Happy birthday to me!

©2013 Lydia Hinshaw

Lakefront walk in Nakusp, BC

 TSAWWASSEN, BC -- My 63rd birthday finds us here, waiting in the rain to board a BC Ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.
 The past few days, we have been following the route of a bicycle tour I took in 1991, from Jasper to Golden to Revelstoke to Nakusp to Castelgar,  Grand Forks, Osooyoos, Princeton and Hope.
 My memories of that trip are mainly that I pedaled slowly uphill for hours and hours every day, then spent 20 minutes racing downhill toward the next camping spot.  The whole thing is much easier to do in the Magic Bus.
 In Grand Forks, BC, we spent the night in the same municipal campground where I'd stayed in 1991, and it hadn't changed much.  The town was another story.
 Grand Forks was settled many years ago by members of a Russian pacificist sect, and Russian foods, especially borscht, were on every menu in town.  My tour group buddies and I sampled some in a downtown restaurant.  I liked it, though not enough to seek it out anywhere since then.
 The Grand Forks restaurant brochure still lists three places that brag about their borscht, but it being Sunday, not a one of these eateries were open.  And the ones with hours posted planned to be closed Monday for Labour Day too.
 Also, the town's landmark historic hotel burned to the ground 18 months ago, torched by a disgruntled local resident whose previous bad behavior had gotten him banned from the hotel's bar.
 So we left Grand Forks  without a Russian meal, and with some disappointment on my part that it wasn't as neat a place as I remembered.
 Monday night we spent in Hope, camped on a bluff overlooking the Fraser River.  The campground, called Telte Yet, is a First Nation business which we didn't remember until we arrived and then we recognized it -- we camped here in a tent in the fall of 2006, when we were on our way home from our first trip to Alaska.
 Our ship has come in, so to speak, and we will soon drive aboard for the two-hour trip to Nanaimo.