On every road trip, I like to imagine what it would be like if there was a Star Trek teleportation device that would enable us to skip certain sections of the highway. For instance, everyone knows that the hardest part about driving south down Highway 97 is from Prince George (after the old Art Knapps building) to what used to be the blue bridge on the north side of Quesnel.
This part of the drive is always achingly slow and I would dematerialize and transport right to the next stop (for more coffee). The road trip doesn't actually start until you drive past (or, if you travel with small children, stop at) the 7-Eleven in South Quesnel. From Quesnel to Williams Lake, the scenery starts to change and I'm always surprised when we arrive at the Tim Hortons.
"What Tim Hortons'?" asks no one from north central B.C.
The rest of the drive south seems to go a little faster because the countryside changes from the boreal forest tunnel to Cariboo farmland, then desert, then mountains. It really is a beautiful drive, if a little long when your one-and-a-half-year-old daughter is counting the trees at the top of her lungs.
If you are confused about how someone who doesn't have numbers yet can count, she improvises by shouting "Tee!" at the top of her lungs and gesticulating wildly when she sees them.
All of the trees. Every time.
Sometimes, the drive surprises you, even if you have driven the highway one thousand times.
If the teleportation device was real, I never would have had "The Best Coffee in the Cariboo" at the Sugar Shack in 70 Mile House. Neither the Sugar Shack nor I are joking.
This is truly the best coffee in the Cariboo.
They also have real poutine. With smoked meat.
My son (he's four) refused to try the poutine because the fries had sauce on them. Pity.
I ate his share. The coffee was sublime and had real maple syrup that was somehow better than the "real maple syrup" that I buy in the grocery store.
I was still talking about it four hours later.
It's hard to imagine what the highway would be like without the boring sections.
We would miss wildlife, emergency rest stops where you discover a perfect view, or, in our family, we would miss having a conversation about what we would do if we lived in one of these small towns. For example, if you lived in Chasm, what would you do?
This time, my answer was sleep.
When my husband and I lived on the Island, there were great swaths of time where we never left the city. At one point, I don't think we left the Island for well over a year.
Since I've moved back home, we travel more than we ever did in Victoria.
We have seen bears, moose and deer in our backyard and have put more than 60,000 kilometres on our minivan in less than four years. Prince George is not Vancouver or Victoria and nor should it be.
It is the city where we live that allows us to explore this fantastic province. Most people who live in Victoria and Vancouver have never been past Kamloops and they don't know what they're missing. But we do.
