Our attempt to spend a few days in Vancouver was stymied by circumstance. I needed a campground with wi-fi available, to catch up on work, but I hadn’t thought to research it before we went into Canada. Once we got to the Vancouver area, it was raining (of course, because that’s what happens in the Pacific Northwest in the winter), traffic was heavy, and we had no clue where to find an appropriate campground.
After meandering aimlessly through Surrey for a while, and having lunch in a parking lot, we decided to head back across the border so that I could catch up on work with my Verizon card and phone, and skip Vancouver this time.
The good news is that we are safely on the Pacific coast. We got past the final barricade of mountains along Route 5 in British Columbia without incident. Although the weather will probably be rainy here on the coast whenever it isn’t foggy, it will mostly be mild. For example, the weather forecast for Birch Bay (about 100 miles north of Seattle) is virtually the same for every day this week: highs in the 50s, lows in the 40s, and a high probability of rain. Beats snow.
So we can take our time from here. We’re no longer racing against the calendar. Our only scheduled obligation is to meet some friends for Thanksgiving in southern California, and even that plan is still tentative. Worst case, we have a month to drive 1,250 miles through Washington, Oregon, and California. That’s my kind of schedule.
The current discussion is whether we want to return to home base for Christmas. Eleanor and I had another one of those early morning discussions in bed about it. No conclusions yet. We have several possibilities and considerations which make it a tougher decision than you might think.
For one thing, in December RV’ers have a limited range of destinations. For decent weather out west and no risk of snow, we’ve got the valleys of California and Nevada (San Joaquin, Death Valley, and Owens Valley), the Pacific coast, southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, southwest Texas, and Mexico. Any place over 4,000 feet is suspect. Anything over 6,000 feet is very risky. That rules out the entire Colorado Plateau, and most of the western national parks, for examples.
But this is a fun problem to have. We’ll continue to mull it over as we cruise the coastline, and by the time we get to the San Joaquin Valley I’m sure we’ll have something figured out. In the meantime, the next stop will be in the San Juan Islands for a few days, and then over to Olympic National Park this weekend.
Our location: 48 °55’7.11″N, 122 °44’17.03″W
