Anti-Social Cow

Today was mostly about travelling. With 270 miles to cover before arriving in Clearwater, we were on the road at a reasonable time, destination numero uno, for a coffee stop, a small town with the colourful name of Lillooet. Our hope was that there would also be one of those (Lil' Loo-ette) - ha ha. You can see by this terrible joke that we have had to find ways to entertain ourselves during the several hours in the car. Not that the scenery isn't gorgeous, if not awe inspiring, but dare I say you get a tad complacent after a while. Such scenes of jaw-dropping beauty should never be taken for granted and sure enough, from time to time, as we would round a bend to be presented with yet another awe-inspiring view, the "Wow"s would still fall from our lips unheeded. And we did have a rather deep and meaningful conversation about the vast eons of time that have carved such wonders of nature, and how the vistas will have been formed, and changed, with the arrival and progression of ice ages, the influences of man, how brief our time is on earth etc (kinda deep for on holiday, eh?) but mostly we've been playing 'spot the ....'. More about that shortly. 

I must just note for posterity that if I appear, on our return home to be permanently leaning to the left at a 45 degree angle it's because I'm still (yes still) adjusting to being a passenger, on the right, when the winding roads are so often cut into the mountainside, and where I feel like I'm about to be tipped off the road, not just into the gutter but down a crevasse!! Not that I don't trust HRH at the wheel, but the poor love is full of cold, isn't sleeping too well and we all know that biology dictates that you close your eyes when you sneeze!! Oh, and maybe, just maybe, I'm a minor control freak and fancy getting my hands on that Chevy steering wheel. 

Back to 'SmallToilet'.  Funny place, in existence probably only by dint of it being approximately 2 hours out of Whistler, and halfway to somewhere else. It's a town of one street with the weirdest information centre I've ever encountered. Looked normal from the outside ...

... then we went IN. 

This info centre is more like a museum (actually, for 'museum' read junk yard). To get past the guardian you must pop a donation into the jar, hand over your bag, then step in not yet knowing that what's to be found is a collection of someone previously inhabiting this place's stuff. Very old stuff. But not very nice. Truth. Sorry. 

Having quickly escaped I learnt more about Lillooet from the info boards outside, for example ...

1. The town's golf course is in a sheep paddock - so watch your step.

2. The newspaper editor in the gold rush era was a feisty woman, known to everyone as 'Ma'. 

3. To cross the river you have to use the 'Bridge of 23 Camels'

4. Jade has been found in the river ... (not sure what she was doing there in the first place - boom boom).

That's as much as I retained (or could be bothered to read) before heading off in search of the town's namesake. We did also follow a recommendation to buy a local delicacy, a cinnamon roll which, as a particularly special specialness is 'stuffed with raspberries'. I'm not sure you can count 2 raspberries as 'stuffed' but it was OK and got demolished along with a coffee before we drove on.

The next stage was sadly rather less enjoyable. The scenery changed quite dramatically. The lush pine-clad mountains gave way to dry, sandy-looking crags with sparsely flourishing vegetation. Interesting geology, but not as impactful to look at, so we popped HRH's new birthday CDs into the music system and ate up a few miles accompanied by E. Clapton Esq and The Lumineers (separately, not together - that would be weird). 

A not very good shot, taken through the car window at some speed, of crevassy sandy, irony-looking hillsides.

Some miles on, having dropped now into the valley bottom and as the vistas changed again (and having fully expected not to find nice places to shop) we pulled into a rest area by a lake at a convenient moment for our pre-prepared picnic (I was not a girl guide for nothing, you know). Lunch was nice, and was also when our 'spot the ..' game really got going. 

Lunch anyone?

Until this point we hadn't been fortunate enough to see either a bear at reasonably close quarters, or a caribou, or a moose so these were now top of the list. And certainly, as we moved north and into an area known for its lakes and creeks we felt we stood a reasonable chance. HRH was first to score. He got a caribou. When I say 'got' I don't mean he shot one, or ran it over, but he saw it spring across the road before I did. He also reckoned he scored again but I maintain he cheated by asking me something about the route which required map consultation just before Caribou II made an appearance (yeah, right). Anyway, I still reckon I win. It was the anti-social cow that did it*. We were still laughing about my sighting when we arrived at The Lake House in Clearwater (which is in a gorgeous setting, by a lake. Funny that). 

Tomorrow we may take tea at the end of the jetty as the sun rises - if the midges don't get me. 

*

Me (excitedly): "Look. Down there. There's a black thing by the water". 

HRH: "Where?" as we drove past. 

Me: "There was a thing, a big thing, black, with long legs, down by the water. Wasn't a bear. I'm sure. It's legs were too long". 

HRH: "Well how big was it?"

Me: "Hard to say. About the size of a cow, but black, or dark anyway" (by now my recollection of the thing is fading)

HRH: "Sounds like a cow to me"

Me: "No. Cows aren't wild. They're farm animals. They live in herds. Not on their own anyway. This one was on its own".

HRH: "So maybe it was a cow but with poor social skills". We laughed. Anti-social cow! 

I maintain he was trying to deflect any possibility that I may just have seen a moose :-) Or it could have been a tree stump .... Who knows. Back to the drawing board tomorrow.