Day 31: Wed Aug 3 " Jade City, Cassiar, Iskut & We've Got Company!

DAY 31: Wednesday, Aug 3 “ Jade City, Cassiar Mine, and Iskut – we’ve got company”

We woke early at our beautiful Boya Lakeside campsite and had a sausage and pancake breakfast (cooked by daddy, of course! – will this continue on when we get home? Hmmmmm). We were up and at ‘em at 8am. The kids toodled around the site and by the water while we got packed up. Ollie was quite excited about the gray-jays that came yesterday and this morning to steal food from our picnic table.  Jonathan took the kids on a little bike ride (ollie on his pedal bike and amelia in the kangaroo seat on Jsy’s bike) and then went to the playground for a last play while I finished packing up the RV. We managed a record-breaking departure time of 10:30am and were high-fiving each other as we left.

Our first stop was Jade City… touristy little place but a neat stop. It was cool to see the huge boulders of Jade getting sliced up on all the wet saws. Ollie was curious about all the different things for sale in the well stocked gift shop, and asked lots of questions (as usual) about all the different stones and gems he saw. Amelia was probably most excited about the cat she saw walking beside a motorbike.  I took their obligatory photo beside the big bear statue under the JADE CITY sign (both kids decided to peek out from between the bear’s legs, rather than stand beside it, which makes for a rather funny photo).

Around 12:15pm we left Jade City and drove back a couple of kilometres up the highway to the road that leads to the Cassiar Mine.  We drove up a dirt/gravel road past some deserted looking buildings, and a huge green slag pile (?). It was so huge! Kind of eerie. Along the back side of the huge pile of rocks was a carved out road for big working vehicles to drive up and dump the rocks. It was quite a sight.  At the top of the road that we were able to access (there was a gate that was closed to the public) there was a car junk yard with lots of neat old cars rusting away. Beside the gate was a big building that had sign reading Cassiar Crystalite.  We pulled over near the old cars (hoping not to be mistaken for a junker! Ha) and had some bagels and apples and cheese assortments. We explored a little bit before loading up and heading back down the dirt road to the highway. On the road back down, we saw a bit of strange sight… a horse walking down the road quite slowly. It looked like it was injured at first, but as we got closer behind it, we saw that it had a chain connecting its two front fetlocks (ankles?) that made it able to walk, but not to run. It also had a leather collar with a large bear bell attached to it up high around its neck. Beautiful horse. It didn’t seem concerned with us, or the fact that it was only able to walk along with smallish steps. Really strange and caught us a bit off guard.

We drove on to Dease Lake (Ollie and Amelia slept along the way) and when we arrived, we stopped in at a little supermarket to pick up supplies. Jonathan had gone in first to ask around and see if anyone knew his friend Wendy (whom he had met back in his BCIT days and had been in touch with on and off… we heard last that she was living in Dease Lake). No one had heard of her. He did report in to Ollie that there was a great toy section in the supermarket/café/liquor store/fishing store. We got the kids out and went in to get supplies (fishing tackle, beer, groceries, but NO toys). Ollie and Amelia were very interested in the toys available in the crammed little toy section. It was quite a selection!!  Oliver fell in love with a dragon/transformer toy, but was not allowed to buy it. This created quite a problem, which turned into a full meal deal meltdown in the store and daddy had to remove him physically while Amelia and I finished getting the last things and paying for everything. Amelia seemed unruffled and was quite happy to pull the little plastic wheelie basket of groceries around for me and stood on the case of beer while I paid for the food. When we came out, Daddy had Ollie in a very strong bear hug. Oliver was still in full meltdown mode, and kept trying to escape to run back into the store to get this very special (and very overpriced) plastic toy.  An older local with his little one eyed dog, Popeye, tried to cheer Ollie up to no avail. We managed to get him back to the RV and after much crying (and strapping him into his carseat) he managed to settle down. Yowzer. That was a doozie. We’ll be hearing about the toy again later I can guarantee!

At this point it had started to rain, and the Stewart-Cassiar Highway is basically a dirt/gravel road with no road lines. It is hard to consider it as a “highway”…  So our short stop at 3pm turned into a longer stop due to the meltdown, but we were on the road again around 4:30pm.

