, intact. Although, sanity, especially mine, is a very subjective concept, I’ll admit)

I actively restrained myself from wondering, ‘what was next’? (out loud at least, because winter was coming)

-oOo-

Winter of 2021/2022 in our little corner of the world became the season of arctic outflows. During one such event the external fuse (the one that required an electrician to replace) blew yet again. Three days without power in half the house and daytime temperatures never getting above zero. We had extension cables everywhere, but remained very careful that we didn’t overload the rest of the house. That would’ve really, really pissed us off.

We’d had enough. Come hell or high water, as soon as the high passes were clear of snow, as soon as the roads through those high passes were repaired, (the damage to them being as a result of the atmospheric flooding mentioned earlier) we, were, leaving.

Unfortunately all the stern resolutions in the world didn’t alter the fact that we still faced the same dilemmas … Where to go. How to get there. How to cram everything we weren’t taking with us in the RV (almost the entire contents of the house, 2 storage sheds, and a well-stuffed patio) into a 20x10x8 storage locker.

Those storage locker dimensions are in feet, I have no idea why Canada has a dual measurement system, when ‘officially’ we’re using metric, but there it is. I suspect it’s because our neighbour to the south still uses the ‘imperial’ system and politicians lack the will, and captains of industry, on both sides of the border, remain unwilling, to adapt. One of my biggest challenges when I first arrived here from Australia in 2004, was to retrain my perception of distances, measured in centimeters/meters/kilometers to include inches/feet/miles at the same time. My brain freezes up only ever fifth or sixth time I have to convert something, which I think is a pretty good average.

Time, dancing to its own tune, and be damned to the effect us humans were having on the environment, passed. Snow melted, the days grew perceptibly longer, and the outside thermometer I’d sacrificed to record just how cold it did get throughout winter, breathed a sigh of relief as its mercury started to slide up its glass tube. Strangely enough though, it didn’t move quite as high or as often as I expected.

The reported numbers of people infected with Covid slowed (I doubt none of us will ever know the fullest extent of the pandemic) and our regional borders started to open again. Emergency repairs to the Coquihalla Highway, the main route up off the Lower Mainland, the one we would have to take, and damaged in the flooding, were completed in record time.

Spring sprung into action, and it rained.

I felt as though, except for a brief snowy interlude, it had been raining since September the previous year, but a little rain wasn’t going to stop us now. Our resolve to leave was unstoppable.

We packed in the rain. We took trailer-loads of boxes and bags, (the things that couldn’t be boxed or bagged, we taped together with duct tape) to the storage locker in the rain.

We re-dewinterised the RV, in the rain.

Mrs Widds lost her footing on a soaking wet board and fell, injuring her back two days before we were scheduled to leave, in the rain.

Our wonderful landlady allowed us an extra week to take care of the myriad last minute things that needed taking care of, which we did, in the rain.

On Friday, the 6th of May, we finally hitched up the RV to our truck and hauled it out of the driveway for the last time. Note I said the RV left for the last time.

We parked it at Cheam Fishing Village and Campground, where we’d camped previously, (in the rain then too, I might add) and merely slept there while we returned to the cottage several times to finalise the cleaning/tidying up, and videoing the final results to send to our landlady … in the rain.

-oOo-

For the following ten days most of the entries in my day-planner simply read, ‘too bloody exhausted to do anything … and it’s still raining’.

On the 16th of May we left the Lower Mainland behind us, and headed up into the coast mountains with only the RV campground in Kamloops, where we’d stay that night, as a fixed destination. We had no idea where we’d go after that.

We broke through the rainclouds at the top of the Coquihalla Summit. Blindingly bright sunlight bounced off the snowdrifts, piled high by the snowploughs, bathing us in all its glory all the way to Kamloops. We stayed for two days, visiting with Mrs Widds sister, the Melodious One, and replenishing supplies … and it didn’t rain. However we did experience a few icy snow flurries.

People we met there, (and by my own observations) said it was the coldest, longest winter they’d ever experienced.

La Nina, responsible for the seemingly never-ending rain, had decided she was also going to delay spring, for months.

