Although, since Canada uses metric, I suppose it’s probably a centimeter worm.

It rained here in this area, so all the roads that we were trying to go to the free campsites that we knew about we’re way too muddy for us to go very far along. We were worried that if it rained again the roads would be impossible in the morning with two-wheel drive van. The tires have been amazing, but with the van being heavy I didn’t want to chance it.

We pulled into an area that yet again said private property no trespassing where a cyclist had set up his backpack tent and already made camp for the night. It was almost 10:00 when we stopped driving. It’s way too late because both the kids have meltdowns setting up because they get pretty tired without realizing it sitting in the car all day.

About 20 minutes after we parked and started setting up somebody pulled in with a white pickup work truck type vehicle and parked on the opposite corner of us, the first we didn’t know what to make of it but apparently he stayed most of the night too, just resting somewhere that wasn’t going to be a noisy pull out pit toilet rest stop. You say that one of those type of rest stops because it didn’t have signs saying no overnight camping, but with the amount of traffic going by it just didn’t feel as secure as one that was a little bit more out of the way like this place here and there’s just so few people around that we didn’t think the trespassing thing would be enforced and it was really too late to worry about it at that point anyway.

How I’m looking for places to stop is free camping van life type apps like IOverlander, free campsites.com, the back roads maps map books that we bought, but if we don’t have Internet those aren’t very helpful, and unless I download the Google maps for the region, navigation doesn’t really work either with just the gps.

We’re not worried about getting lost, because there’s only one road for the most part, I don’t think we’ve had to turn off this road in 4 days except maybe once. And I do have paper maps which are perfectly fine when you go on a road and you stay that way for hours and hours and hours.

The problem is finding a place to sleep every night. We stopped at an official campsite in Sikanni Chief last night after we tried to go down the mud Road as far as possible and even tried a few other mud roads to see if there was a pull off and there wasn’t, and it would have been 30 bucks to stay in a huge mud pit, honestly it was kind of disgusting, I would have rented one of their cabins for 50 bucks, but it smelled like an old shoe, and there were only two twin beds so somebody still would have had to sleep in the van or on the floor. And with the way that it smelled in there I wasn’t really sure it was even worth using the showers for the $30. I just felt like spending $30 to stay somewhere officially when we would have had so much mud and we would have had to walk through a giant mud puddle with standing water to get to a bathroom would have definitely been less clean than staying in the van at a rest area or wherever we could find.

It does look like a lot of the places that might have catered to people driving through this lonely highway have closed. More than one place that we have tried to stop or wanted to stop for a meal or for gas has looked like it was open but when we pulled up had signs that said it was closed and I can’t imagine that they did very well before covid and now with covid it seems as though only one place in a place like this has survived instead of several places maybe eking out a living before that.