Finding our tribe on the road

It is a trite in the world of travelers to miss having a community. We can feel quite lonely, craving dinners with friends and heart to heart conversations. I thought it was the trade-off for being nomadic. But a great encounter showed me I was wrong! While camping at Seaside, OR, we met not one, but 5 amazing families! We jumped right into the real conversations and I felt I could be vulnerable with them because they totally were getting me and my reality. Those people were speaking my language: unschooling, making kombucha on the road, photography woes, traveling with your Vitamix, needle felting, inner journey, food intolerances. It was love at first sight!

I have found my tribe. A village on the road.

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A stroll on the beach, frisbee fun, a talk with our neighbors about clamming and the good chanterelle picking spots, a storybook made my Mara just for him, games from the others.

Oh we showered him with love. He deserves it so.

On mist and love...

The bus was wrapped in a blanket of mist. All four of us at the table, fully absorbed in a project. Mathilde making hemp bracelet, Mara and Aïsha sewing clothes for their stuffed animals, and me, sewing another patch on Aïsha’s favorite pants.

After lunch, Aïsha and I walking on the beach. And the sun that peeked through the fog and made everything feels so very bright. The siren she made with seaweeds, feathers and sea shells. And then her smile when she ran towards me, her arms spread open and how she hugged me tight. I kissed her eyes and felt tears fill mine.
My little girl. My big wise girl. 

I hope I will never forget those magical moments.

The beautiful wild sea at Ecola State Park, OR

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"People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. What we seek is an experience of being alive." –Joseph Campbell

 

We had been dreaming of the sea for months and were all looking forward to hitting the Oregon coast.  Ecola State Park was our first stop and it didn't disapoint! The view from the cliffs is totally breathtaking and the beach (Indian Point) is nothing short of amazing, reminding us of our favorite secluded Costa Rican beach. The girls played for more than a half hour in the freezing cold water, among fully suited surfers!

*Note that this park is a day use area only (no camping) and the beautiful drive that leads to it is not suitable for an RV or larger trailer.
 

Mountain biking at L.L. Stub Stewart State Park, OR

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We finally got our bus back on Friday night at 7 pm and we were more than ready to leave Portland. We took the road towards the coast not knowing where we would camp that night. When we arrived at L.L. Stub Stewart State Park, we were lucky enough to score one of the two last campsites available and we soon discovered that we had stumbled across an amazing playground. The mountain bike trails have been created by mountain bikers for mountain bikers and it shows! The single track was so much fun! 

Portland, Oregon

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Portland, Oregon, is one of the most alternative cities in America. It's a green, cool and incredibly bike-friendly city. And it's a total foodie town. Food carts are the big thing here. They are everywhere and most offer very high quality tasty food. 

Every time we visit big cities, the girls are deeply disturbed by the sight of homeless people and beggars. They ask questions, try to understand how these people ended up on the street, feel sad and helpless. While we were waiting at one of the food cart, Mathilde had spotted a young woman begging on the corner of a street who looked quite unwell. She decided to buy a bratwurst for her with her own money. It was a very touching moment when she gave it to her.

JF spent a few day working at Stumptown Coffee while the girls and I explored the downtown area. We spent a few hours at Finnegan's Toy store (and good 30 minutes of those playing with wind-up toys and laughing!)

We spent more than 5 hours (over the course of 3 days) at Powell's City of book, the largest independent used and new bookstore in the world.

On another day, we walked Hawthorne Blvd and had a lot of fun in the vintage second-hand clothing stores. The girls even found their Halloween costumes!

We also went for a soak (and a shower!) in the beautiful outdoor heated pool of the Kennedy School, a 1916 school turned into an hotel, restaurant and theater. 

One day, we went to Washington Park and visited the rose garden while JF worked in the elephant house, an open building (with electricity!) that once housed the first elephant coming to Oregon from Thailand. We also went for a hike in the beautiful trails of that park.

A weekend of hiking in Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon

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Mt. Hood National Forest is about an hour drive from Portland. We camped at Still Creek campground at 4000 feet, an awesome little campground with the most beautiful campsites where barely no light filters through the tall trees. A land of moss, ferns and lichens...


On Saturday, we went hiking to Mirror Lake (so-called because we often can see the reflexion of Mt. Hood in it) and kept going up to Mt. Tom, Dick and Harry, where we had an incredible view of Mt. Hood. It was a perfect 10 km hike that we all loved!