The Wunder-Lusters Origin Story – Part 2

Read Part 1 HERE.

… Wherein we find ourselves at the very beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic …

Apart from a few highly qualified virologists I don’t think anyone really knew what was happening, or what to do. Most of those in authority seemed to be running around like chooks with their heads cut off, and/or trying to protect their arses at the same time.

Would this be the ‘armageddon’ event that so many people feared it would be and civilisation would degenerate into warring tribes, (not that we weren’t doing that anyway) bent on claiming the remaining resources for themselves? Truth was, no-one knew how bad it would get.

Across the world people started dying in the hundreds, then the thousands, then finally, horrifically, millions. Talks, (let alone taking any sort of action) between nations, about closing international borders started far too late to stem the tide.

As the days passed it seemed the only voice of reason we could find in a sea of inertia, arse-covering, and ineptitude, was Dr John Campbell. We watched his daily updates with a growing sense of dread.

I was (still am) immune-compromised, and Mrs Widds wasn’t (and still isn’t) a spring chicken, which made both of us prime candidates for this global killer to target.

We pulled our RV out of storage, de-winterised, and provisioned it so that if one of us caught the virus we would be able to isolate from each other. We were unclear how effective that might be, but at least we had a plan.

Even before borders, both international and domestic, finally, and with the speed of a snail on valium, began to close, it was obvious, at least to us, that any sort of long-distance travelling was completely out of the question. In fact we picked up our RV only days before travel in our entire province shut down.

Growing up in the country, albeit in different hemispheres of the globe, we both understood the value of a well-stocked larder in times of crisis. (we tended to have a fairly well-stocked larder at the best of times) And if those early months of the pandemic didn’t constitute a crisis, I don’t know what did.

Face masks were suddenly as rare as hen’s teeth and what stocks were available were slated for first responders, so we sewed our own.

Only ‘essential travel’ was allowed. After the Canadian/USA border closed, and with no-one having a clue about ‘essential services’ needing to include the trucking industry that kept every aspect of modern-day living running smoothly, things started to look dire indeed.

Where previously we’d topped up Mrs Widds baked goods supplies only when we were running low, we now doubled up. Two bags of flour at a time instead of one. Two boxes of baking soda instead of one. Never emptying a shelf though.

(And we certainly didn’t contribute to that ridiculous run on toilet paper in any way. I understood the reasoning behind it, the fears people had, supply-chain disruptions, etc, and most people didn’t buy more than they immediately needed. But seriously, those bastards who bought it by the truckload and profiteered off other people’s fears, and not just toilet paper … there are no words to describe how fucked-up that was)

Fresh fruits and vegetables soon joined the ‘hen’s teeth’ brigade, so we bought canned or frozen varieties.

Thankfully Mrs Widds was working in an essential industry at the time so we still had an income, unlike so many, many, people who lost everything.

I remember very clearly, developing this little twitch, where I would constantly run my thumb across the insides of my fingers. At first it was an involuntary thing, but even when I noticed what I was doing I couldn’t seem to stop. I don’t know if it made me feel any better, but it was an action that I could take, it was something I had control over, which was a far cry from the world around me.

Human beings showed their very best side, doing things for each other, reaching out, (as best as could be done from afar with masks and gloves) and sharing the burdens of ‘lockdowns’.

We all saw the news stories, and perhaps we were some of those doing the reaching out, sharing a friendly word over the back-fence with the neighbour we’d never talked to before. All of us have stories like that, and each one I read about or watched had me weeping with the true humanity of our species.

On the other hand, humans also showed their worst side. The me-first-and-screw-everyone-else brigade hoisted their colours from the nearest flagpole and posted their deeds of complete arse-holery on their social media blogs, YouTube, Instagram, etc.

I was already aware of the growing divide between these two aspects of our humanity. The pandemic not only pulled back the drapes of civility behind which we hid our ravenous hungers but somehow was seen to be giving permission for some of us to exhibit our foulest natures.

