School finally came to a close and a much needed adventure was taken with Kelsey. after four long tedious and great years at college Kelsey and I decided that we needed to have some fun and adventure in our lives now that we did not need to worry about school. So I packed a bag, (she packed up her apartment), and we headed to her home town of Castlegar, BC, and thats where the adventures began.

**** Full disclosure, when I say adventure it means “tried not to die”, because you see, when Kelsey and I are together things just tend to…. happen?…We’ll go with happen. It sounds better than us being bad omens… I think… So just keep this in mind when reading this blog post.****

***** (also we totally need to have our own reality show called Glinda and Gina, but we’ll get to why that’s what it has to be called in a moment.)*****

View from the troll bridge to Zuckerberg Island

Pathway to Zuckerberg House

Kelsey looking into Zuckerberg

Castlegar Dam

Nelson

View from Kelsey’s backyard

Troll bridge

So, Castlegar, where it all began, not too much almost dying here. Though Kelsey did take me down a road that seemed like she was taking me to get my kidney stolen by gremlins… turned out it was just the road up to a magical waterfall. We went on a lot of magical waterfall adventures that day. She also took me to Zuckerberg Island to see the Zuckerberg house that she has tattooed on her arm. We got to walk over a troll bridge ( which are my obsession by the way) and up a magical pathway (picture above) to get there. This is also the place where the obsession of taking photos in flowers began. Some lady judged me in the public washroom at the park when I was cleaning BBQ sauce off my pants. She came in to change her kids diaper and I was just there trying to clean myself up and then her kid started copying me so she said ” Are you going to be like the big girl and clean your pants too? Looks like she made a mess and now she has to clean herself up in a public washroom”. Some serious shade was thrown in my direction and all I have to say was that that kid looked old enough to be potty trained so maybe she shouldn’t be so damn judgey. Bitch. The next day we went to a “spring fling” in the town, its like a street festival but really lower your expectations. Then we spent two hours trying to pack Kelsey’s suitcase.

Now onto the actual road trip part of the adventure. About two hours into the drive we stopped in Greenwood, and Kelsey wanted to show me an old abandoned smoke stack there, so we started driving up the mountain. She overshot and we passed the creepiest NO TRESPASSING sign ever, it kinda looked like a junk yard, but people lived there. so were turned around, made it to the smoke stack and were just hanging out taking photos, then the sun went away, it got dark and he heard a really creepy noise. Could have been the wind, could have been a dog with a mountain person laying in wait watching us, but i do know we have never run so fast in out lives back to the car. So, two hours into the trip and were already almost killed by mountain people. (You can see how this blog post is going to go.)

View from inside the smoke stack

Kelsey moments before we were almost killed by mountain people

So, many hours later we are passing through Abbotsford and there was a shit ton of traffic and we couldn’t figure out why. Turns out the tulip festival was on. Now we were coming from Calgary where there was just a snow storm and we had been seeing snow and dead trees for eight months now. There aren’t a lot of flowers in Calgary in general so we were pretty excited to see flowers, except we didn’t know that the tulip festival was happening, so we may have had a slight meltdown in the car that involved a lot of swearing, while we sat in traffic. We made our way to the North Vancouver Hotel, (which is actually quite a nice place for only 90$ a night with breakfast included) once we got to our hotel we tried to make ourselves presentable once again, since sitting in a car for 8 hours will kinda make you look like a gremlin. The hotel had massive windows that opened all the way which you could then perch in like a cat. Once we were once again presentable we headed out to adventure around Stanley park.

So there we are, driving into downtown Vancouver from North Vancouver, and Kelsey’s GPS (a.k.a Glinda) decided that the only way to get to Stanley Park was for us to make U-turns in downtown Vancouver during rush hour, because she was trying to kill us. Eventually we figured it out by just not listening to anything Glinda said and we made it to English Bay and even found parking. We walked around on the beach for a while until we remembered how hungry we were, so we made our way back to the car, stopping to take pictures with some flower trees along the way.

We ended up going to earls because it was super close to our hotel and I tried a beer called Gypsy Tears…. it wasn’t good, it tasted like drinking perfume. It was quite upsetting because it had such a cool name for it to taste that awful. Afterwards we attempted* to drive back to our hotel, Glinda told us to take a left, even though she meant right, so she recalculated the root and decided that the only way for us to get there was to drive all the way back into downtown Vancouver, and you guessed it, make a U-turn. For the rest of the trip Glinda would continue to get her right and left confused and tell us to make U-turns. To double check Glinda’s directions we would use my GPS (a.k.a Gina) who knew her rights from lefts, but couldn’t pronounce a damn thing, so we would be driving around not knowing what street to look for. Eventually we made it back to the hotel where immediately fell asleep because it was a long day, also we’re grandmas so you know, we have a bedtime. But we were also going to catch the ferry to the island the next day.

Travel

BC Adventure: Part 5 : Victoria

BC Adventure : Part 4 : Island Adventure

BC Adventure : Part 3 : The Beach

BC Adventure: Part 2: Road to The Island

BC Adventures : Part 1