On the Road Again with Verna

I decided it was time my oldest friend Verna, met my ‘old’ friend Ruth. Ruth and Bill lived in a Trailer Court just south of Edmonton. As usual, we had done nothing in the way of planning before we set off, except to get a few directions. I don’t really know why people give us directions because we never use them. Our friends seem to think we are renowned navigators and so should be able to follow simple directions. If that was true, we would just have to be told to turn right at the Big Red Barn. Those are the kind of directions we can follow, sometimes.

Once in Vancouver, I suggested we take the road through Port Coquitlam, Maple Ridge etc., rather than the Freeway straight out to Hope. We figured the back way would be much less boring than the Freeway. It all sounded simple enough and we would avoid a lot of traffic. I could always dream! I lived in Coquitlam for 29 years but who would have thought in the last 10 years since we left a whole new city had grown up. So eventually, being women and not men, we did ask for directions and managed to follow enough of them to get us on our way.

We got off the ferry at about 10:00a.m., and should have been over the Coquihalla before supper. As it was, we only arrived at Hope in the late afternoon. We had spent so much time finding our way out of Vancouver, instead of taking the Freeway, but what fun would that have been?

Getting out of Hope was a little easier than getting out of Vancouver. We only had to ask a service station guy once for directions to the Coquihalla and he just pointed over our shoulders at the very large sign that said ‘this way’. Not in those words, but you know what I mean.

Once over the Coquihalla, we took a secondary highway to avoid Calgary. We were getting close and weren’t sure (surprise) which was the road to Bill and Ruth’s place. A phone call to Bill and he said, turn on to such n’ such a road and follow it to their place and he would meet us at the road into the trailer park. We came to what looked like a good road, but couldn’t find a name on it. However, we figured this was the road Bill meant. We just went for miles and miles and the farms got further and further apart. The two of us reflected how many trailer parks, unprotected on the ‘bald’ prairie, had been flattened in tornados and we decided this is not right road. So, we turned around and went back to the main road.

Following the highway for a short distance, we saw ahead of us about six or eight RCMP officers with three or four police cars. Obviously, there was a serious problem for the RCMP. We just pulled into their ‘Road Block’. I mean people are usually pulled over at a road block, you don’t go into one! They really looked puzzled, like what the heck were these two old biddies doing? One officer came over to the car and I asked him if he knew where “such n’ such a road was. He pointed to a matter of yards from where they had set up their road block. Again, there was a nice big sign telling us that this was the road we wanted. As we pulled away, looking back we could see all these officers scratching their heads and smiling.

To be continued............

Biddy Jean