Day 13 – Wide Open Spaces

1200 miles. That’s how far I’ve driven in a single car. Based on my average number of miles per day, this would have taken XXX days. Instead it took two. Hooray for awesome people who are going to the same place as you!

Driving through British Columbia is absolutely beautiful. But it does have problems. As A----- said, ‘It’s beautiful. Eight. Hundred. Miles. of Beautiful.’

Note: The majority of the following photos were taken from through the window of a moving car.

Trip Stats:

Total Distance: 679 miles
Total Time: ~12 hours
# of Rides: 1
Total Cost: $7.50

Day 12 – Animals!

Hooray for BC and the fuzzy things that live there! I’ve seen a larger variety of large animals in twelve hours of hitchhiking than I have in any other place except a zoo.

Early in the morning, I was picked up by A----- and F-----, a newlywed and her sister-in-law driving moving a truck and trailer’s worth of tools and life from Montana to Alaska. Also present was a Chihuahua named Moose, a feisty little dog who shared the car with me for two full days and still considered me a suspicious character. Granted, he also growled any time construction workers came over to say how long we’d be waiting at a segment of single-lane highway, or when F----- passed anything to someone else. He was a great little guard dog, and a beautiful one at that.

As I ran up the road to where they’d stopped, I saw my first three animals of the day: a black bear and her two cubs. I’d actually seen them an hour or so before hand, running across the road in the other direction. Apparently the grass is consistently greener on the other side of the road. Wish I’d caught a picture of them…or of the two other bears I saw later on in the day. I’ll note that these were the reason I didn’t camp out the night before: I don’t exactly have a good bear protection system in place right now. Tie a bag with some food up in a tree, but a dozen feet of rope doesn’t go too far.

Mountain goats were next on the agenda: after a stop for road repair, we passed a herd hanging out on the road. Barely enough time to snap a shot of the last few.

An Elk made an appearance later on in the day. Dangerous animals for cars: unlike a deer, you’re generally not going to kill it on impact. Because of its height, it’ll get knocked into your windshield, where it’ll flail around in your lap in a panic. Pay attention to the signs all around the highway.

Finally, the first wild bison I’ve ever seen. A whole herd of them had taken over the road and cuts on either side, dozens of massive animals with just as many calves. Perhaps a hundred in total? Crazy, crazy animals. Seeing a half dozen in a zoo doesn’t do them justice, and I imagine even this group didn’t do the herds of the old great plains justice. F----- taught both A----- and I an important lesson about bison: don’t stop for them. Go slow, drive through, and get away as soon as you can. Stopping makes them nervous, and nervous bison attack cars. And considering they’re as big as a car, they can do a heck of a lot of damage.

This took care of most the animals I was hoping to see on this trip. It’s been so incredible to see so much in such a short period of time! Now I just need to find a moose, bald eagle, and a big ‘ol grizzly!

Trip Stats:

Total Distance: 600 miles
Total Time: ~12 hours
# of Rides: 1
Total Cost: $0.00

Day 11 – Oil Country

Hooray for an awesome experience staying with someone who’d given me a ride! And hooray for me not being an insane hitchhiker! It’s good when both of those things happen. i spent last evening camped out behind H-----‘s house in Dawson Creek, getting a full night’s sleep in before waking for a shower, shave, and awesome breakfast of toasted multi-grain bread with fresh-picked tomatoes. Days like these make me glad I don’t have to keep to a schedule: plenty of time to relax and chat before being driven to the junction to start a 11am hitch.

This has been an interesting experience, learning a bit more about the oil industry of northern BC. My first ride, J-----, works for a company that produces a salt water mixture that is pumped into wells to help along the process of fracking. It also replaces what’s pumped out, keeping things in balance. He used to haul the equipment used to drill new wells, and pointed out a crew that was in the middle or working through one. They’ll be in place for about two weeks, then cap it off, pull out their equipment, and be off to the next site. A different team will come in, set up the pump, and pull out the oil later on.

R----- hauls equipment for far off oil camps. His work provides him with a new pickup every two years: he turned in the last one with over 400,000 miles logged. The previous one was closer to 600,000. For today’s trip he’d been driving for two or three hours before we met, carried me for another three or four, then dropped me off before turning off the main road for another few hours of driving. The delivery was a machine for horizontal drilling. Not a clue how it actually works.

Oil really is the lifeline of this area. People make good money in the fields. They support the hotels and restaurants in the towns along the highway. All of the side industries needed to maintain the wells are a very visible source of employment. This area once had agriculture as a source of work. Now, the balance has changed. When the wells run dry, and cars stop needing oil, what will happen to northeastern BC?

