The Adventures of Reba

Lac Le Jeune Provincial Park - The weather was perfect, but there were mosquitoes and cotton a plenty, and their potable water was on a boil advisory. We finally got to use our Clam bug shelter, which helped a lot with being outdoors and not getting inundated. Still, a lovely and quiet park to enjoy nature for a few days! We braved both the bugs and allergens to enjoy a little walk to the lake before sunset. We got a double campsite there, which is so convenient when you have travel buddies to join you. While there we took a short drive to Kamloops to explore their market and have some brunch. While there the night disappeared, and as we traveled further north and approached the summer solstice, daytime just got longer and longer!

Even though the RV park we stayed at in Hope had a waterfall view, my parents and I still went for a short drive and hike to see another while Beau was working (😣). We’ve spent so much time in the southwest these last few years, I’ve really missed trees like these: Tall, dense, and so incredibly green! We also walked around the town, where part of Rambo was filmed, viewing some of the wood carvings on display from the international wood carving competition they host each year. We all got a good chuckle out of seeing a large log in someone’s front seat, presumably on the way to get carved, but couldn’t manage a picture of it with the window glare. We stayed here just a couple of nights before hitting the road again.

Several years ago, for Christmas, we gave my parents a promise to go on a trip to Canada together. Life got in the way and the next year we promised them an even better trip to Canada - taking the Clipper and for longer. Then COVID happened. We didn’t get to go, but we both wound up buying RV’s, so when Beau and I first started planning our trip to Alaska, we invited my parents to join us for the beginning of it. It only took 5 years, but we finally fulfilled the presents!

Together we left from Bellingham, WA on May 23. We crossed the border at Sumas, WA and had slightly different experiences: My parents took a faster line and spoke to the border agent for less than a minute, we wound up being the first people through after a shift change and the agent really wanted to ask someone (us) ALL of the questions. But we got through without any issue, did a quick stock up of groceries and exchange of dollars, then headed to our first stop of the trip, Hope BC.

While we were home we did a lot of work to prepare for our trip to Alaska, including buying a Canadian National Parks pass, downsizing our storage unit, selling my old car, buying a new mattress from Tochta, ordering travel contact cards, making my first ever Cricut project - a sign for the Sign Post Forest (more on that later), buying a drone, visiting my work for the first time in 8 months (it looks so different now!), and planning a very full itinerary for the next 5 months of travel!!

Not sure how rested we felt, but our hearts were FULL from two months absolutely packed with friends and family time back home in WA! 🥰 There are so many memories we didn’t capture, and so many people we didn’t get to see or spend enough time with. AND, we were definitely ready to be back on the road again (except for the whole leaky window discovery we made Day 0 of our trip to Alaska 🤪)! Thanks a million to everyone that hosted us or made time for us, lots of love!

The day we left to head to Sacramento there were high wind and flood warnings across much of northern California, and the Siskiyous mountain pass wound up closing. We stayed an extra night in Sacramento at our friend’s house (she cooked us incredible food, which is the real reason we stayed another night 😆), but the pass still required chains, so we headed back to the coast. We wound up on the ONLY mountain road that didn’t require chains and spent the night in Crescent City before crossing into Oregon. It was a lot of extra driving, but we didn’t have to worry about ice on the road. And more importantly, after stopping to see Beau’s sister in Oregon, we made it back home to Seattle safe and mostly sound 😉 where one of our fist stops is always Taco Time PNW!

We spent a week in San Francisco, visiting a few tourist sites, like the California Academy of Sciences, Fort Mason, and The Interval bar at the Long Now Foundation. We had brunch with a fellow therapist and quilting friend, and had dinner with Beau’s boss who we hadn’t seen in person since before COVID. These pictures are of one of the very few non-rainy moments we had!

Our last stop before turning north again had two parts: Beau headed to a guy’s weekend at a Palm Springs rental house, and I took the RV solo camping at Joshua Tree. We’ve camped outside of Joshua Tree on BLM land several times, but never inside the park. It was windy and cold, even waking to a dusting of snow one morning, but worth the views and a little alone time! Turned out the weather was just prelude to our trip north. I did manage to meet another LTV (our RV brand) couple there from Oregon, we shared tips and experiences, and hope to meet out on the road again sometime.

We spent most of February going back and forth between Nevada and SoCal, getting to spend time with family and friends (new and old), and getting some work done on the RV. March, for us, would be all about going home, but mother nature wasn’t making it so easy…random California snow storms and torrential downpours, it was definitely interesting!

We headed back to Nevada and spent a few nights in a hotel in Vegas while the RV was getting some work done. At the hotel it sounded like they were jackhammering outside our window all night, probably the worst sleep l’ve had in ages, resulting in a terrible migraine. But we did get to see some friends, who happened to be there at the same time, and ate some good food!