Yesterday was another 8 hour drive. At about 6 hours, I am over it. It’s been like that on each of my 3 long drive days. I had trees on yesterday’s drive. It helped a little, but where are the mountains? I expected more mountains. I still found myself over it around hour 6. But, I’m in the car alone so I put the audio book on pause and just screamed for 5 minutes. After that I’m able to go back to the audio book for the remaining 2 hours.

All day today, I would look at the time Google maps was telling me I would arrive and it was an hour earlier than anticipated. This was good news, but still was perplexing. Google is never an hour off. How is that possible? I’d check again in an hour or so and it was the same. Did I put the right location in? Am I going to the wrong place? About 4 hours into the drive, it dawned on me that I must be going through a change in time zone. It’s still an 8 hour drive. I felt a mix of relief, disappointment and duh how stupid.

I finally get to Dawson Creek. I looked it up – has nothing to do with a TV show by the same name that I have never seen. I’m in British Columbia now. I don’t know when that happened. I never saw a sign saying welcome to BC.

I had a room booked at Travelodge by Wyndham. I had no idea Wyndham had bought Travelodge, but I assumed it was an old motel with a face-lift. I couldn’t be more wrong. It was an old motel. My room smelled like rotting carpet and other terrifying things. There was a metal strip that had been the transition from tile to carpet. It was now a sharp protruding one way ticket to the hospital. The carpet had huge bulges in it as it was no longer tight against the floor. There were two areas in the ceiling where there was obvious water damage and I was concerned about mold. The bathroom was clean, but I was in such a bad mood, that it was no consolation. I checked for signs of bed bugs and found none, thank god.

I decided to spend a couple hours in a park before going to dinner. Maybe I could get that horrible smell out of my nostrils if I sat outside. I found a few parks in town on the map and drove to one. The place where I first got to the park had no park entrance, parking lot or anything that stated it was a park. It was just woods on the side of the road. I drove to another place where the map put the little red dot when you searched for the park. Again, just woods on the side of the road. This time there was a sign with the park name, but no trails, benches or parking, just trees. This looked like the kind of place where you walk in, but never come out. I decided that hanging at the park was not happening tonight.

I drove back through town and saw a Staybridge Inn. It looked shiny and new like it may have been built in the past 3 years. I pulled in and sat in the parking lot and just sat there trying to decide if I should just go get a room and consider the Travelodge a loss. I looked it up on line and saw it was about $70 more than the Travelodge. I was frozen and couldn’t make a decision. I felt defeated. I sat there frozen for about a half hour. I finally drove back to Travelodge and told them how bad my room was. They gave me a new room. I decided if it was the same, I would just go to Staybridge. It was a little better. It had a strong room freshener smell, instead of the smell of a decaying building materials. I figure it was covering the decay smell, but it was a little easier to take. It had the same lumpy carpet, but it didn’t look like it would send me to the hospital. I only needed to stay one night. The next two nights on my trip were in questionable places. Maybe I should suck it up and be ok with this as it might not get better for a bit. It was just such a shock after the Hyatt in downtown Calgary. Although the Hyatt and the Staybridge were roughly the same cost per night……

I went to dinner – found a nice hopping restaurant with good food and gin. I stopped by the Alaska Highway Mile 0 sign to take a picture on the way to the restaurant.

When I got back to the hotel, it was about 9:00pm – go to bed early – get up early and get on the road sounded like the best plan. There were a few guys hanging out on the second floor. It wasn’t a deck and there were no chairs. They were just standing around outside their room. They had been there when I checked in. They had been there when I changed rooms. They were still there. I assume their room smelled too bad to be in also. When I got back in the room, I noticed the door didn’t close all the way. There was a huge gap at the bottom showing light through it. If I had noticed that before, that would have put me over the edge and I’d be at the Staybridge right now. But, now I was too exhausted from all the worry and negative thoughts from earlier. I locked all the locks on the door and shoved extra furniture up against the door. I left all the lights on, put on my eye mask and went to bed in the clothes I had worn all day. I had no effort left in me. Tomorrow would be a good day.