Vancouver Island - Day 3

"slightly shorter driving day"

I should know better than to tempt fate.  As we were coming down from one of the last mountains, we encountered a row of stopped vehicles.  For the first few minutes, the line slowly moved forward, but I became a bit concerned that it appeared that we were only moving forward when cars ahead of us turned around and started heading the other way.  That was true, as we eventually got to a point where no one was moving and the majority of people were getting out of their cars and wandering around the highway.  Of course, we were in a location with no cell service, so there wasn't any opportunity to find out what was going on.  After about 30 minutes of waiting, we decided to eat lunch, so Sandra grabbed the cooler out of the back of the van.  At this point, a man walked by and said that a coal truck had tipped and spilled its load across the entire highway, and that it could be a 4-5 hour wait before they got the road opened again.

At that point, I decided to drive back to Princeton (about 40km), just to get cell service and figure out a plan of action.  We stopped at a sketchy picnic table at a sketchy gas station right at the entrance to town and ate lunch.  The BC highway website seemed to corroborate the information, stating that the highway was completely impassable and no more information would be available for another hour and half.

As this is the mountains, there are limited alternate routes.  The shortest one was north from Princeton to Merritt and then south from Merritt to Hope - an almost 2.5 hour detour.  As the quickest the road could open would be 1.5 hours, and then it was still an hour drive to Hope, I figured it was best to just take the detour, which we did.

They ended up opening the highway about two hours after we left, so we saved half an hour by driving, but it still took us all day to get to Hope, and we were almost 2 hours from North Vancouver at 4pm.  We had to cancel plans to meet with friends in the Vancouver area and just head straight to the hotel.

Once there, we had a quick supper and then managed to meet with some old friends who were able to find some time to drive out to us instead of us driving to them.  Tomorrow we will do something in the Vancouver area, as we aren't leaving until Wednesday.