Minor RV Repairs, Assisting a Dive, plus Local Hikes

Hi everyone, so we are in our storage lot in our van and we are not actually currently traveling because there are some COVID restrictions in place in BC. A few weeks ago when we were in Tofino, just after we came back, there were some restrictions about traveling put in place and now it's really across all of British Columbia. Everyone's encouraged to just only travel locally, stay within their community, really only interact with members of your household for the next few all with hopes of trying to bring the COVID numbers back down to a more reasonable number that we had several months ago. So that's restricted some of our travel. Our next little bit will probably just be some local hikes and we may be able to go camping locally, which if we do, we'll share with you. In this video, we thought we'd do a little bit of a mishmash of things. First of all, Gordon did some repairs on our door latches in the van, so we wanted to share that with you. If any of you have similar latches that might be helpful. Secondly, Gordon did a trip up north of Pemberton with a fellow YouTuber, Henry Wang, and he is a diver and they did a cleanup of one of the lakes up there. So he's going to talk about that and we'll show you some footage of that. And then thirdly, we're going to share a few clips from some local hikes that we did recently. Yeah, so with regard to the latches, they were the latches for our cabinets, and they look sort of like if you remember what a cigarette lighter used to look like in an automobile, that's what they look like. And the latches, what was effectively happening is when we were closing our cabinets, they weren't opening or they weren't opening very easily, and they were actually locking. At one point, Mickey, to get one open, had to take some needle nose pliers and play around for like 10 minutes. I was going to just take a crowbar and break it open if I needed to. I think it took longer than that actually. But she managed to get them open. So we replaced the cabinet latches and that's a very straightforward process. You can actually unscrew the nut on the back by hand, really just unscrew the whole latch and it pulls out from the cabinet. So that's easily enough done. The real challenge was just actually finding the part. We contacted Roadtrek and they provided us with the part number right away. The challenge was is that no one had any in stock. I reached out to some of the Roadtrek dealers, nobody had any in stock and people were reluctant to order them. They wanted to wait until they were doing a larger order from Roadtrek, largely because the shipping costs were going to be significant. And they were just encouraging us to wait a few months until they ordered other parts, but didn't want to wait that long. So I was able to find the part online from a dealer in Ontario and they were $60 for each part, plus I think total shipping charge is around $40. So it was fairly expensive to replace, more expensive than I thought it would be. But they're pretty much a Roadtrek specific part and not found in any other coaches. Some of the other dealerships I went to looked and they just had nothing that was close. So we've done fixing that was actually fairly straightforward. Screws back on like this. Just gotta screw the nut on with your fingers. And tighten it up enough with your fingers. The real challenge was actually just the hinges on the doors. One of the reasons I think the latches failed is that our hinges are in some cases just not quite working properly. They stick when they shouldn't and probably was putting more pressure on some of the latches when we opened them. So we just spent literally an hour trying to get the hinge adjusted correctly. Just in the right height and position. It's close to being good enough, but I think there's still some more work to do. So that was an interesting process and again the main thing was just getting the part which we hadn't anticipated being such a problem. Or so expensive actually. Yeah that's true. But you know being people that aren't very handy we still managed to do it. So anybody could do it. Yeah and you can actually unscrew it with your hands which we were surprised at because we thought we'd need some tools. These were the special tools. The other thing we wanted to share was just the trip that I did with Henry Wang and as you may recall Henry and his group do dives in lakes to effectively clean out the garbage. And in this they were asked to go up to an area called Blackwater Lake which is near Birkenhead Lake. So about an hour past Whistler and do a dive in the lake to look for a snowmobile. The snowmobile had fallen in I think a couple of years ago in the winter. Somebody'd been driving it and then it got stuck on the ice and fell through into the lake bottom. So Henry I think this was the second time that they've gone to look for it. So they asked me to come along not because I'm a diver but what they wanted me to do is actually to basically take the packraft and paddle a grid pattern on the lake. I had a rope that was dangling down to the diver and effectively I was towing the diver at a packraft pace and they were basically just being towed along by the rope swimming and looking left and right to see if we could find this snowmobile. And we did a grid pattern in this lake which would have been really cold. It was I think on Halloween so the temperature was starting to get pretty cold at night. I actually didn't take the van up. I took our MSR tent that we'd had a challenge with a few months ago and in this case the um this trip the... Another tent fail. Yeah at this case the tent pole broke so I think this tent is now going to be retired and I spent half the half the night just sleeping in my truck but that was fine. So it's a beautiful area and what we'll share with you and our our side of the video is just some of the paddling in the morning before I went out with the uh the group and then we'll put a link into Henry's video if you're interested in the dive itself. Yeah and check out Henry's channel too because he does they they do a lot of great work yeah and also he has a truck camper as well so my welcoming committee. Oh yes you're a good dog. You're a good dog. Oh yeah you're a good dog. Don't come in the water it's cold. Good morning Gordon. How'd you sleep? Good. Cool half the night. Warm half the night. How was the tent? I spent half the night in the tent and half the night in the truck. Oh. So no luck on the first round of dives. So these folks are just paddled back. I'm waiting out here until they send another diver out. It's gorgeous. A little cool but gorgeous. All right same sort of routine. Yeah two times I get to the bottom. Yeah there you go. All right. All right sadly no luck. Just waiting for the last of the divers to come up. There he is. I think everyone's cold. I'm gonna head back. I'm a little cold in the boat. Getting windy. Too bad. Somewhere probably over there there's a snowmobile but we couldn't find it yet. Next time. Next we just want to share some footage of our a couple of local hikes that we did and one is to the Garibaldi area Garibaldi park area and the other one is at the Bunsen lake area. Short hikes we got in just before the snow came so the snow level is starting to become reasonably low here. Beautiful fresh snow on all the mountains. We were up probably about literally less than a week before the snowfall started to hit on a couple of trails so we'll just share some short hikes from that area and that's probably what we'll end up doing a lot of especially during this period of restricted travel as we'll likely do some trips maybe a few paddles locally and some trips up into the local mountains. If we get camping we'll share that too. Our first rest stop. It's gorgeous. Still no snow. When you're hiking in the winter time it's such a great idea to bring a thermos of hot tea. Yeah it warms you up and it tastes so good. I guess technically this is fall but it feels like winter. Yeah it feels like winter. We're in the mountains. But yeah there isn't as much snow as we expected up here. You have to get a little higher. Yeah it's good. Gordon just dropped his iPhone in the creek. Still works. Yeah luckily it didn't go also have power lines. I know that we're all sort of in the same boat and hope all of you are doing well and keeping safe. That's the most important thing and taking care. So we hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please be sure to give us a thumbs up and please subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already and we'll see you next time. Be safe. Be well. We'll see you next time.