Living in a Van Down by the River at Granite Creek Rec Site

It's an absolutely beautiful weekend so we were just going to go for a quick camping trip up the coca-cola but then the sinkhole was discovered on Thursday evening by a maintenance contractor. The ministry of transportation says it was caused by trans mountain pipeline boring work in the area. So now we're gonna go find another option. Oh my gosh there's like a little general store. Well it's not terribly busy is it? Looks like we have the place almost completely to ourselves. All right I kind of like this spot actually. This has a path that I think goes to the river. It does go on for quite a ways. Leads to another campsite. This one that we think is maybe taken due to the fact that these chairs are here although these chairs look like they've been here forever. I think this site might actually be available and if so I think we should take it. Hey so I just walked the path to that other site and I'm pretty sure it's available. Those chairs look like a hundred years old and have duct tape all over them. I think they're just there permanently. Really? It's a much better site. I mean I guess if someone comes and says hey you're on our site we just say oh sorry it wasn't obvious. It's waterfront. All right we're gonna give it a try. Like close to the water like backed up to the water basically. It's like yes there's duct tape on those chairs but there's wood here. There I'm almost positive. Like look at that chair it's like broken. There's nobody here. And just like that we've relocated. It's so fast with the van. That'll probably just get normal but it's still kind of cool. So now we're right on the river. I feel like the van is not entirely level but I think it's probably level enough. I don't know what do you think about the levelness? Do you care? I think it could be better but it could be much worse. Yeah I think it's fine. We don't have to mess with it. We're not even gonna bother with leveling. So that's something I don't do that often. I just crashed my drone into a tree. I'm hoping it's probably all right but gonna have to do some diagnostics and see. I don't know no visible damage. All right I'm lucky it seems to be okay. Let's give that another try. How's that boo? Are you gonna go for a walk? Big scary world. Bannie come here boo. Come here. Come on. Roses? He's like okay adventure over. I'm going back. He's like I recognize this vehicle. So dirty. Look at the dirt coming off of him. Um what am I looking for? Chairs. Oh there's our table. Oh this really lets you pack a lot in this new way of organizing. Oh yeah. I like it honey. Yeah you see where the chairs are? Yeah and they're not gonna go anywhere because they're between the panels. Perfect. All right this is the spot. Oh I suppose. Okay. I mean there's so much room. There's so many options. I just can't pick one. We have too big of a site apparently. Are you checking out the back? Yeah. Oh what's there? All right it's my favorite time of year. Time to take a dip. But first as we always do here we're gonna get the temperature of the water. I believe this is the Tulumene river but I don't have my phone to check so. Feels cold. Feels icy. My guess is like close to 10. Dropping like a stone. Actually says about 16 degrees celsius. Maybe I need to go out further. 16? Not that cold. All right who wants me to take a dip? Everybody of course. All right. Oh boy. All right on the count of three you're going in. I think you're deep enough. One two three dip. All right count me in again. One two three dip. And you're being swept down the current. Quite a current. Yeah swim diagonal. Don't swim against it. Do you know what's crazy? You looked like you were like swimming hard but you were more or less stationary. That's so funny. Water shoes are needed next time. All right your turn dear. I don't think so honey. Mel's first time cooking in the van. We got fresh lettuce from our garden. Just went for a little walk up one of the forest service roads. Pretty nice view up here. Get some nice exercise before it gets too dark. Time to head back down again. All right as it turns out we're not alone. Look who randomly showed up with his new rig. The new rig. The inaugural journey. Oh I think it's pretty sweet dude. I like it. I think it's awesome. I like that it's very ghetto. It's like very old school. It's vintage. Yeah very vintage. Vintage. Totally. Vintage is cool then you know. So how did you sleep? Um okay. I'm quite stuffy. Got a cold or something. I'm still tired though. I think we didn't have the shades in the side windows like the passenger seat and the driver's seat. And Benny spent a lot of the night I think up on those seats looking out the windows because I woke up at like three at one point to get up and he was already in the windows. Yep that's where new solar and electric system we're in a unique position where we can actually power two rigs. All right it's 11 o'clock. It's getting kind of warm. I think Sal's got the right idea here. Chair in the river. Mel's gonna try it now. Hasn't quite got there yet. As far as I go. Oh Sal's coming back. It's too cold. It's too cold. I mean it's not that cold it's just numbing my feet so I don't want to be uncomfortable either. The verdict is that it's cold. Not cold but numbing the feet. All right folks I think