Two Brothers, Two Coasts: Driving Vancouver to New York
Meeting Egor
My Uncle Red had a bad feeling about it…
We had checked into the City Centre Motel at 2pm and arranged to meet Egor at 3pm. Me, my brother and Uncle Red stood leaning against the wooden railings on the first floor and waited for the guy to turn up.
My brother and I were looking for a camper van to take us across Canada and we didn’t want to shell out for a rental, so we had been trawling Craigslist for vans. I had spoken to Egor on the phone a couple of times and he seemed cool, honest, maybe a bit stoned. I mean, this was the guy’s facebook profile picture:
He was selling a 1986 burgundy red VW van that he had converted into a camper. It was “customised”, which in Craiglist speak means “rigged out with a load of ply wood and some foam”. It was a “rustic”, which in Craigslist means “a rust bucket”. But I liked the look of it, it would make for a good story, as long as it ran OK.
Egor rang me three days before we flew out to Vancouver to say he was having some transmission issues but had topped up the fluid and it was running fine now. Big red flag. Then he blew a tyre out the day before we met. Less of a red flag. The problem was it was already proving to be unreliable, and however good a story it would maybe make, the worst story I could tell would be shelling out half our travelling budget on something we have to write off. So we loaded up Craigslist while we waited for him and made some contingency plans. Then we found Pete.
Pete was selling his 2001 Ford Windstar LX for $2900, a full $600 less than Egor’s rig. It had only been up for three hours and we had come to learn that something this good would fly off the shelf. So we gave him a call and set up to meet the next morning in the Squamish Valley and we could cancel the meet if Egor came through.
We met Egor and his fellow Russian Dmitri in the parking lot and took a look around, kicked the tyres etc. and then Red took it for a turn round the block. It ran well, the brakes were a little hard and it rattled like a truck twice it’s size, but it ran. Still, I was nervous, if it broke down on us we were fucked. I wanted to check out Pete’s vehicle first. Yeah it looks like a soccer mom’s mini van, but there’s nothing cool about being stuck on the side of the road, so we told Egor we needed some time to think about it.
But first we got chatting. Small talk moved to big talk really quickly with Egor. We asked what he would do with the rest of his day. “I’ll probably head over to this meditation session up town, it’s pretty hardcore solo meditation for ten hours straight.” Now I can hardly do something fun for ten hours without getting bored. I can’t play Xbox for ten hours straight, I couldn’t even watch sports for ten hours straight, but this guy was off to sit and breathe for ten hours.
Then Red started asking questions. Egor practiced Vipassana meditation, and like anyone with a passion, he was keen to chat about it. We stood around in the parking lot and received a crash course in the physical and mental benefits of Vipassana.
Egor was rolling now: “It’s really changed my life, given me a lot of balance. You start to really go deep with it and ask some serious questions, about yourself, the meaning of life, the universe. What I found out was, if you start asking ‘what is the meaning of life’ you start applying all these pressures to yourself. Life is just a set of appetites and aversions and I’m slowly working out that it’s not worth applying too much value to these. Everything works out, you just have to ride some stuff out.”
Unfortunately for Egor, it didn’t work out this time. We said our goodbyes and headed off for a couple of beers and beef dip sandwiches in a pub called, no jokes, The London Pub. We decided we would set off early to Squamish and check out Pete’s vehicle, and if it was no good we could always go back to Egor. So we drove out at 7am along Highway 99, one of the prettiest stretches of road in the world, to meet him in another parking lot at 9am.
Pete is a 22 year old finance student from Germany. He has been a ski instructor for the season in Whistler and when the season finished early he bought the Ford and head off for a three week trip, taking in Jasper, Banff and Alaska before he met us. It was a no brainer, the car was immaculate, a picture of German efficiency inside and he was bundling in all his camping equipment too. Red took it for a spin and we shook hands on the spot. He’s lucky we didn’t bite it off.
Next stop: Trout Lake, BC