Taking in the amazing view!

Great lunch on the trail!

On Sunday, we went to the Timberline Lodge and hiked the Timberline Trail (which is part of the Pacific Crest Trail, an interesting synchronicity since I am finishing the great book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed). The view was just stunning, especially on the ridge where we stopped for lunch. JF kept going and ran the Paradise Park loop up and down the canyon.

One of the most amazng campsites I have seen!

I could stop here and lead you to believe that we live the most idyllic and perfect life. And in a way, we truly do. But I wouldn't be honest if I didn't tell you that we have had rough patches. The bus is spending a week at the garage for a radiator problem and we have been sleeping in the garage courtyard in the Westy for a few nights, while JF tries to find places to work at 5 am... Portland is an awesome city, but it is not exactly camping-friendly. Boondocking is not allowed anywhere (not even in Walmart parking lots) and the only campgrounds less than 40 miles from town are two ugly and expensive RV parks. Finding a place to shower was a half-day feat! 

We are now at the hotel. We have electricity, a shower and a place to do our laundry. JF can focus on all the work he has to do while I try to fill our bellies with half-decent meals. The girls have been pretty awesome through all of this and we are spending amazing moments together everyday. It's just incredibly intense right now. 

Rock climbing at The Feathers, WA

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We crossed the border from Osoyoos and headed down into Washington State. I had no idea that I would soon feel like I was in Utah, with canyons and mesas all around, and clusters of sagebush everywhere there is not an apple or pear orchard (there are so many, that the air smells of apples!), the only green spots in a dry desert landscape.

We went rock climbing in a wonderful spot called The Feathers, in Vantage. It was 31 degrees Celcius outside, so we chose the north side! The routes were so much fun!

We had stopped at a fruit stand on our way and found some incredible Honey Crisp apples (unsprayed!) for 1,50 a pound and a giant super sweet watermelon (organic) for $5! They were the perfect source of energy for a day of climbing in hot weather.

Hayne's Point Provincial Park, Osoyoos, BC

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It had been a really long day. A day of waiting at the garage for the Westy to be ready (and then, seing the bill…) and then waiting for hours in traffic because of a car accident. It was warm and sunny outside. Clearly not the best day for being stuck in the bus.

When we arrived at Hayne’s Point Provincial Park at 9:30 pm, the campground was full. Fortunately, there was still some room in the overflow, right by the lake. The girls had been sleeping for an hour, but when we arrived, Aïsha said she was too warm. She joined me outside. It was pitch black. And we stood there in silence, hugging each other, looking at the stars. She decided she wanted to go for a swim, climbed down the rocks to the lake and jumped in! Ahh! The feeling of swimming in complete darkness! She was smiling from ear to ear as I let the warm wind wash out the frustration of the day.

Funny how morning never knows what evening will bring…

 

P.S. The photos have been taken the next morning...

Rossland, BC, and a bit of nostalgia

The bus got a facelift thanks to Andy's artistic touch!

We spent the week in Rossland, BC, visiting our dear friends Andy and Martine, as well as Annie, in Winlaw, an hour away (I forgot my camera when we went to visit her.... so no photos of her little corner of paradise...). The kids created amazing plays and art, there was always great food cooking on their beautiful big stove and we soaked up every last bit of friendship we could before heading south on our adventure.

Even when you know you are where you should be in life and feel truly blessed to be, there are moments where nostalgia takes over. Visiting our friends and connecting with their community made me miss mine. This morning, I woke up thinking about all the people I miss. I sometimes question our decision. How can we stay away from the people we love for so long? How can this be the right thing?

This morning, I sat with the tears of insecurity. And the tears of love for those I miss.

And I also sat with a deep feeling a gratitude for all that we have. For everything that comes our way. For the amazing love I feel for JF and the girls. For the adventure that is still to come.

This is all so alive right now. Some days, all I can do is be thankful for emotions and allow the beauty of the present moment to eclipse our worries for the future.

Organic fruits and veggies picking at Covert Farm

We went to Covert farm, a biodynamic farm we discovered two years ago, to pick fruits and veggies.

