Dumb Decisions, Mis-Adventures, Surviving Same.

07-19-2010 Monday Revisited or Down the Rabbit Hole!

Cheryl: It’s 8:00 p.m. and Frank is snoring away peacefully because he drove for three hours on a really, really nasty forest logging road! It all started with an innocent left turn after driving 36 very curvy miles to visit the not so lovely marina at Mabel Lake (a very, very, very BIG Canadian lake that would be fabulous if you had a boat to take out on the water, duh, like we don’t). Anyway, the “warning” sign said if you go left here from the Mabel Lake Marina, you will be on a forest service road/not maintained/used heavily by logging trucks. However, on the map, the little black dotted lines show this road going easily from where we were to where we wanted to be next. Therefore, we turned left, trusting our sturdy Dodge 4-wheel drive truck to take us any damn where we wanted to go. So there!

Here’s where Cheryl lost it, about an hour and a half of curvy road with big tall trees crowding either side and an occasional view of a blue very large lake through the tree trunks. On and on went the intrepid pair and their puppies, bouncing up and down and swerving for pot holes, sometimes pulling over for very large trucks stacked with big, in fact, very big, long lodge poles with the bark still on. Whew! But, the really scary part when Cheryl actually shed a few tears happened when we passed not a single car or truck in a whole hour. Then the road got narrower and narrower, and my friends, Cheryl was ready to walk all the way back to the Mabel Lake Marina. However, ever the adventurer, Frank assured her that civilization was just around the next bend in the hmmmm road? Or was it now a path? Maybe a trail? Yiikes, the lake is lapping dangerously close to the left side of the road and then we spot a tent in a little triangle of land next to the lake, but no one is at home. “Can I yell and see if anyone is around?” Cheryl asks. “No!” Frank says, “That would be a sissy thing to do.” Well, maybe he didn’t say exactly that, but I knew what he was thinking. Then we saw a really, really old log cabin with empty windows and doors, so we took its picture a couple of times to make ourselves feel better. In fact, a couple of times we stopped to do things to make ourselves feel better, like when we spotted a rushing mountain steam cascading down the mountain and under the little bridge we drove over. The water looked cleaner than what runs out of our faucet at home. Then there was this little mamma bird on the road in front of the truck. Frank took lots of pictures of her. She wasn’t so little either, about the size of a Roadrunner, but more upright and she had five little guys following her across the road. She had a fan tail and a top-knot and walked sort of like a chicken on downers. It was a giddy moment for me since I temporarily put aside the thought that this road was taking us deeper and deeper into the Canadian wilderness and endlessly around and around this giant forested lake! Ye Gads!!!!

Frank kept reassuring me that the tire tracks ahead of us were fresh, that the little numbered mile markers (we assumed) on the trees were accurate, and that soon we’d hit highway 97 and be home by 6:00 p.m. Then, the real miracle happened since I’d been praying one would – a forest service truck showed up parked along that God-forsaken stretch of road. However, the ranger was missing and again, calling out would be “sissy-like.” So on and on the fearless adventurer drove with his hands glued to the steering wheel and a sure and certain confident expression plastered across his face, while I, clinging to the hand grip by the window and the center console of the truck, had given up being fearless after the first hour and a half, and rode on in abject terror at the outcome. I was sure we were to be the next headline that reads, “Old Man and Wife Found Petrified on Ancient Canadian Logging Road. The sidebar subhead reading, Both Identified as Yanks, It Figures, Eh. And then, just when I was considering what it would feel like to actually be petrified, up ahead a clearing loomed and a car whizzed by on a PAVED highway. Just when you think God is dead, He shows up! Not to mention my brilliant husband, who just kept urging our big Dodge Hemi down that dastardly winding cattletrack.
This posting courtesy of the Canadian Outback Lewis (Frank), who said, “I told you we’d be home by 6:00,” and Clark (Cheryl), who said, “Shut Up,” and their trusty guide dogs, Peanut and Cleo, who remarked, “alls well that ends well, eh.”

07-20-2010 Tuesday AM – A Small, Rough, Pot-Holed, Beat-You-To-Death Road and a Psychotic, Hysterical Woman.

Frank: Headline: "Lost Yanks Photo Rare Bird!" Cheryl was freaked out. She was sure we were going to die. I had made what appeared to be a logical decision to turn left onto a dirt road and take it about 30 KM to intersect with a major highway and then go onto the Canadian Glacier Park. It looked good on paper. It turned out the road, which started out as flat, smooth, well graded hard packed dirt & gravel, turned into a rough, narrow, bumpy, lost forever in the Canadian outback experience. There were long rocky sections with potholes that were axle deep followed by narrow stretches that were literally just two wheel tracks in the grass. At one point we came face-to-face with a humongous log truck and I had to pull over to the left side of the road so he could pass me on the right side. It was so close that after that I folded the side mirrors in against the truck cab to avoid losing them. I was never in doubt we’d make it to the highway OK as long as we kept the lake to our left and stayed on the “main” road. The truck did fine on what turned out to be almost 80 KM of hard four-wheeling, and even if we had had a mechanical problem the tire tracks in the dirt indicated that the road was reasonably well travelled and rescue would have come eventually. Anyway, it was a dumb decision and it will take a bit of time before it becomes a funny story. Remember, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”