By 5:45pm we had made it to Iskut and decided to stop for the night here before we pressed our luck with cranky kids.  We randomly pulled over at a very nice wooden sign carved with the name “RedGoat Lodge” and pulled into a long sweeping gravel driveway that led to a neat log cabin house/office. To the left were some “cabins” in a row, motel style. To the right was a building clad with offcuts from a mill (the bark slices) that housed showers, two bathrooms and a laundry room. Further down the slope were several camping sites at a most gorgeous lakeside, with some trees between each site. Perfect.   They had wifi, and water and electricity hookups at the sites… even better! 

Jonathan went to pay for the site and ask for an extension cord so we could plug in properly, and also ask about laundry. He came back with an old extension cord, and reports that the guy running the place was a slightly “odd duck”.  He paid for two loads of laundry and was given the key to the laundry room to use as we liked. Ollie found a big elastic band and made some various sling-shot style contraptions on the picnic table. Amelia loves climbing around under the tables like they are forts. To each his/her own. We all spent some time at the lake (just steps from our RV) throwing rocks and admiring the AMAZING view. So gorgeous… a vast, misty lake with treed mountains in the background. Stunning. Ollie and Amelia LOVED throwing rocks into the water, and we walked down the beach slightly to cross over to a small rock spit along a wooden plank. In the water beside the plank was a tire, which seemed out of place, and Amelia was quite taken by it… repeating to us that there was “tire in der” .

We cheated and made pizzas in our oven (yes! In our oven!) and even baked some cookies in there! Pretty novel and fun. At 8:30pm we dosed the monkeys up with Melatonin, and by 9:30pm they were asleep. Wuhoooo!  

I also had run up earlier and put the laundry in. Such a nice new washer/dryer set! They were 2 years old and still had the plastic on the fronts. Very satisfying to clean our clothes in this nice big laundry machine. Ah, the little things in life.  I finished the second load after the kids were asleep and went to return the key to the office. It was just before 10pm when I peeked at the office door which was all closed up. Then a face appeared behind the glass door. I held up the key and looked with a questioning gesture of where to put the key. He just shook his head slowly and made the gesture with his hands of going to sleep. I put the key on the table beside the door and smiled and left. It was a little strange he wouldn’t open the door to take the key, since I was right there, but I didn’t bother questioning it, knowing that Jonathan had a bit of a strange interaction with him, too.

In the darkness of the quiet RV, I typed out some journal days on the laptop in hopes of uploading a bunch of days through the wifi at the office in the morning.  It was by the dim light of my laptop and reading light that I saw IT. I sat bolt upright and said to Jonathan, “Oh --------! I just saw a mouse. No joke!”    A little furry ball with a tail had scurried across our bathroom floor and darted behind the toilet. We had known that this was a possibility. That mice often find little entry ways into campers and RVs and make themselves at home. This was the first sighting and sign of any such hitchhiker. Damn.   Brave Jonathan (he hates mice) turned on the light in the bathroom and looked to see if there was any escape route for the mouse. There was a hole behind the toilet basin where a pipe when in and there appeared to be room for the mouse to dart in (and out?). He plugged the hole with crumpled up aluminum foil and we used Amelia’s old welly boots with rocks in them to try and block either side of it a little bit. I pulled the bathroom door across (kind of a folding accordion style door, with magnet closure) and piled some pop and beer can boxes in front of it to try and block the gap underneath. I also piled Jonathan’s shoes on top as an extra defence or at least an alarm if the mouse jumped up onto them and knocked them over).  I also pulled the table across the “entrance” to our sleeping area like a wall so that at least it might deter it from joining us while we snoozed.  

Needless to say, it was a little hard to sleep knowing there was a critter in with us. A few hours into the night, I woke to the sound of Jonathan’s shoe falling to the floor. I turned on my flashlight and sure enough, the culprit had escaped the bathroom. I very bravely crossed the table barricade into the war zone and tried to find out where it went. It darted out at me unexpectedly and fearing that it would try to get past me into the “sleeping zone”, I waved my flashlight at it and kicked my feet and sent it scurrying back towards the pop can box wall. I couldn’t get to the door to redirect it in my flurry, and it ended up in the bathroom again and disappeared. The tinfoil seemed untouched, so who knows where it actually escaped to. Jonathan woke up during this commotion, and remembered that we had a couple of traps under one of the seats. He had seen them when we bought the RV. We set some traps in the bathroom and kept up the table barricade. No further luck removing the little rascal that night.