Unwelcome guests

So, when we left off we had just met our new bus Mr. Bunbury.

No, Mr. Bunbury is a great. He runs well, responds to handling brilliantly and would have (maybe someday will) made a great home for a little family. But along with the first trimester of my pregnancy came preganncy fatigue, amplified my health problems and thoughd my husband was on paternity leave until our son was one he couldn't take care of Wildeman (our son), me and our bus. So, as our last day at our little apartment crept up on us Mr. Bunbury sat in a parking lot enjoying only the occasional visit from us to buff off his surface rust or remove some screp metal left over from his school bussing days.

Then it was five days until the first, it was October, we owned an empty bus, no furniture (as we had gotten rid of it all in preperation or moving into the bus) and no idea where we were going to live.

And so once again, as I always do when my problem is one of resources, I turned to Craigslist. I searched listing after listing as the days closed in for an apartment that would cost only as much as bus gas. And finally I found one. A little bachelor house. It was 400 sq ft of pure adorableness. There was, naturally, just one catch: it was four hours away, up in the mountains, in northern British Columbia.

We were hesitant to move away from the hospital that had so beauifully handled my high risk delivery a year before, my doctors, midwives and more than anything our family friends. But we are nothing if not aventurous and we took the leap.

And sometimes when you leap, you don't quite make it to the other side.

We drove the bus up, filled with our few remaining belongings and left Vancouver. The house was perfect, if perhaps haunted, and the people were nice, save a few who had crept around outside our house an evening or two.

It was about 2 o'clock in the morning when I jolted awake to the sound of my husbands almost ferrel shouting. He was on his feet before I had even realized he had left the bed.

"What the f*ck was that?"

"Stay inside, I'll be right back."

It takes all of about 30 seconds to circle that house so he was back in a flash.

"They're gone."

Who is gone?"

His fright had turned my sensitive stomach and I asked this question with my head in a bag between wretches.

He had woken up and seen the tall, broad figure of someone peering into our back door window. I should perhaps mention that the locks on this house hadn't been changed for over five years, while the tenants had changed at least eight times.

Whoever it was was gone, and our locks were changed the next day (when you live that far our getting to a store that sells locks is a whole day excursion) but we were shaken. That evening a pain started in my stomach that I just chalked to stress. We tried to go back to sleep and finally gave up around five in the morning.