Friends

I think one of the most important parts of life are having friends. Friends make you laugh, support you, encourage you, frustrate you, inspire you. I'm extremely lucky to have the friends in my life that I do. Especially Christine. So this blog is about her.

I define a friend in this way: a friend is a person who will come over in the middle of the night and not only help get rid of the body, they would never speak of it again. No one fits this description better than my friend Christine. She is ultimately the one person I would take to a deserted island as we would not only survive way longer than we ought too, but we would have the most incredible journey that would be the most fun that anyone could ever have.

I love the fact that she is willing to do anything, and I mean anything, with me. Take our latest adventure in to pole dancing. I've really wanted to try pole dancing for quite sometime but this isn't something that you do alone. It's important to have a buddy to share this experience with. So of course the first person I thought of was Christine. And of course she was on board with this as well and I have to say.......we are having the time of our lives.

The Friday night before Halloween we attended a Halloween dance party at a firemans hall in Port Kells (sp?). Anyway, at some point during the evening, Christine, myself and her friend Ron went back to my car as they had a couple of beers stashed there (no, I was not drinking as I was driving). While the three of us were hanging out I played some of my favorite songs in which C and I danced and sang as loud as we possibly could too. Even Ron caught himself up in the moment. But the BEST was when I played Comfortably Numb by Scissor Sisters. C and I broke out in a random routine, a complete random routine for us, but to Ron... he had insisted that we had done that before. But we hadn't. That's just how intune we are. I swear I had more fun in the car with C and Ron then I did at the actual dance!!!

Besides having wonderful fun moments with C, the most random things you could possibly imagine also happen to us. Sometimes it's dangerous for us to hang out together!!!! The worst was my birthday camping trip a few years back. For my birthday, I had bought myself a roof rack for my VW Golf, Astro. I had decided for my birthday that C and I should go to Okanagan, camp and ride part of the KVR on my mountain bikes (yes, I have a few). So I packed up, threw the bikes on the car and went to pick up C from her work.

Things started off pretty well, until about 10 minutes into the trip. C knew of a shortcut that we could take to get to the highway. A shortcut that involved a tunnel......Yup, Astro got stuck halfway thru the tunnel thanks to the bikes on the roof. OMG we backed up traffic for a bit while we tried to navigate back out of the tunnel. After we got out we assessed the damage (I took part of the roof rack off...) and decided that it's probably best if we skipped the shortcut.

After a awhile we made it to the #1. It was just before Chilliwack when Astro suddenly stopped having power. She would stutter then get going again. It got pretty bad so we decided that we should spend the night at Cultus Lake that way we could head into the Canadian Tire in Chilliwack in the morning to fix the car. Easier said than done.

When you get to Cultus, there's a little hut that tells you where the campgrounds are (private and provincial). It's getting dark so we thought the best thing to do was ask the dude working there where the nearest campground was. The guy told us that we should try this one campground that was privately run. We pulled up to the hut for the private ground quite pleased with ourselves that we actually made it (Astro will only go to 3rd gear at this point). We hop out of the car and head over to the hut and a lovely lady greeted us. We asked for a spot and she looked at us and said "is it just you two?". We smiled and said yes. "We do not accept singles." C and I sort of looked at each other and said "What?"

"We don't accept singles. Only families. This is a quiet campground".

"Uh, it's 9pm, our car is broken, we just need to sleep somewhere close to Chilliwack".

"Sorry, we don't accept single campers" and slid the glass window shut and walked away.

C and I got back to the car and after a moment of silence I asked her if that really did happen and if we were just discriminated against because we were singles. She confirmed. I started Astro and we quietly drove away. 5K to be exact to the provincial campground where we found a spot, set up in the dark, had one caesar and then went to bed.

In the morning in took forever to get back to Chilliwack as Astro wouldn't get out of 1st gear. When we got to CDN Tire they informed us that there was nothing that they could do, I had to take the car to Chilliwack. OMG.........Long story short and a tow to Abbotsford, Matthew had so kindly lent us Yellow car. So C and I threw our gear into Yellow car and we were off again. However now it's 1pm on a Saturday afternoon....not much time to find a new campground..... we basically went to every campground, provincial and from my Camp Free BC book between Merritt, Kamloops and Cache Creek. All of which were full. By the time we hit Cache Creek it was 7 or 8pm. So we decided to just get a motel room. Well wouldn't you freakin' know it.......a motorcycle tour group were in town and took every last single room available in every motel in Cache Creek.

That being said, the lovely lady at the Sandman Inn felt bad for us and moved some people around in order to give us a room. (thank you!) After a weird dinner at the weird greek restaurant downstairs in the motel, we went back to the room, had a couple of drinks, played cards and fell asleep.

It was most certainly a birthday I'll never forget. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING worked out for us that weekend. But because I was C, it was one of the greatest, fun adventures!!!!!!