I've got the optimal situation here. My feet are not getting numb because they're up on this rock but I'm over the water so I don't have any bugs. Sal's still got lots of bugs. My feet are on a rock. I'm comfortable. But you got bugs. The occasional fly. Yeah. All right this is where I'm staying for the rest of the day. It's hammock time. I'm gonna make my own shade. You know I'll put the hammock in the water. It has legs right? I guess you could. Yeah set it up first and then we can move it. All right. That's it. Yep. As easy as that. Cool eh? Wow. Yeah. Sal's impressed. Yeah no it's pretty lightweight. Pretty lightweight. There we go. It has a cup holder. Some days I just feel like all I want is just... Yeah. Especially if it's 36 degrees. Right. Kind of just want to chill then. I have to remember how my shade canopy goes on. And now it's a giant kite. Yeah I see the hole. But I'm so happy actually that we have this because I forgot my hat. Ta-da! Now we have shade. That's not bad. Cup holder. There. Now put it right in the middle of the river and that way. Yeah and then I'll just float away. Okay there's good. Well come on guys I want to be a part of the conversation. She wants to be closer to us. Oh this is perfect. Yeah there we go. Thank you. Now Sal gets shade too. Oh yeah. Perfecto. All right now we're all in the shade of the hammock. It's perfect. Works really well. We made our own shade. It's a brook. I think so. This weekend is absolutely perfect for rejuvenating our energy levels. We're just hanging around by the river. Hanging out. Having some snacks and good conversation. And yeah just taking a lot of time to relax rather than finding all kinds of things to do and go go um you need that sometimes right? Balance. Well it's been fun but Sal has to get going but I think we're gonna stay for another night. See ya. Well it is super super hot. It's like maybe 34 but I just checked and it is 26 inside. Benny is perfectly comfortable. Our air conditioning is doing its thing and it's actually pretty quiet. You can like kind of sort of hear it out here but it's not like All right I'm gonna go for a float. I'm gonna go all the way up there and hopefully whiz by here. See how it goes. Okay start coming in this way. All right that was good. Wow very refreshing. Very cold. Let me touch you. Oh my goodness you're like ice. Highly recommended. All right the wind is getting a little pretty windy here so we're actually gonna go and move our stuff back up near the van and enjoy the shade up there. Well we're having a nice dinner of fresh greens from our garden and we're eating inside because it's actually like really really hot. Like it was like 36 degrees hot today. Having an indoor dinner in the van with our air conditioning working pretty well. And I'm just generally not feeling great. I have a massive cold that came on I guess yesterday afternoon shortly after I finished work shortly after and we got here. And so yeah I'm just really stuffy and sniffly and sneezy and kind of sore throaty so I'm resting. Yes hopefully Mel will feel better very soon. Usually Mel doesn't stay sick for very long so I predict a quick recovery. Let's hope so. The salad wasn't quite enough so we're gonna have some ramen noodles. And we can apparently make these in a rice cooker if we just fill the water so that it'll cover the noodles and then boil it and then put it in and then cook as normal. Just checking on our battery we've got 88.2 percent. That's after running the air conditioning the entire day. And as I mentioned in my previous video if we have good sun overhead we're actually generating enough power that we can run the air conditioner indefinitely. It only started eating into the battery after the sun went behind a big tree and we were in the shade. All right we have a bit of a boil here. I guess we'll just toss the noodles in. Oh yeah they're starting to soften up. Nearly done. I disagree with this. Right Mel doesn't think this is going to get this into here without making a mess. We don't have tongs so very carefully without making a mess. Look at that. All the noodles are out. Now you might be wondering why are we taking them out of the water because most people would eat it as like a soup but we don't like them that way. So we're gonna keep most of the noodles sans water and put the stuff on it like this. It's like chicken noodle soup without the soup. Oh that's spicy. Holy cow. Spicy spicy. Whoa you might want some of the water to stay to dilute the spice. Oh now it's pretty warm actually. All right it's Mel's turn to try out the shower. Spacious? Very spacious. And he said it warmed up pretty fast. Yeah do you know what we need? What? A small light in here like on the ceiling. I mean that works. Mel is getting to partake in the bran cakes this morning. All right good morning. This is about the time of the video where I give you a tour of where we're staying. So let's begin. Here's our campsite. It's absolutely massive. I think we could fit at least three solid rigs on it. It comes with a picnic table which has seen better days. We have a man-made fire pit. Some of the sites around here have the metal ring ones and some of them have just one made of rocks. And then we got the very last site that is on the river. Let me show you the rest. So here at Granite Creek Recreation Site