Page 25 of The Trip of a Lifetime

As she said others, she nodded in Sam and Harrison’s direction.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ Martha said and strode back over to the ticket office.

Erin sat down and thought that despite a fairly good night’s sleep in a nice hotel, she still felt a bit jaded. Her life usually consisted of pricing and placing pretty trinkets on shelves in the shop, and chatting to customers in the vain hope they might buy the overpriced items, and then popping out with her friends for drinks and shopping at the weekends. None of them would want to do this as they weren’t a particularly active group. That made Erin a little sad. She hadn’t always been so unadventurous but now she was stagnant, she realised.

Erin had lost her best friend, Dee from uni, when Dee had moved to Scotland. They’d messaged a bit, charged up and down the country for a while, and then those visits had lessened. Dee met her boyfriend and they moved to Orkney. It was just a bit too far to go. But really, Erin thought now, what was stopping her? She didn’t have a boyfriend, a child or even a pet. She could do whatever she wanted. She’d flown halfway across the world for her grandmother, after all. What she needed was a rocket up her backside. That’s what her nana would say. This trip was the rocket, she decided, and all she needed to do was to make sure she kept it launched when she got home.

‘Right,’ Martha said when she returned. ‘We can get a bus to Terrace and lovely Margery, behind the counter, phoned a friend at an RV hire place there. And guess what?’ She lowered her voice then, no doubt to make sure the opposition didn’t hear. ‘They have a haul back to Edmonton and it now has our name on it. We can sleep overnight in it and share the driving too.’

‘That is fantastic!’ Erin said, taking the map from Martha and opening it out on the seat next to her. ‘So that doesn’t get us all the way but it gets us a good distance. Just the rocket I need. I’m feeling really good about this.’

‘It’s about 1,500 kilometres, so we’ll need to split it up. Margery said it’s a sixteen-hour drive if we didn’t stop, which obviously we couldn’t do in one, but if we find a camping spot we’ll be fine. We’ll be driving out of British Columbia and into Alberta.’

Both Martha and Erin slept on the overnight ferry back to Prince Rupert and then decided to treat themselves to a taxi once they had docked to get them to the bus station. Erin saw that Sam was watching her as she pushed her rucksack into the boot. He smiled tentatively but Erin didn’t return it. Her embarrassment ran deep despite what Sam had said the last time they were in chatting distance. Then Harrison turned round and his own smile was for Martha.

‘Bit spendy – a taxi,’ he said.

‘We’ve got so much money left, having hardly used any so far,’ Martha said with an edge to her voice. It was an edge of smugness.

‘Same,’ Harrison said just as an expensive-looking SUV pulled up next to him and a woman rolled down her window. ‘And this is free.’

Martha turned to Erin and grimaced. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

They traversed the route they had done just a couple of days ago in reverse but instead of carrying on up to Kitwanga they got out at Terrace. The driver offered them an easy route they could take to the RV rental place and by lunchtime they were being shown around a motorhome.

‘It really shouldn’t be this easy,’ Erin said, poking her head inside the back.

‘Shh!’ said Martha. ‘You’ll put the kiss of death on it with talk like that.’

‘You have to know that the heating system isn’t working at the moment. It’s going to be looked at when you get it to Edmonton,’ the man said as he handed over the keys. ‘And don’t open the window at the back, it’s a bit wonky.’

Cally arrived then with her producer car and had a quiet but heated conversation with Noah. Then they walked over to Erin and Martha, Cally’s expression a bit grim.

‘There’s a bit of news, I’m afraid, and we’d like to get your reaction to it on camera,’ Cally said.

Noah started recording as Cally told them that Don had fallen and broken his leg, so both he and Pete would have to retire from the race.

‘He’s getting treatment in hospital and we’ll make sure they get home safely, of course.’

‘That’s awful,’ Martha said. ‘Especially as they were racing for their brother. I’m really sorry to hear that.’

‘Such bad news, I’m sad they’re out of the race,’ Erin said. ‘And they looked so fit, it seems unfair somehow that it should happen to them.’

Instead of thinking it made their chances of winning greater as they were now a race of four teams, Erin felt more exposed somehow.

Noah lowered his camera. ‘Well done for getting the haul back,’ he said. ‘More comfortable for me than being squished into a bus or running for a train. Easy for Cally and her driver to follow us too.’

‘Erin and I are going to get some provisions to last us the journey, so we’ll be leaving in half an hour,’ Martha said.

Provisions were tins of baked beans, a loaf of bread, butter, tea bags and milk. The RV place let them fill up drinking water bottles from their taps and water for waste. They had a rundown of how the motorhome worked and then they were off in their own little home on wheels to Edmonton.

13

MARTHA

We decided that I would take the first stint in the driver’s seat as Erin would probably have more stamina than me and could easily take over later in the day when I would be more tired.

Looking at the map, we hoped to get to Jasper by the end of the day. That would break the back of the journey and we’d have fewer miles to cover tomorrow. We really wanted to be on a bus or a train from Edmonton to Banff as soon as possible. Neither of us were sure if we could camp on the roadside but I was prepared to do it if we had to. Erin wasn’t so sure.