I didn’t buy any books, unfortunately. I made due with what I had from home, which was a copy of Bill Clinton’s memoirs. I read about one hundred pages while I was on the trip and found it to be generally unbearable. Books by politicians are really hard to read because they’ll so blatantly glossy and uncontroversial. A politician’s job is to tell half truths, so apart from the odd extraordinary political figure like Nelson Mandela or, in my opinion, Aymaan Hirsi Ali, these books are incredibly uninteresting.
Instead of reading more about our last president’s life, I went back to Canadian TV. Later that night there was a movie on where Tommy Lee Jones plays a cowboy that deserted his family to live with Indians (Native Americans, not the ones with nuclear weapons). It was pretty intense, as the bad guy was a big Indian bloke who kidnapped innocent girls and brutally murdered them.
The hotel was run by a really nice man, whose family lived in Calgary. Revelstoke was (and is, unless something has really changed) a very small town, and he didn’t bring his children out there because he felt a big city like Calgary was a better place to raise them. He worked the hotel on a seasonal basis, and when summer ended he would be going back out east.
He was from Pakistan, and both my mom and I had some good conversations with him. My brother in law is from Morocco and he was very interested in hearing about him. I told him that he had recently obtained citizenship in the United States because he planned to go back to Morocco to visit and wanted to make sure he would be able to get back in the US afterwards.
He was very courteous with us and didn’t charge us after the car failed to be repaired properly. We were pretty lucky. We could have gotten a total asshole managing the hotel, but he recognized that the situation was totally out of control. It’s nice to know there’s people that kind out there.
We had brought along our dog, Georgia, on the trip, and this was the longest that she had ever gone away from home. Georgia is a border collie, and border collies can’t stand to be cooped in a house or anywhere for long periods of time. If a border collie isn’t given the amount of exercise it needs, it will go insane.
This gave an incentive to get outside of the hotel and explore the town. If Georgia wasn’t around, both my mom and I most likely would have stayed inside doing nothing (though I did do plenty of that while I was there but nevertheless). Georgia really didn’t seem to mind being in the town. Her favorite two people in the world were there, and she got even more exercise than she did in Seattle. So even if we were stressed out by the situation, she was all smiles.
The whole dog situation seemed very strange in Revelstoke. Dogs were not allowed to be left unattended, which meant that you couldn’t tie her up while you went to go buy groceries. This seemed really weird when combined with the impression I got walking around the town. Revelstoke was filled with dogs, and none of the owners seemed to keep them on leashes. Dogs were running across the street without any owners visible.
There was a very long beach that stretched for miles near the town. It was covered by rocks and sands. The trail that lead to it when through areas with uncut grass reaching several feet in the air, an old bridge and an area where several horses were grazing. Georgia had just seen horses for the first time on another trip a month earlier and when she saw these ones she stopped and became very interested.
Once we got to the beach, Georgia leapt into the water and ran through it. She absolutely loves going to the beach and will dunk her head to get herself as soaked in water as possible. When you see Georgia playing, it’s hard not to smile. I love having a dog for the simple reason that she makes me smile no matter how hard and mean the world seems.
Two weeks in, the car had still not been repaired. My mom was fed up and didn’t want to use up all of that year’s vacation waiting for a car to be repaired. The truck driver who had helped us through the entire problem arranged for a rental car to be provided for a trip back to Seattle and eventually a trip back towards Vancouver, B.C., where the car was being kept.
While on the way back towards Seattle, I did an experiment with the rental car’s radio. I tuned to the big Vancouver hip-hop station, which was actually pretty decent, and kept it tuned to nothing else all the way to Seattle. I was very surprised by the results. The signal stayed relatively clear all the way and didn’t get lost until we reached the Northgate area.
Apart from summer camp, the time spent in Canada was the longest amount of time I’d spent outside of Seattle (all together it was almost three weeks). I wouldn’t rule out ever living up north, but I will rule out ever live in Revelstoke.
