Just completed another successful pilgrimage to Victoria to take the oldest son and his stuff back to UVic….
….well, successful is a relative word of course and there’s always stress and mishaps and dear old Dad gets tense at stupid stuff. And then there’s the near misses and all that, but the bottom line is you do learn a little from the first time around, thank goodness.
Having said that the previous top-of-the-Coquihalla tarp fiasco was merely replaced by the stop-in-Kelowna-and-take-it-off-cause-it’s-going-to-come-off-and-I’ll-stress-about-it-the-whole-way-anyway scenario.
So, see, that’s kind of learning from your mistakes, ahem.
The first time we used a paper-thin tarp and thin rope and somehow it lasted until, like I said, the top of the Coquihalla connector, although that’s just when we checked it so it likely was pretty much toast much earlier. That’s just when we cut it off after realizing it wasn’t really covering anything anyways and prayed for good weather.
We got it. For the most part. Although tarp stress was just replaced by searching-the-clouds stress but somehow I felt less responsible personally.
Besides, it’s really only the bed you worry about getting wet, and I was originally really hoping he could’ve stashed it away with the rest of the household stuff in a storage locker in Victoria, but I had eventually resigned myself to transport it better this time.
I even talked about getting one of those bed bags just to cover it up and then you don’t worry about a tarp flapping in the breeze the whole time.
Good idea. But the thing about ideas is you have to actually act on them if they’re going to help you out at all.
But I did get a better tarp and rope, and it might have held up but we made the call in Kelowna due to a slippage and tatter factor that didn’t translate well over the remaining kilometres. We didn’t actually do the math and I’m sure the previous experience weighed in heavily during the calculations, but again we were praying for clear skies, and for a longer period of time this trip.
And it worked out fine. A couple brief showers – one I swear only 8.5 seconds after I stupidly proclaimed “I think we’re going to be OK after all” – but official bed checks in Hope and Tsawwassen revealed no damage done.
And we were on time and we got everything in better this time (including mom who we had to leave behind last time due to the amount of stuff we packed, even though I ended up bringing a couple things back last time, so the dresser got a free return trip to the Island but not my wife, ahem).
Like I said, you learn from your mistakes.
But, not always, as I again tempted fate by proclaiming near Chilliwack that “we’re making great time,” and even considered slowing down a little so we would hit the half-hour reservation window at the right time.
Then the freeway, just shy of Abbotsford, turned into a parking lot.
We weren’t moving at all, then a little bit, then nothing, a little bit, you know the drill if you’ve ever been backed up on the freeway at the Coast. And just when I thought we weren’t going to make the 4 p.m. ferry after all, things cleared up and we made the 3:30 reservation deadline with at least 45 seconds to spare.
No problem. Another successful trip back to school. We got him settled, a couple tears from mom, and all’s right with the world.
Next year should be even easier.