Was this how we, homo sapiens – the current peak of evolution – had always behaved? Had society, civilisation, only coated us with a veneer of domesticity, so that all it took was a simple act of will, a choice, to crack it wide open and expose the festering wounds beneath?

I had no answers. (only opinions) None that would change anything. I stopped watching the news, barely glancing at the headlines before retreating to more sane pursuits …reading, sitting in our garden, drifting with the clouds …

… waiting, for … something …

Vaccine trials intensified and by the end of 2020 their results, in the form of mass-produced vaccines, began to trickle out into the most vulnerable communities. The conspiracy theorists put on their tin-foil hats and took to whatever social media platform that would give them their fifteen seconds of fame, (and there were so many platforms willing to do just that) to spew their idiocy to any audience they could find.

Sadly they always found an audience.

A simple internet search of those times will lay bare the hysteria exhibited by people from all walks of life, in all professions, from the very highest authorities, in quite a few lands, to the lowliest of the low.

The only thing that hadn’t irrevocably changed for any of us was the passage of Time, and eventually 2021 rolled around.

2021 – would we be able to get away this year?

Viruses, like all living organisms, including us, want to survive, to live, to thrive, and we do it with either our intellect or our biology.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, (aka Covid-19 – finally called thusly, to avoid offending anyone’s delicate sensibilities or stupid people wanting to be racist arseholes) was no different. Not having an intellect as we humans define such things, it used biology and mutated, again and again, until in May of 2021, the Delta variant reared its brutal head above the crowd.

Too few people had been vaccinated. Too many were resisting the simple ‘masks-and-social-distancing’ concepts that were either mandated or ‘highly recommended’, (depending on where one lived) to make much of a difference.

No, we wouldn’t be travelling anywhere in 2021.

With the beauty of 20/20 hindsight, had we braved the wildfires of the years before the pandemic and headed out anyway, our story would’ve been so much different. There were times in those early months of 2021 when, again as in 2020, no-one knew what was going to happen, we fervently wished we had. (hell, if the pandemic hadn’t happened in the first place, things would’ve been so much different)

In the midst of all this, quite frankly, terrifying new paradigm, and after feeling emotionally paralised for a year, I began to write.

I’d had a vague idea for a story rattling around in my brain, and computer, for a while but not enough to hang a whole novel on. I was in no particular writerly frame of mind either. I simply sat and read through my sparse notes one day, pictured the scene in my mind, and began to describe it.

Words flowed through me like the boundaries of my body were made of nothing more than the vaguest of tissue, porous enough to let the story, from where, I knew not, flow unheeded. A thousand words a day, (on my writing days – I still had the non-writing aspects of my life to attend to) became two thousand, and after a few weeks, evened out at three thousand words each day. They were good words too. About dragons, and living forever, and how a world wracked by, and recovering from, WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic, might respond to such wondrous things.

I wrote, edited, and published, The Last Dragon In London, in six-ish months. It was a glorious experience in the Time of The Plague. (as I called it on days when the never-ending, always-increasing, death-toll got me down)

By mid-Summer, the continuing threat to our water quality on Widder Island resulted in weekly water interruptions, as them’s wot knew wot needed to be done, purged the system of increasingly nasty bacteria. (we finally bit the bullet and bought our Berkey water filter, which paid for itself in a matter of weeks – In fact as I write this – August 2022 – it’s saving us a fortune in bottled water as the water here in our ‘home’, is too ‘hard’ to drink safely from the tap)

Mainstream politics, as reported by mainstream media, continued to fracture and polarise like nothing I’d ever seen before. Perhaps those who are a generation or two older than me could name what was happening, as could any student of history.

I discovered a brilliant series on YouTube called ‘Fall Of Civilisations’, which, apart from being highly informative and entertaining, reinforced my feeling that we humans have been stuck on this ‘rise and fall’, of civilisations since ‘civilisation’ began. And all we do is keep repeating the same cycle, over and over and over.

