Satellite Run
For those of you who don’t know my older brother Rich he’s super cool, I look up to him a lot and ever since I can remember he’s been passionate about restoring old cars. Like; super cool, fast as fuck, really old cars. Every now and then the planets align and we get to do something really cool together, like this time; we took his Satellite for a Run.
A few weeks out of BC’s August long weekend, a harebrained scheme was hatched for an epic road trip through the bottom half of our environmentally diverse province…in a 1967 Plymouth Satellite. What could go wrong?! Surprisingly; not all that much.
The plan was pretty simple really. We were going to leave Chemainus on a Sunday morning, drive up through the Fraser Canyon and across to Lillooet where, the following morning we would meet up with our youngest - also very cool - brother and his girlfriend who would then follow us though the Duffy lake road to Whistler and back out to the Horseshoe Bay ferry home. A quick stop in Tsawwassen to grab some road trip supplies and it was off towards Hope to start the trip. Both Rich and I were surprised by just how well the car was running. It hadn’t been run much over the last few years on account of Rich and his family building a house on the island, the thought that the cob webs hadn't even been blown out yet had us both waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The car has been meticulously restored in very close to original fashion which allows Rich to have it insured as a collector car, with collector plates. It has a tried and true Chrysler 383 big-block 383 with a 4-speed manual transmission and sounds exactly how you’d want a muscle car to sound. Loud enough to rumble your seat, but just tame enough to not totally restrict the telling of awesome jokes…something Rich and I are experts at…as long as you’re asking us anyways. It scoffs at modern conveniences but you don’t miss them amidst the heavy dose of sounds, smells and nostalgia and overall it was actually a really comfortable ride. After a quick stop to check out the abandoned tunnel of the old highway near Hell’s Gate, it was into the canyon for a windy, twisting drive along the banks of the Thompson River…Oh, and it was FAST too! Very fast.
After blowing through Spences Bridge and not really giving it much thought at all we decided to change course, and go up as far as 100 Mile House to meet Dave & Carolyn there since it’d get us a little extra drive time and an extra night of hanging out with Dave who, we only see at best a handful of times per year. So it was on to Cache Creek for some gas, some food and a slightly unexpected detour.
We made great time into Cache Creek and got gas and some burgers and I txt’d Dave at 8:20pm saying ‘Yo! Just gassed up and got grub in Cache Creek. About an hour left so see you around then’. After observing some of the locals, apparently also gassed up, but on something totally different, we were off to find a spot to eat dinner and as you can see in the time lapse below we found a great lookout.
After eating some cold burgers and shooting the shit we pulled out of the lookout spot and headed up the road another 20 or so minutes…which is when I started to suspect something was off. With a flickering single bar of service I somehow locked us in on my mapping app and yup; we were about halfway down the Cache Creek - Kamloops connector, the opposite direction we should be. Idiots. We rolled back into Cache Creek about 9:20pm and I txt’d Dave, no doubt expecting us any minute, and said ‘Took a wrong turn, just got back to Cache, see you in an hour’. Haha. I swear this kind of stuff never happens to us.
We spent most of the hours drive into 100 Mile house chasing one of those weird Delica vans that was travelling at absolutely beyond a safe speed for such a tall drink of water, but the anticipation of seeing it cartwheel into the rhubarb kept us awake and laughing…or maybe we were just tired and getting delirious.
Lil brother Dave in all his glory! After a surprisingly refreshing sleep in what was a very clean and newly renovated motel we were back on the road and headed home. I didn’t shoot a lot on the trip home, well not many stills anyways. Sometimes it’s nice to not see life through my cameras viewfinder. The drive was awesome and the weather held up perfectly, we even had time to stop and film a burn out or two on a secluded piece of road near Pavillion Lake.
And after winding through the Duffy Lake road, and cruising through Whistler, realizing we had reserved the wrong ferry, getting stuck in some weird bottle neck of traffic near Squamish, we made it home without a single issue … car wise at least. It’s not often that Rich and I get to do things like this together. He has a family, I have a family, and most of the time we’d probably both rather bring our kids along to share these kinds of experiences. But every now and then it’s pretty rad to get out together, we drive, we talk, crack jokes, eat Twinkies, and just for a short while, I get to feel like a little brother again, in awe, that his cooler, older brother has allowed him to tag along for the adventure…and that’s pretty hard to beat.
