End of Road Trip

Sadly, the time had come when we needed to return to Vancouver to sell the van and prepare for the next phase in this adventure. We gave ourselves plenty of time to sell, we had four weeks before we would get desperate. We were unsure of the market and it was the end of the season. After researching BC out-of-province vehicle import rules (this is one country, right?) we were happy to find that we were exempt from import certification requirements as we exceeded 3,501 kg. We rented a storage unit, dumped the van contents there and spent a couple of days cleaning what had been our only home for the last four months. With everything looking really good the ad went up on kijiji on Friday and we crossed our fingers. The hit counter went up and up and exceeded 400 very quickly, 21 inquiries followed, there were three offers and the van was gone on Sunday! Maybe we'd priced it too low? Now, all of a sudden, too quickly, we were totally homeless.

Out came the tent and we were "lucky" to secure a campsite at the Capilano River RV Park just down the street from where our winter rental apartment had been located in West Vancouver. It's in an ideal location for visiting Vancouver, if you don't mind traffic noise, as it's almost underneath the Lion's Gate Bridge. It soon began to grate on our nerves though, we felt as if we were living in a roadside ditch, which we were! Crammed in beside neighbours on one side that liked to play and sing along to loud rap music and French tourists smoking Gauloises generating blue clouds of smoke on the other, queuing up for morning showers and nightly visits by urban skunks and raccoons jarred our senses and we had to come up with a plan to get ourselves out of there, fast! When you're homeless, without a vehicle and naturally parsimonious it was difficult to come up with ideas, but, as usual, we did.

First, we decided to have a rest to recover from a bout with the flu and cashed in some points for a six night hotel stay at the Sheraton in Surrey, what luxury after living in a van all summer. Points programs seem to be getting a lot of bad press recently and rightly so. Long ago, we cancelled all our points programs except for one. The Starwood Preferred Guest program http://www.spg.com has been invaluable. This year alone we've had eleven free reward nights at very nice hotels. Points are accumulated 1:1 for every dollar spent on our Starwood American Express card which we try and use at every opportunity. $3,000 on the card means a free hotel night (some hotels, newer and fancier, cost more points). This sounds like an infomercial, but, we find this an amazing value and hope it doesn't change.

Then, rested and reorganized we decided to go for a walk, a long fifty kilometre walk, along the Sunshine Coast Trail.