Trip Stats:

Total Distance: 281 miles
Total Time: ~8 hours
# of Rides: 2
Total Cost: $3.50

Day 10 – New Ideas

This blog is very much a work in progress, not just in the sense that I’m writing it piece by piece, but that I’m also coming up with new ideas for how to make this blog interesting to write and worthwhile to read. Today I started on two new micro-projects.

The first is taking pictures of everyone who gives me rides, and posting them on here. Hopefully this will explain individuals a bit more than my words, since I’m not able to write about every person that picks me up. I meet so many incredible people each day, and I wish I could show this better. I wish I could tell the full story of every person that I meet. But I have neither the time nor the skill to them justice, and so I’ll limit myself to the small amount that I do.

The second is a project that I won’t be able to complete till I get back to my standard laptop, with its editing software and non netbook specs. I’m recording 30 seconds of video from the ride that each person gives me, then I’ll attempt to splice them into a short clip of my entire journey, with each area that I’ve moved through. Not really certain how well that will work, as the video tends to be rather jumpy on parts of the road, but I’ll find out! I’m considering posting links to raw video on here…not sure if it’s worth it.

What else can I do to make this interesting? Suggestions?

Trip Stats:

Total Distance: 576 miles
Total Time: ~14 hours
# of rides: 3
Total Cost: $9.00

Day 9 – O Canada

So, first day actually hitchhiking inside the borders of our northern neighbor. It definitely has fewer people, but wait times are about the same, and people are just as awesome as everywhere else I’ve been.

As usual, the first step to hitchhiking from a large city is to get to the outskirts. You want to get away the traffic that’s just going to the next exit, and get to the distance travelers. After taking the Skytrain as far as I could, I switched to a bus with a driver who knew exactly where to take hitchhikers. As soon as I walked on, he asked where I was headed, and told me to wait till the second time he crossed the freeway, as the first crossing had too much construction at the moment. He’d let me know when we were getting near, so don’t worry a bit. That’s the first time I’ve had a driver do something like that.

My first ride asked me if I’d ever had Poutine. Nope, but I wanted to. So off we went to the Costco food court, his personal favorite source. Tasty stuff! French fries with cheese curds and gravy, it’s definitely not the healthiest thing in the world, but it is pretty awesome. B----- had recommended a few really good places in Vancouver to stop buy it, and I’m hoping the next time I pass through I’ll be able to.

Hope, BC

The little town of Hope was my next destination, which happens to have been the scene of Rambo: First Blood. It’s also the world chainsaw carving capitol, home to a number of very beautiful parks, near enough to an airfield that you could see three gliders moving through the air, and has a visitor’s center staffed by a guy who thinks hitchhiking to Alaska is completely nuts. As a hitchhiker himself, he’s probably the most qualified person I’ve met of that opinion. Not that that would stop me ;)

My final driver was a tow truck driver with a car on the back. This is something new. I very rarely get rides from people who are in a work vehicle, maybe this is going to be different in Canada. That would be awesome if that’s the case, as I imagine that a lot of the distance drivers will be on the clock when they see me. I’ll find out!

Overall, it seems that hitching in Canada is very similar to doing so in the US. Good to know.

Trip Stats:
Total Distance: 128 miles
Total Time: 6 hours
# of rides: 3
Cost: $5.00

Day 7, 8 – Vancouver

I think I want to live here. Too bad that housing prices are insane, with even the relatively small house above B-----‘s basement apartment valued at nearly 2.5 million. She showed me a high-value set of condos on campus, technically ‘student' housing,’ but that sold out on the first day of pre-purchases with values in excess of a million. Professors are being priced out of their town, with a massive housing bubble that’s just waiting to burst.

The university is rather beautiful. It’s very large, with a wide band of trees separating it from the rest of the city. It’s nearly 100 years old, but is mostly modern in appearance. it’s obvious that many of the buildings are very recent. While I didn’t see anything boasting of the obvious star-power of what you might find at MIT, or South Korea’s *****, they’re very good looking buildings that appear to be very functional. The health science’s building had a massive sky-lit atrium with study space on the ground floor, lounges going up the wall on one end, and a wide, welcoming corridors on the other. The Population Studies building was also interesting, with a large, outdoor covered table, with enough all-weather plugs to accommodate several dozen students with laptops.

Something I noticed both on the university grounds and in the rest of the city was the massive amount of seating available. Everywhere I went, there were places to sit and relax, and a fair amount of it was in use. Coming from Hong Kong, where if you want to sit you’re almost forced to go into a restaurant, it was an impressive change.

