Finding Betty
When I flew to Calgary to pick up the bus from Skye I thought I could get a paper map from a truck stop along the highway.for the drive back. Little did I know, After being basically living off grid and in the woods for the last 15 years, not traveling further than Vancouver a couple of times I have not needed to navigate any new places or landcapes. When I got the bus that day I drove with just a phone but no I-maps or Google maps to help me. I figured I didn’t need it and I could just get a paper map and find my way back to Slocan.
After getting turned around a couple times in Calgary trying to find the right highway I finally found a truck stop and ran in to get a map. The attendant said “ UH, we dont have paper maps anymore. But we got free wi-fi.”
I was like, Holy shit. I felt something weird just happened. Like I missed something along the way. Really, no more maps. What does this mean? I knew I needed to head south so I just followed the sun and the signs on the higway and eventually made it to Fernie, BC and spent the night. Next morning I think I used mapquest to chart a course the next day and made it back to Slocan that evening. As I pondered how we would navigate on this journey without paper maps, I mean I knew we could still get them from other places, I was told by friends to get Google maps or I-maps on my phone . I balked at that idea it seeming too high tech and un neccesary! Well I let it go for the next couple of months while we finished other things to get ready to leave the country in September. I guess I figured we could still find an Atlas and use it for all of our wanderings and besides it would be cool to use a highlighter and trace our route on the paper map .
The day finially came to ship out, all our preperations were made, the ship and been refitted for our long journey for a family of five and a cat. We left Slocan in the early hours in mid September and planned to drive to Vancouver to make our appointment with Canada Border Services to officially check out of Canada.
Well Inanna had an old BC roadmap in her files that we could follow to Vancouver but I started to think about being IN Vancouver with a 40 foot bus and a 7 foot trailer looking for a parking spot! I started to get a little nervous. The reality of the situations started to get real, fast. I recalled a time 16 or so years ago when Aura was a baby, we left BC and drove around the states for a summer in a small car with a pop up camper behind us . I recall trying to drive around Seattle at one point and a certin panic and fear arose from the depths of my being. What a nightmare it was trying to park anywhere and telling myself, firmly, after a few grey hairs emerged instantly, I would Never go into a big city again with anything but a car or truck! And here I was on the way to a huge city with a school bus and a trailer and 3 kids and a cat with no maps and hoping it will just work out? That somehow I would just use my jedi skills and watch the spaces just open up as I needed them? And all the spaces I would need would be pull thru spots and I would not even have to think about backing up? I began to panic. Luckily, as I started to share my concerns with the rest of the crew, Aura piped in saying, “just use I-maps on your phone.” I was like, “what?”
“yeah, all you have to do is type in where you want to go and it will take you there,” I know why immediatly my resistance came up, just one more thing to hand over to a computer, one more convienience to make our life easier. Sure, one more reliance on the cell phone, one more trap and on and on and on in my head.
Anyway, for some reason, probably my jedi insight, more likely because of my deep wound from the Seattle trip, I said “ok” lets try it. Well needlees to say, I handed the phone back to my 16 year old daughter and within seconds I now had I-maps sucessfully loaded on the phone and we were being guided by some strange new navigator with a lovely , slighlty British voice that told me exactly where to go. I was enchanted. My fear had been lifted, the panic was eased. So much so she was given a name and a spot on our crew , and that was how we found Betty and she has been in our lives ever since…