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I checked out of the top secret suite and made my way to Commercial drive to have some breakfast. I also bought two large pizzas because you don't show up at a campsite empty handed. After an entertaining and scenic drive, I arrived at Manning Park and checked into my room.
Getting a room at the Manning Park Lodge was actually rather lucky on my part, twice. What I'd done was phone them up about a month earlier to book a room, only to find that they were sold out. Not unexpected. They had a waiting list and I was put on it. The first bit of luck came when they told me that I was no longer on the waiting list, and would I like to actually have a room reservation ("Yes", I said). The second bit of luck came because of when they did this - the night before I left, which meant I wasn't packing camping gear for the whole trip that I wasn't going to use. This removed a lot of stress immediately prior to the trip.
After checking in I drove 5 Km out to Lightning Lake to visit![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kermie_canada, spookiemonkie2, somejauntypolka, Chris and Cliff, assorted children, and one dog that doesn't like me. Nothing earth-shattering here - just a nice relaxing evening with some friends. It was wonderful.
( The one and only picture I took, behind the cut... )
I was hoping to see Troy while I was there, but that didn't happen. Still not sure what happened there, since dates and locations where obtained.
Later, it got dark, kids were put to bed, swiftly followed by the grown-ups. That's one of the downsides to parenthood - you just can't manage those late nights anymore. It was fully dark when I got into my car and drove back to the lodge.
I got to the lodge only to discover that my room key was gone. I spent a fruitless ten minutes searching the car's interior, even though I knew where the key was - it was in the dirt, at the campsite, next to where my car was parked. It was there because the only time it would have fallen out of my pocket was when I was fetching my car keys to get into the car.
So I drove back - contacting my camping friends was not an option since the Lightning Lake campground is in a cellphone dead zone. Actually, so was the lodge.
Now at this point, you need to understand that it was super dark. It was effectively the wilderness, so there were no streetlights, and minimal signs. I largely used my GPS to navigate (it knew about the campground roads), I could not find their campsite again, despite spending the day there. Eventually I gave up (because I could keep driving around in circles, but all that was going to accomplish was pissing off lots of campers with my headlights). I skulked back to the lodge.
One good thing about this whole misadventure: I stopped on the road about part way between the lodge and the campground to see a man about a dog. Concluding that important business, I spent a few minutes just looking at the stars. Hours from the nearest city, I could see all of them. Yes, all of them. It was breathtaking.
I got back into my car to drive the remaining way and, after a few hundred yards, caught what looked like an antler-less moose ducking back into the woods. It might have been some other ungulate, I'm no good at identifying critters.
The front desk is manned 24/7 so I got a new key. Next morning I went back to the campsite and discovered that my GPS did not know about all of the roads in the campground. It was missing the loop that my friend's campsite was on. The turnoff for that loop is not obvious, and in the dark I couldn't see it, and my GPS had no evidence that it existed. Hence my inability to find anything.
I hung around while people made breakfast and packed their things, then went back to the lodge to check out (I wasn't going to do it until I tried to recover the key, because they'd have charged me $25 for any missing keys). "Camping" was done for me, and I headed back to Vancouver for further misadventures.
Getting a room at the Manning Park Lodge was actually rather lucky on my part, twice. What I'd done was phone them up about a month earlier to book a room, only to find that they were sold out. Not unexpected. They had a waiting list and I was put on it. The first bit of luck came when they told me that I was no longer on the waiting list, and would I like to actually have a room reservation ("Yes", I said). The second bit of luck came because of when they did this - the night before I left, which meant I wasn't packing camping gear for the whole trip that I wasn't going to use. This removed a lot of stress immediately prior to the trip.
After checking in I drove 5 Km out to Lightning Lake to visit
kermie_canada, spookiemonkie2, somejauntypolka, Chris and Cliff, assorted children, and one dog that doesn't like me. Nothing earth-shattering here - just a nice relaxing evening with some friends. It was wonderful.( The one and only picture I took, behind the cut... )
I was hoping to see Troy while I was there, but that didn't happen. Still not sure what happened there, since dates and locations where obtained.
Later, it got dark, kids were put to bed, swiftly followed by the grown-ups. That's one of the downsides to parenthood - you just can't manage those late nights anymore. It was fully dark when I got into my car and drove back to the lodge.
I got to the lodge only to discover that my room key was gone. I spent a fruitless ten minutes searching the car's interior, even though I knew where the key was - it was in the dirt, at the campsite, next to where my car was parked. It was there because the only time it would have fallen out of my pocket was when I was fetching my car keys to get into the car.
So I drove back - contacting my camping friends was not an option since the Lightning Lake campground is in a cellphone dead zone. Actually, so was the lodge.
Now at this point, you need to understand that it was super dark. It was effectively the wilderness, so there were no streetlights, and minimal signs. I largely used my GPS to navigate (it knew about the campground roads), I could not find their campsite again, despite spending the day there. Eventually I gave up (because I could keep driving around in circles, but all that was going to accomplish was pissing off lots of campers with my headlights). I skulked back to the lodge.
One good thing about this whole misadventure: I stopped on the road about part way between the lodge and the campground to see a man about a dog. Concluding that important business, I spent a few minutes just looking at the stars. Hours from the nearest city, I could see all of them. Yes, all of them. It was breathtaking.
I got back into my car to drive the remaining way and, after a few hundred yards, caught what looked like an antler-less moose ducking back into the woods. It might have been some other ungulate, I'm no good at identifying critters.
The front desk is manned 24/7 so I got a new key. Next morning I went back to the campsite and discovered that my GPS did not know about all of the roads in the campground. It was missing the loop that my friend's campsite was on. The turnoff for that loop is not obvious, and in the dark I couldn't see it, and my GPS had no evidence that it existed. Hence my inability to find anything.
"Did anybody find my keys?"And so my keyless adventure ended.
"I did. They're in the front seat of the truck."
"Thanks."
I hung around while people made breakfast and packed their things, then went back to the lodge to check out (I wasn't going to do it until I tried to recover the key, because they'd have charged me $25 for any missing keys). "Camping" was done for me, and I headed back to Vancouver for further misadventures.