there are 25 sites split between three different areas. Let me show you. Here we are at the entrance and this is what I would call the first area. So you've got sites to the left and to the right. Some of them have pathways like the ones here on the left have pathways to the river. The ones on the right are the forest side. And then in the middle there are two outhouses so super handy. Otherwise there are no hookups, no electric, no dumping station, no water fill station. So you have to come prepared. As you can see though the sites in this section near the entrance are pretty far apart and they're pretty massive. So you could bring in probably any size rig that you want. Then as you get to the second outhouse you'll see there's a fork in the road. So if you go to the right it takes you to eight of the forested campsites. This area seems to be pretty well shaded for a lot of the day so if it's really really hot out I would actually recommend coming up here. For us this doesn't work as well because we have our star link we look for more open areas. If however you decide to come to the left of that second outhouse at the entrance again we've got another fork in the road. And to the left is the very last site in the entrance area. This is the first site that's actually on the river with river access and that's the one that we managed to snag. It was the very last river site available when we got here on a Saturday afternoon. And the very popular area this is the more open but this is where most of the riverfront sites are what I'm going to call the riverfront area. So there's a whole bunch of sites in here there's a couple along here in the grass but most of them are all to that side. There's also an outhouse in this area too. Just beyond though this little section you can see those rigs all the way back there that's private property so you cannot go back into there. There's signs though that tell you that you can't go there. And then just a little note on firewood and mountain pine beetle here. This recreation site has been an area where mountain pine beetle have gotten in. They kill the trees and they can spread around the province very very readily so if you happen to come here and don't don't leave with your firewood. So things to do around here well if it's early enough summer like now it's early June you could bring some floaties and float certain sections of the river there's a pretty decent current. We can't comment on summer conditions because we just don't know how deep the water will be but right now it's about chest deep on an average heighted adult but there is a good current that to take you down. We even saw a little whitewater kayak go past the other day too so that was kind of cool if you're looking for some gentle rapids. Across the river from the recreation site from where we are staying is the TransCanada Trail actually so if you're looking to do sections of that you can do that. From what we've gathered the most popular thing around here to do is to ATV so if you have an ATV or a side-by-side or some kind of off-road vehicle bring it along you can check out the trail right over here just remember to be kind to your neighbors and idle your way through the campground. There's a deer sitting here in the shade of this tree on the path how cool is that a beautiful black-tailed deer and you can tell the black-tailed deer from the white-tailed deer not only just because of the color of their tail but their ears as well the black-tailed deer tend to have these big kind of mule-like ears like this one and the white-tailed deer have smaller ears and the white-tailed deer are also smaller so cool just hanging out enjoying the shade. So one of the many reasons we switched to a van was so we can do stuff like this really easily just stop at the side of the road and go check out a view beautiful view of the Tulumene River. To be fair though the van wasn't really necessary this is a massive pull-off and you could probably fit like two semis So we've got one last stop to make here in Princeton before we go there's a donut place and you know we like our donuts it's the most unassuming place to get donuts but it's in a dollar store there's a sign that says fresh donuts and it says bakery it's donut time breakfast of champions even though we've already had our breakfast it's breakfast part two it does not look very wide diameter but look how thick that thing is wowza there you go honey impressions first impressions wow good can't really go wrong with sugar and dough well we made it back home another quick little trip figured out a couple more things that we want to add to our van list but i think we're getting pretty close to having this set up exactly how we like it yeah so i imagine we'll do a couple more of these kind trips this summer it's pretty fun pretty quick pretty easy so yeah we'll see you on the next one bye bye i can't tell if i got it you're gonna have to face the camera when you're talking excuse me excuse me whoops i don't need to close that this time we have a screen there are 25 campsites oh hang on my alarm is going off so yeah make sure you don't miss the next video by liking subscribing and turning on notifications oh and don't forget to check out our website and sign up for our weekly email blast thanks for joining us and we'll see you in the next one