We picked perfectly ripped blackberries until our fingers were purple and ate sun-warmed strawberries, walking barefoot in the warm soft sand in between the rows. Too ripe tomatoes and peppers were all over the fields on the ground, like the forgotten toys of a toddler.

We left with organic corn cobs, strawberries, blackberries, incredibly sweet white grapes and nectarines, funky carrots and a bunch of veggies we picked ourselves (hot peppers and sweet peppers, yellow tomatoes, cucumbers) and they gave Mathilde the yellow watermelon she found in the field.

We arrived at Gladstone Provincial Park just before sunset, just in time for a soak in Christina Lake. I sat on a log, reading a book while Mara talked about an imaginary island in the middle of the Atlantic, devastated by a big storm, where a chief lived with a white raven whose feathers were magical. There was a golden tree, the only tree that survived the storm. The house of a tailor and a doctor, and many twists and turns. I stopped reading and listened attentively, thinking that there are probably not that many years left of made up stories in the sand with rocks and feathers… My sweet storyteller…

As I sat by the bonfire, watching Aïsha playing with her kendama and Mara with her poi, and listening to Mathilde playing the recorder, I drank all the goodness of a perfect day.

The knitting club and a road angel

I believe the cold weather has inspired us and we have been in a knitting frenzy for the past week, which has kept us busy on the long days of driving south.

One night, in the middle of nowhere, halfway through a big hill, an air hose popped and we were stuck on the side of the road. The roadside assistance could not get a mechanic to reach us before the next day. An hour later, a truck driver stopped by to tell us to be careful and not get out of the bus because a mama bear with her 3 cubs lived right there and that she was quite aggressive (so much so that none of the truck drivers from the area wanted to stop there). After some talking and figuring out our problem, he said he might have the exact part we needed to fix our air leak. And sure enough, he did! After lots of loud screaming from the girls (to scare the mama bear), JF successfully replaced the part and we were off to a better place to spend the night! Thank you, road angel!

We are now in Kelowna, camping by the beautiful lake and enjoying the bounty of local fruits in season. We feasted on organic peaches and strawberries, as well as super sweet concord grapes and perfectly crunchy apples! Oh the Okanagan!!

Down the Cassiar

We arrived at Meziadin Provincial Park after 30 hours straight in the bus. We had slept in a rest area in the rain and only JF had stepped out to fill up at the Cassiar Junction. The girls and I remained bundled up, cold and sick, our bodies responding to the grey weather outside.

We had great memories of that Provincial Park and hoped to find plenty of thimbleberries like we did 2 years ago at the same time.

The sweet smelling air brought a smile to our faces as we ate dinner outside by the lake.

We were too late for the thimbleberries, but there was a perfect sunset walk on the shore, an eagle feather found, rocks made into knives and a bear cub passing through the campground. Morning brought crepes eaten with homemade cranberry sauce (from the highbush cranberries we picked in Alaska), dinosaurs swimming in the lake and more shore exploration.

Just what I needed to be reminded of the reasons we have chosen this life on the road.

The goodbyes

Our last weeks in the Yukon have been packed with plenty of bonfires and shared meals with friends, great conversations and goodbyes. There was more music making, more filming, more dress-up play. 

I was very touched that the girls decided to give the money we made selling energy balls at the market this summer to our friend Johanne, who volunteered 3 months in an orphanage in Senegal this Spring. Johanne, one of their two Yukon grandma, had told the girls how she chose to support one mom who would have lost her daughter at birth if she would not have helped her to pay for a surgery. The mother decided to call her daugther after Johanne. The girls were so touched by that story, that they wanted to send the money to help little Johanne and her family. Mara made a drawing of the mom holding baby Johanne and offered her to our Johanne along with the money. Needless to say, she was very touched too.

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” 
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road 

 

The mud party

There were at least 20 families at our friend's Max place to celebrate Pascal big 40 and a few other birthdays, twice as many kids and probably half as many dogs. It rained most of the afternoon and his house building site became a big mud hole for the kids to enjoy! There were two bonfires going, lots of tarps and a few campers with lit woodstoves. The sun kept coming and going and there was quite a bit of rainbow spotting.

I stood there in the rain, boots deep in mud, listening to a friend's aborted sailboat trip, a new pregnancy, a child's suspected diagnosis, a summer job in Old Crow...