Yes, technology improves, and the overall quality of life takes an uptick each time around, but really, imagine all the resources, human and otherwise, that are completely and utterly wasted every, single, time. (perhaps this is why I’m fascinated by ‘alternate history’ SF – the ‘what if’, stories that start with a pivotal incident whose outcome is changed in this reality, and an alternate reality heads off in … who knows what sorts of directions)

Then it got hot, and hotter and hotter, then hottest. (so far) They called it a ‘heat dome’, and it killed over 600 people in our province alone.

The town of Lytton, only  a hundred and eighty kilometers away from us, burned to the ground.

The Wunder-Lusters Origin Story – Part 1

This series of posts came out of me doing a bit of semi-regular ‘blog housekeeping’, wherein I check to make sure links are live, no trolls lurk in the shadowy corners, that sort of thing.

I opened up the separate page I’d created for ‘The Wunder-Lusters’, and lo-and-behold I discovered, nothing … except that at some point I’d typed the words ‘under construction’, and then obviously forgot all about the poor wee thing.

I hastily added a link to The Wunder-Lusters burgeoning YouTube channel and set about writing a bit of a blurb about what The Wunder-Lusters actually was, just in case someone who hasn’t been on this journey with me dropped by and had no idea what it was all about.

So far I’ve written over 5,000 words about what this is all about.

Don’t worry, it’s not all here in this post. I’m going to break it up into edible chunks, post each one here and then post the entire story, at least thus far, on its own page. (as usual, any words in green and bold are live links for a bit of further info – and, our 2015 and 2016 Adventures need to be read from the last one to the first. Something about WP’s ordering of the universe)

Here we go …

-oOo-

The Wunder-Lusters Origin Story – Part 1

In the Fall of 2014 Mrs Widds and I embarked on a road-trip.

It started mostly as a whim, to visit all the hot springs within a reasonable distance of Widder Island, and with reasonable access, (because even back then, my knees were a shadow of their pre-motorbike-accident days) and turned into a pivotal Adventure that directly, and indirectly, led us to where we are today.

We’d gone camping in a tent for several summers prior to 2014, having decided, perhaps years before, that, being born-n-bred in the country, neither of us were of a temperament to take to city life and we didn’t want to stay in Vancouver and be ‘city-folk’, for the rest of our days. Going camping was our low-key, low-cost, way of exploring the possibilities.

Relocating from urban Vancouver to rural-ish Widder Island in 2012 was the first step toward living in the Interior. ( the ‘Interior’, being loosely defined as anywhere in British Columbia that wasn’t the coast or the Lower Mainland)

The next conundrum to be solved was, where. The Interior of B.C. is a very big place, and by extension, the whole of Canada is a very, very, big place. (about 1.3 times bigger than the whole continent of Australia. I know, technically, Australia is an island, but I still maintain that technically, Pluto is a planet)

(We weren’t closed to the idea of moving to another province, but after our 2015 Adventure,  wherein we speed-pootled from one side of Canada to the other, (near enough anyway) we decided B.C. was the place for us. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself …)

After settling in to our new life on Widder Island, and after my run-in with cancer in 2012-13, we began a series of camping pootles to get a feel for the lay of the land. No one area really spoke to us and said ‘pick me, pick me’, although the North Thompson River valley from Clearwater to parts north, came the closest. (it was the route we chose on our way up here to Prince George)

It was about this time too, the tides of Climate Change (it wasn’t called ‘Climate Crisis’, yet) began to lap at the shores of our lives. Not quite impinging on our little island, but warning signs of what was to come made themselves known, mostly with unexpected weather patterns, micro-climate changes, etc. The data was there, clear as day, if one choose to look.

Our road-trip of 2014 circumnavigated a goodly portion of the south-eastern corner of B.C. Although I made some posts about it, I seem to have deleted most of them when I did a major ‘clean-up’ of my blog. The remaining two give a feel for it …

‘A Perfect Ten’, and ‘Hot Springs’

One of my two favourite memories from that trip was discovering Lussier Hot Springs in Whiteswan Provincial Park. To sink into that glorious crystal-clear hot water, flowing directly out of the earth and into the Lussier River, all held within giant water-smooth river boulders, was a treat for all the senses.