I did find a few buildings especially impressive. I wish I’d seen the False Creek Energy Centre before doing my Arch 100A studio at Berkeley, or even my Arch 24 studio at CCSF. The building was a hot water heating plant for nearby buildings, providing all of their heating needs without having to use smaller, lower efficiency forced air systems.It was placed under a bridge, utilizing less-useful shaded space. Many of its sides were made of glass panels, with concrete tubes going down below the ground to show the basement mechanical systems. A number of panels on the outside explained the processes and purposes of the system. There was also an outdoor garden and seating associated with the building.

It was also awesome to hang out with B---- again. How many years has it been since the last page reunion? 4 years? It’s hard to get together, now that we all live in different areas across the world, but so much fun when we actually do. With any luck, I’ll get the chance to meet up with a few more pages on this saunter around the US.

Trip Stats:
Total Distance: 0 miles
Total Time: n/a
# of Rides: n/a
Total Cost: $34.50

Day 6 – The Kindness of Strangers

There are a lot of nice people in this world, more than a lot of people assume. All you have to do is give people the opportunity, and many of them will pull through.

Last night in Portland was awesome. I posted a message in Portland’s Emergency Couch group on couchsurfing, and quickly got a message inviting me to stay with a couple of awesome Alaska natives living in the area. There house was expected to be full, but they had tent space in their yard that I was more than welcome to have. So I took them up on it, and when things changed at their house I ended up getting a couch anyways. They also gave me a number of tips on where to go and what to do while in Alaska, like how you have to take a bus into Denali, or a recommendation to hit Thompson Pass near Valdez. This map book of mine is getting fairly well filled with notes and suggestions.

After a tasty breakfast egg scramble, I headed out to the freeway. D----- picked me up on his way back to Seattle after visiting family in Portland. He’s a laborer, holding down a variety of jobs that keep his employment fairly stable, even in this economy. Not a bad strategy. He also has a hobby of dumpster diving, something he’s been doing for decades. He used to be the only person in Seattle doing it, back when he began. It’s become much more competitive, and people have stopped throwing away as many things. He’s found rings and other jewelry, pieces of gold that weighed as much as an ounce. As he said, if he’d held on to all the gold he’s found till now, he’d be sitting pretty. But, that doesn’t matter very much, and doesn’t bother him. That’s just the past.

Bridges! I didn't stop in Washington

As we got closer to Seattle, D----- mentioned that he didn’t have any plans for the evening, and he had a bag of Canadian coins from his dumpster diving that he wanted to convert at the currency exchange near the border. Plus, he had this rental car till the following day, and there wasn’t any point in just letting it sit in the street all night. It’d been a while since he’d been to Blaine, the last city on this side of the border, so he’d go ahead and take me to the edge of the US. And he did. He drove over an hour past where he was going, without being asked, just to help me out a little bit more. It was such an awesome thing for him to do.
Of course, not everyone can readily believe that someone would go that far out of their way for someone they’d just met, with no compensation other than gratitude. This includes border police. We made a mistake, and missed the last turnout on the US side. D----- didn’t have a passport with him. We had to stop at the gates and go into the customs building, where they interviewed me, and then interviewed him. They asked me a bunch of questions about who I was, where I was going, and why. They asked me even more about why D----- had driven me so far out of his way, implying that there must be some reason for it. All I could say was, nope. A lot of people are just plain helpful, and this sort of situation isn’t as rare as people think. I was given back my passport card, and ready to be on my way. I hung out an extra half hour or so, while they ran D-----‘s passport and interviewed him. Then he was given a paper stating that he hadn’t been in Canada, so he could cross through the US gates, and took off on his way, while I went off on mine. He gave me the ziploc of Canadian coins he’d collected to use on my journey. Then I was across the border, caught a ride to Vancouver, and pointed in the direction I should go by a fellow light-rail passenger.

A lot of people like to help out others, even complete strangers. The whole premise of hitchhiking is based on this. But in our daily lives we so rarely get to meet these sorts of people, we so rarely experience this kindness. But now I do. For the past week, I’ve been almost exclusively with people who go out of their way to help others, and it’s infectious. I’ve found myself more willing to help others, and more actively searching for opportunities to do so. I love being on the receiving end, but perhaps even more I look forward to many days and chances to not get, but to give.

Trip Stats:

Total Distance: 304 miles
Total Time: 8 hours
# of Rides: 2
Total Cost: $9.00