Catching up is good, but I realized that we do not spend enough time here to feed most of those friendships. We just have time to get up to date, to scratch the surface of our relationships. I left feeling empty  because of the words that weren't shared and all the many stories that could have been told... 

On the drive back, I came to the conclusion that our friendships do not stop when we became nomads, but for the most part, the communication did. Every time we come back, we are received with eager embraces. Everything is just like if we never left: dinners, game nights, great conversations. And we leave again, and the silence resumes. Friendship hibernation.

To Haines, Alaska

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Haines is only an hour from Skagway by ferry, so we decided to do the loop and go visit that town that we love so much. Haines is not on the cruise ships run, so it has a very different and authentic feel. We used to come to Haines every summer with the girls when they were little. If you want a better idea of this small town feel, read this great book called If you lived here, I'd know your name by Heather Lende.

There, we met another traveling family that we connected with online. Joy and her two boys have spent the last 3 winters in Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru and Ecuador. We connected instantly and spent most of our time there around the bonfire, talking. It is so awesome to meet like-minded family on the road.

On the way back, we stopped at Kluane National Park to make dinner in the shelter and enjoy beautiful Kathleen Lake. 

Skagway, Alaska, the heart of the Gold Rush

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In the first couple of years of the Gold Rush, the city of Skagway was the type of frontier town we see in western movies. It had makeshifts buildings with false fronts, gambling halls, saloons and dance halls.

We personnally do not go to Skagway to visit the now fake Gold Rush cardboard town. We go because the road between Whitehorse and Skagway is one of the most amazing roads one can drive. We go because we love to see how the landscape changes dramatically in less than 200 km as we cross over the Pass into the valley and down to sea level.

Skagway is now a cruise ship town and when we arrived, there were 3 cruise ships at the dock. The town was overflowing with tourists from all over the world, buying souvenirs by the dozen. We retreated to the Starfire, the local thai food restaurant, that felt so exotic when we lived in thai-food restaurant deprived Whitehorse. When we left, the town was empty again, the stores were closing and the locals were biking down Broadway Street again. They had their city back, until the next cruise ships...

We camped at the National Park Service Dyea campground, the heart of the ancient Gold Rush town and talked a lot about that amazing piece of history with the girls. We picked giant American bush cranberries, saw a seal playing in the sea right beside our campground in the Lynn Canal, spotted a few bald eagles and filled our lungs with the wet salty air. It reminded me of how we came to Skagway every spring, when it was still winter in Whitehorse and our bodies were hungry for the warmth of the sun, our dry skin drinking in the humidity of the Coast. 

Dyea was much less developed than its sister town Skagway. The first stampeders who arrived at Dyea Harbor found endless tidal flats stretching before them. A 2 mile long bridge was built on the flats for the stampeders to use to carry their 1,500 pounds of provision off the flats. Little remains of Dyea today, as it only existed for a single year and was deserted when the White Pass and Yukon Route Railway was completed in 1899. The upright post that you see in the sand in the next photo are all that remains of the pier that jutted across the flats of the shallow harbor. When the people left, they brought back all the wood they had used to build the houses and now, and nature has reclaimed Dyea. 

As you can imagine, standing right there in the middle of the flats sparked really interesting conversations with the girls, as we tried to imagine how busy it once was here when there were 8 000 people getting ready to leave for the gold fields. Four years ago, we briefly participated in a documentary/reality show made for TVO with the historian Gerges Hébert-Germain on the Gold Rush. We will watch it with the girls in the next few weeks, so they really get a feel of the stampeders' reality (and see their dad and themselves in it for a few seconds!).

The only real remnants of this era is the Slide Cemetery, in memory of the many  people who died in an Avalanche on the Chilkoot Trail, trying to reach the gold fields.

Dawson City

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Everytime we go to Dawson, I have this same feeling. We are not locals, but not tourists either. As we drive the Third Avenue in our (very dirty from the Dempter Highway) Westy, locals smile at us. We fit the bill. The Dawson summer crowd is quite colorful: lots of artists and crunchy hippies, too many tourist and some First nations cross paths on the wooden boardwalks... The atmosphere is welcoming and warm. We walk in the Alchemy café and are served in French, we meet a long-lost friend at the Taco stand... I understand better why people are attracted by Dawson's magnetism. There is definitely a sense of belonging here.