My other memory was standing on top of Sulphur Mountain, in Banff National Park. At 2,400 meters above sea-level, the air was so clear I could see forever. The air was also noticeably thinner up there, and lowland me felt a tad out of breath if I moved too fast.

Just to be clear, I didn’t actually climb the mountain under my own steam. My bad knee vetoed the strenuous hike and opted for the more sedate, but no less thrilling, gondola ride up and back.

Which brings me to my two worst, perhaps not ‘worst’, but certainly very sad, memories of the trip.

The day before we left Widder Island, I had an obscene amount of fluid drained from one of my knees. By the time we’d dipped our toes, and the rest of our anatomies, in the Lussier Hot Springs, (near Columbia lake – the start of the mighty Columbia River) and then headed for Radium Hot Springs, I knew my days of sleeping on the ground, (albeit on an air mattress in a nice comfy tent) were numbered … and that number had finally wound down to zero.

Thankfully we were able to book hotels for the rest of our journey, but it was the end of an era for me. One that began a year after the motorcycle accident that buggered my knee in the first place, (1983) and required that I do everything in my power to live as ‘normal’, a physical life as was womanly possible.

Looking back, almost 40 (and still counting) years, isn’t a bad innings for a knee that was given a maximum life-span of 10 years before being replaced. But still, it was a sobering realisation.

My other memory in the ‘sad’, category was taking a guided tour up onto the Athabasca Glacier. It groaned and creaked beneath my feet, existing, probably, long before the last Ice Age ended. Because of Climate Change, it was, (and still is) retreating beyond the ability of any amount of snowfall on its high reaches to ever replenish.

That afternoon, spending time with such an ancient entity, Climate Change became Climate Crisis for me.

-oOo-

We’d often talked about buying an RV of some sort, at some point in the future, but by the time we returned home from our 2014 Adventure, it was obvious that ‘some point’, had arrived.

We went to a few RV shows. The ones where they showcase the $400,000 coaches with 9 slide-outs, 15 gold-plated toilets, and Italian marble countertops. (I’m exaggerating, but only slightly – those things are insane) A glorious fantasy they were, but I ask you, who in their right mind wants (very heavy) marble countertops in their RV? (someone with enough money to not care, that’s who)

We liked the idea of a 5th-wheel, (which is a type of travel trailer (caravan) that hitches up inside the tray of the towing truck, mostly for the ceiling height as I recall) with slide-outs for more room. We liked them, that is, until we started looking into costs and financing. We eventually settled on our trusty 8m/25’ ‘Canyon Cat’, travel trailer and started planning our first trip while we waited for delivery, and thereafter, our modifications, to be completed.

Out came the maps to be pinned to the wall and stuck all over with post-its. We’d surprise each other with, ’what do you think about this’, and ‘maybe we should go here’,

We initially planned a few-hundred-kilometer pootle, a ‘shake-down cruise’, while we learned the in’s-and-out’s of RV-ing. (something neither of us had ever, ever, done before)

 … yeah, about that …this is what we actually did …

10,000 kilometers in 31 days. From Widder Island, on the West coast of Canada to Niagara Falls, and back again.

It was one of those Adventures that usually have the appellation ‘… of a lifetime’, tagged on them, but somewhere along the way we wondered if we could do it more frequently, perhaps even as a lifestyle. There was nothing really to hold us to one place. The possibilities were … exciting, challenging, tantalising … endless.

Our steep learning curve turned vertical the moment we pulled out of our driveway, but we did it, and we made some truly memorable memories and saw some truly spectacular sights. (I was, however singularly unimpressed with the Prairies though. Not a mountain to be seen … for days, and days, and days and … I wrote a story about it that I might publish one day … perhaps in a collection of short stories inspired by our Adventures)

Elsewhere in the world ‘extreme weather events’, started making mainstream media headlines, and we took note, even as we planned our next RV-ing excursion (albeit a more modest outing than our maiden voyage) to Otter Lake in 2016.

On the way to Otter Lake, we drove through hundreds of hectares of devastated pine-tree plantations. Decades of forestry mismanagement and Global Warming provided the perfect environment for an opportunistic little bug, the Pine Beetle, to launch an invasion. Trees were dying everywhere, and when trees die in such numbers it’s only a matter of time before wildfires take their turn to ravage the land.

