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Which is exactly where I am at the moment, have been all winter.
Not comfortable.
And now the restaurant is calling me back, and, damn, I need work, but not on those terms...
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"Nice Town" I said...."and what's the lake called again?"
***
I've agreed to go along for the ride and help a friends brother move. "He only has a little stuff..." she tells me.
She was wrong.
He's a pretty full apartment, couches, beds, chairs, tables, desk, basically I was lied to because ...
Well, I wanted the ride. I've not been for almost 40 years, and looking around the town realize I might never have been, although how I made it to Cache Creek from Prince George is a bit of a mystery. The town, largely ugly and brand new, full of chain stores. Nothing remarkable.
The drive, beautiful, after a sense - the weather, warm, to 21 degrees Celsius, no snow on the ground anywhere, the lakes - frozen solid, people out ice fishing in shorts and t-shirts.
We go for dinner and I choose the fish tacos.
Tasty tasty.
And chatting to J***, Lester's brother, he's got a new job in Dease Lake, a mining camp, he does the tech stuff...
He makes formidable cash. 2 weeks in and 2 weeks out.
He's worked at the diamond camps up north as well, and we're talking, this and that, and I'm showing him the giant clams that show up on my Facebook feed and explain how they're filled with colorful pearls and even gold nuggets...
Which sets him to thinking...
"If you seeded a clam with a bit of gold would you get a golden pearl???"
Clearly not a geologist. Otherwise a smart enough guy.
Pass the night on his sofa, next day we get underway and it takes about 5 hours to get everything into the truck, then we head off, towards Vernon...
We stop at a taco place on the north end of Cache Creek. I don't have a name, it's a sign just as your leaving, farm-to-table. And while I didn't take a picture, they were amazing. Huge, with a buffet of hot sauces and salsas - watermelon, blueberry, pineapple, strawberry, cilantro, cucumber, onion, and on and on...
I make 2 tacos a towering foot high. And, while it's plenty enough, I go for 2 more. I won't be this way again, or not soon.
Although, from what I can see, the geology up here warrants some exploration. All the dilapidated and crumbling pioneer and prospectors shacks, junk shops, thrift shops, but that's another tour best done on my own.
The weather again Saturday, 21 degrees.
Summer will be hell. Already there are fire warnings.
We make it to Salmon Arm. He has a locker. But it's dark and so we park the truck and head for dinner.
No dinner for me, I'm stuffed with tacos.
Sunday, unload truck into locker, then drive to Vernon and unload truck.
We're done. From Vernon back to Nelson, by way of Greenwood, another Taco Stand, some more tacos...
Good, but the stand in Cache Creek is the best I've come across.
And that's that. A total of 2 stops for thrift shops - in Salmon Arm, and Williams Lake, although we passed dozens and I undoubtedly missed out on hundreds of treasures I haven't the budget for. But it gave me a taste to go back, so many unexplored roads and trails, antique shops, the very real possibility of gold, precious metals and gems.
That's where I've been the past few days, there and now back fucking around with the blog...but that's a seperate post.
The top cufflinks, brilliant, as big around as a toonie, only $30 is a bit steep.
And the ones beneath, at $45, are preposterously priced. I usually pay no more than $5 a pair, as much as I'd like these I can't justify the price. Salvation Army in Williams Lake, seriously overpriced.
And this, spotted at a gas station along the way, the local arts-and-crafts of Williams Lake. And there were proper drug-dealer baseball hats with pot leaves and sayings like "Dope" and I was thinking, I gotta change up my look, I'm far too conservative, shake it up, put together my baseball cap, tracksuit, look like a proper DJ turned fentanyl junkie, once a week hang around town like that, then back to my regular look, a sure-fire way to broaden my realm of acquaintance...
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Kelowna, again, a last minute deal with JR gives me his car, and I'm off.
9:00 leaving Balfour after work, a 4 1/2 hour drive and I'm there, on the outskirts of Kelowna.
The drive, deer, coyotes on the highway, careful careful, a pleasant night with tunes of my own choosing bluetoothed onto the stereo (and I need to download more, my playlist not nearly varied enough), the back, the smell of wet dogs, but spacious enough to spread out.
I need a car like this. A car with a working muffler / speakers / doors / windows / transmission...
A car that goes places.
Monday, the Dentist/Periodontist for a thorough deep clean. Topical anesthesia, then lie back for 2 hours while the ultrasound whines in your ears, and then the pounding, pulling, scraping of the deep clean. I feel nothing.
Trying to move, mentally, into a happy place I fail. Instead I end up in a hypnopompic fugue, where ideas and images just wander in and out of my consciousness.
SO many of these thoughts are of a character that I'd never consider, considered, so random and unrelated that I'm forced again to consider the idea that thoughts - ideas, consciousness - are not local to our brain, rather, our mind is attuned to a certain frequency - by our thinking, diet, company and conversation, by our habits, and we receive therefore only those ideas we can decipher or understand.
Because - really, the stray corners my mind was wandering in, there was no explaining. Much like "Brazil" where at the end the Dentist "loses" his "patient" I was off and wandering Elysian fields.
Mondays appointment done I spend the rest of the day exploring Kelowna. Hit up a few thrift shops, consider getting a hotel - but - the dentist, more expensive than I'd planned, and I'm calling in loans, there is no money to be spent on hotels this trip.
Tuesday, loans in, explore a few more thrift shops, antique shops, traverse the corridor from Penticton to Kelowna, but - while there are a few treasures, really, I need nothing, and I'm just killing time before the second half of my appointment.
I notice, am appalled, at the state of homelessness in Kelowna. Shopping Carts, piles of rubbish, sketchy people everywhere. But, look past the strip malls and it's quite pretty, only impossible to really appreciate given my budget and the character of this trip.
Afternoon, finish appointment, another two hours in the chair, the same, drifting aimlessly through a field of ideas not my own, and then I'm free, off, back to Nelson, pouring diet coke all down my shirt because my face is so numb I can't feel my lips to make a seal around the coke bottle...
Now, back to work, there are a great many bills to be paid...
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And, another childhood memory from when Kelowna was still an interesting place, "Bedrock City", which we drove past (but never stopped in), modelled after "The Flinstones", concrete volcanoes, dinosaurs, rides like the log ride (on a painted blue sluice filled with water).
Long gone.
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Stumbled across this, probably good that I didn't know about it while I lived there...
Link: The Atlantis Bookshop
On this side of the world there's always
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weiser_Antiquarian_Books
Frankly there's nothing better than a used bookstore or old curiosity shop, and to find a bookstore that specializes in my more esoteric/preposterous beliefs and reading is - well, I'd be there far too much I'm sure.
There are plenty more, but I'll let you discover them on your own.