Throughout the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2019, wildfires wreaked untold devastation throughout BC, and blanketed whole regions in massive palls of cruel smoke and ash. Even on Widder Island, untouched by the fires themselves, visibility was reduced to a few hundred meters, and the smoke-filled air reduced any sort of outdoors venture to necessities only.

The regions we had planned to explore fared far worse, and it would’ve been the worst kind of irresponsible to visit them as tourists.

Through an abundance of caution and common sense, we cancelled our RV-ing plans for those three consecutive summers, although we still remained relatively untouched by the fallout from our rapidly changing climate until the summer of 2019 when Widder Lake was closed to swimmers for the first time. An algae bloom rendered the water too risky to human health. (no mention was made of the other species of creatures that used the lake, but isn’t that just like humans?)

As the summer of 2019 faded into Autumn and Winter, we took the time to finalise our plans to leave the coast permanently. Population pressure was driving the cost of living sky-high. We were lucky with our mostly absent landlady, but as renters our home could be pulled out from under us at any time.

We started ‘The Wunder-Lusters’, YouTube channel to document our journey, not only for ourselves, but for others who might be feeling the same way. To show what two older women could accomplish when they set their minds to it.

We waited for the high-passes to be free of snow, usually April/May-ish, so it would be safe to cross over them with our travel trailer, and then we would truly start our ‘wunder-lusting’, in the summer of 2020.

Plans which, as it turned out, were already 6 months out of date.

(It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when Covid-19 first started, but this report, (along with others, I haven’t linked to, but they’re out there if you want to do a bit of research) reasonably deduces that late Autumn of 2019 is when the world changed for us all)

The Dreadable Lurgy

Mrs Widds went out into the world last Tuesday. Wearing a mask at all times, and practicing physical distancing at all times. She had a lovely time, purchased some needed groceries, hit the thrift stores, and scored some excellent loot. All-in-all, a successful expedition.

Two days later – I felt a bit seedy, and Mrs Widds, after putting in an adrenaline-fueled day, succumbed to the lure of a comfy hot-water-bottle-warmed bed.

Two days later – I feel like death warmed up, and … (have you ever thought about that expression, ‘death-warmed-up’? You have to wonder what a warm death feels like. Squishy? A bit smelly, depending on the ambient temperature? … I think I’m going to rephrase …)

Two days later – I don’t feel very well at all. Mrs Widds isn’t much better, and we both of have the energy levels of snails on valium. Which presents us with an interesting challenge. We’re running out of ‘slow days’ in which to lollygag around in our jammies, feel poorly, and not work on our lists of ‘things to do before we move’.

Notice I said ‘lists’. As in ‘multiples of’.

Nevertheless, lurgy-ified or not, we manage to take care of at least one thing on each list each day. As the saying goes, ‘do not fear going slowly, fear standing still’. … which, of course excludes laying down and moaning and groaning.

Do we have the Lurgy? The timing is about right, but then it’s right for so many other lurgys out there. We’re not going anywhere near any other humans to get tested, so in the absence of any hard evidence we’re going to go with a solid ‘maybe’.

By the time we do need to go out into the world again, we will have been isolated for the required amount of days (plus a few extra) anyway.

We’re taking care of each other, and reminding each other that we built ‘slow days’, into our timetable for this very reason. Well, not this exact reason. This reason sucks. We were thinking more along the lines of ‘let’s take the day off and have a sushi picnic by the river’, or some such civilised reasoning.

I do however, see a sushi picnic in our near future. We would’ve earned it.

P.S. Rather fond of my hot water bottles, I am. You might’ve noticed that. 🙂

We’re Going On An Adventure – A Wunder-Lusters 2022 Update

 

… the story so far … from the before-times … (for the wonderful new people here, and those who would like a bit of a refresher)

We’ve always been aware that time here on our island in the middle of a lake was a temporary situation. (notwithstanding that we’ve been here nigh on ten years – which we’re going to blame on cancer, Covid, and just a dash of run-of-the-mill goal-post changing)

Our original plan, which had its genesis way back in 2018-ish, was to set off in our little travel-trailer, swan around the countryside from coast to coast to coast and see what we might see. (Canada having three coasts of course, the western one, where we live, the eastern one where the Vikings landed, and the northern one, up above the Arctic Circle, that I am determined to visit, one day) We were in no great rush to set off, and if we eventually found a place to settle down somewhere along the way, all the better.

The pandemic put paid to that.

For the first year we resigned ourselves to a holding pattern. There were too many potentially dangerous unknowns specifically about the virus, to say nothing of province-wide shut-downs across the country, and far too many people acting like terrified rabbits, for us to go against our common sense in the matter.

In the first half of 2021 I wrote a book. (the sales of which are pootling along nicely) It was, sad to say, the highlight of the year.

The climate crisis, which had been lurking around the corner and growing ever closer, proved that it was done waiting by throwing every sort of weather extreme in our general direction. (and in yours too, I have no doubt)

Add into the mix two more variants of the virus, and we decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and stayed put.

However, every one of those very crises reminded us, each in its own unique way, that we are in a very precarious and unsustainable geographical location here on the coast.

We gave ourselves permission to be as stressed out about the whole damn state of everything for as long as we needed to, and then we would get back to work.

Our plan, now that we successfully made it to 2022 …

Pack up and leave as soon as the passes to the Interior are clear and navigable – thanks to one of the afore-mentioned weather events just before Christmas, every road and rail route out of the Lower Mainland (where we currently live) had been destroyed – and before the Summer (read Spring or whenever) wildfire season kicks in to high gear.

Theoretically … that gives us a window of a few months … theoretically, to relocate, find ourselves a new home, get all our living-in-a-house stuff out of storage, and set ourselves set up for Winter.

Then and only then will we contemplate the possibilities of travelling, probably in the ‘shoulder seasons’ between Winter and Summer.

Perhaps you’re asking yourself, seeing as we’re not going ‘travelling’ first, why we don’t just find a place before we leave and move from one house to another house?

Ideally, this will be the last ‘move into a new home’ we will ever do, (remember, I’m 63 and Mrs Widds is 72) and it will have to meet our requirements for setting up our life to be as self-sustaining, for the next several, at least, very chaotic, decades, as we can possibly make it. There’s no way we can make that sort of complex and important decision on a piece of land/property, sight unseen.

This way we’re open to all sorts of windows of possibilities.

The truly wonderful (insert a tiny bit of irony right there) thing about all this is, in the ‘before times’ we would’ve known what to expect along the way, with minor perturbations, but all-in-all, we would’ve been able to count on a certain amount of familiarity.

There’s no counting on that any more now, is there?

Well, if going on an adventure were easy, everyone would do it!

My Bi-Annual Bloodletting, 2021-Style

Since my brush with cancer in 2013, I’ve had a blood-test every 6 months specifically to make sure my TSH hasn’t gone all squirrelly on account of not having a thyroid anymore, and the radiation therapy immediately proceeding its removal from my person.

Last year I escaped the bloodletting altogether. Our local hospital where I’d normally get such things taken care of didn’t want anything to do with me, and I certainly didn’t want anything to do with it.

I call 2020 the Year of Covid, and 2021 the Year of Consequences. Consequentially, last week I had my first blood-test since 2019, and because of this delay I was getting tested for everything I’d missed out on. Fasting was required.

(I don’t know about you but I find it a bit of a challenge to go out into the world after I’ve been crook for an extended period of time and I wasn’t completely myself after my vaccine shot)

This how it went down …

Clothes – Shoes and socks are weird.

In the car – OMG!!! Why is everyone driving so FAST?

At the hospital – Where’s my mask? Why won’t it fit properly? (trying to put the mask on over my glasses and my hearing aids) Also, I can’t breeeeeathe!

Waiting room – I’m #82. The display is stuck on #75, and I haven’t had anything to eat or drink (except water) since yester-bloody-day!

Bloodletting – Just exactly how many vials of blood are you taking? (answer – 7)

Back in the car – Mrs Widds had packed a thermos of tea, made just the way I like it. I love her.

An ‘Interesting’ Week

I had …

… an, ‘oh gawd, I feel like I’m about to keel over’ reaction to my vaccine shot.

… a migraine cluster. (of the galaxy-busting variety – I rate them as planet, then solar system, then galaxy, then universe-busting)

… and at least more three layers of physically debilitating craptitude … that I won’t go into here because …

… I am done with this week!

The only saving grace was that my brain was still fully functioning-ish, and I managed a few hours of editing in every day. (my typo’s however are hilarious due to pain meds interfering with the connection between my brain – super slow, and my fingers – used to typing super fast)

Even with these delays, I still just might be able have the final product all tied up with a polka-dot bow by the end of June.

Which would be truly awesome – to have a novel go from first word to finished product in six months.

Who’d’a thunk it!!?

3 Bits And A Piece

I had my first vaccine last week with no nasty side effects, only a sore arm for a few days and feeling a bit seedy but that was it. Mrs Widds had hers two weeks before that so we’re good to go on that front until our second shots in a couple of months.

We’re still taking all the same precautions when we go out into the world, of course. Only the willfully ignorant-by-choice believe that this pandemic is in any way shape or form, over.

-oOo-

We’ve hit a bit of a plateau with our packing stuff into storage plan. Although we’re nibbling away at it, we’ve acknowledged that we may not be able to do a permanent move this year.

It’s a fine balance between leaving everything until the last minute and having far too many ‘oh shit!’ moments, and getting everything into storage and living out of boxes and sitting on the floor. (OK, that last bit was an exaggeration, but you get the picture)

Although we can live a minimalist lifestyle for a few months, the prospect of another year without certain items, that are already in storage, isn’t attractive. So, as usual, we’ll see.

-oOo-

Editing is coming along swimmingly. I feel a bit like Data in the movie Star Trek: Generations, when I sit down to work on another chapter, of which there currently are, thirty-nine.

Speaking of Data …

Deconstruction

The Covid-19 infection rate in our Province is rising alarmingly. Essential travel only is recommended – to be reviewed at the end of the month (April) by the Provincial health authorities.

If we wish to stay with our current departure date (31st May) we will have to give notice to our landlady at the end of this month.

We’re only a third of the way through the month, but given that there’s usually a 2-3 week lag between infection rates and the numbers being released, the 31st of May isn’t looking good.

We can reschedule our campground booking without losing our deposit, if we give them enough advance warning.

So, all-in-all, blergh, humbug, and other assorted grumbling noises.

On the up side, we’ll have more time to get on with our packing and sorting, storing and deconstructing of various elements of our house. Case in point – shelving units …

This used to be a very organised workspace

This used to be a very organised workspace

Second case of points – our storage unit is slowly filling …

A box here, a garbage bag there ... it all adds up

A box here, a garbage bag there … it all adds up

Funny thing is though, having all this time to do the sorting, packing, etc, is wonderful, but the process feels like it’s going on forever. I’ve never experienced moving like this.

In my younger days in OZ (Australia) I could be packed up and out of a house in a week, which in some of those early digs was about all the notice I got. Ah yes, those rousing days of shared housing and inner-city living.

Even when I could afford to live by myself, and/or with partners, house-moving took a month at the longest. Hell, even when Mrs Widds and I moved her to Widder Island, we were out of our old place in Vancouver in a month. (nearly bloody killed us, but we did it)

This more sedate pace feels right though. We have time enough to look at each and every object and go, ‘storage’, ‘in the trailer’, or ‘thrift store/garbage’. Those are our only three options for every thing here.

It does clarify one’s decision-making processes.

-oOo-

Here’s something I uncovered the other day. A rough template I created in another Era, (somewhere around the end-ish of 2019) look familiar?

Same women, same wheels, same three coasts ... hell yeah!

Same women, same wheels, same three coasts … hell yeah!

Maybe not yet, and maybe not as soon as we’d planned, nevertheless …