Canada

We start our drive up the Alaska Highway today, leaving Dawson Creek and ending up at Fort Nelson. This section of the drive has been written up to be the least scenic part of the drive, but we find many things to keep it interesting. The best sight is a mama black bear and her two cubs that we see along the highway. The two cubs scamper up a tree when we slow down to try to take a picture and they look really cute!!! I do not get very good pictures since we are in a slow moving car, but I do get a picture of the mama black bear and one of the cubs climbing the tree. The cub is hugging the pine tree trunk on the rightside of the picture.

The most unusual thing we see today is a heard of bison on the side of the road, trying to cross. We’re not sure where they came from.

We arrive at the RV park in Fort Nelson, set up and visit the historical Fort Nelson museum beside the park. It’s actually a very interesting little museum.

I make sure to pick out an RV park with cable TV tongiht and we spend the night watching TV: season finale of Lost and American Idol. The Canadian TV channel, CTV, has them both on, so TV watching from 7pm til 11pm :-) That may be the last of TV watching for awhile, or at least til a rainy day in a town. The next stretch of road is supposed to be extremely scenic and the sun is supposed to shine the next few days. Yea!!!

The sun is shining at 5am this morning, but a few hours later it is cloudy, windy and snowing! We must have a windchill in the teens!

We spend the day running errands, cleaning, doing chores and planning the next few weeks of the trip. We drive into Dawson Creek to have lunch at the Dawson Creek Cafe. A pamphlet we picked up at the visitors center said the cafe is furnished with antiques and old Alaska Highway info, but when we get there it says "Closed til Further Notice". We're finding the the info given out at Visitors Centers is not always current or accurate :-(

So we end up at A&W for burgers and fries. We watch a snow squall go through -- even the workers are looking at the snow in disbelief.

Anyway, we spend most of the day at the RV park, doing laundry, cleaning, planning, etc. We still all agree that this is hands down the worst RV park we've stayed at so far on this trip. We're looking forward to starting up the Alaska Highway tomorrow.

We drive an hour to reach Dawson Creek, BC. Not a scenic drive, but it's short. We do see several elk and a wolf on the way, but this is high prairie and so not real picturesque.

The RV park we pick (actually, I pick) is a dump. We don't realize this til after we pay for two nights, so we're making the best of it. We do all get a laugh when I try to figure out where the creek is that this park supposedly overlooks. I re-read the description "overlooks Dawson Creek" and realize that is the town's name, not an actual creek :-) I also am hoping that their satellite TV hook-up includes Fox so I can watch the finals of American Idol tomorrow night, but they only get 6 stations. Only two of the stations are American, CNN and Speed (yes, they get the NASCAR station as one of their 6 stations).

We drive into town to check out the Dawson Creek visitor center and museum. And of course, GET OUR PHOTO TAKEN AT MILE 0 SIGN FOR THE ALASKAN HIGHWAY!!!

We watch the hour-long, very detailed (read 'boring') account about building the Alaskan Highway. Jere thought it was very interesting -- to each their own. Then walk to downtown Dawson Creek. They have the original Mile 0 post (re-constructed) downtown so people can have their picture taken beside it without having to walk through a very busy traffic circle (in it's original location).

And we also take some pics of the Alaska Hotel...very picturesque, but the downtown is kindof dead, as are many downtowns in small towns.

I collect Christmas ornaments when we travel and am looking for an Alaska Highway ornament. The visitor center said to check out the Mile 0 Gift shop at the Dawson Mall, so we drive over there. The place looks fairly deserted, but we go inside and find that there is no such store as the Mile 0 gift shop. Oh well...

We make a quick stop at a Ducks Unlimited bird sanctuary outside of town and return to the Northern Lights RV Park. And now I'm typing up my blog at 8:30pm and the sun is as bright as mid-afternoon....very odd and I know it's going to keep getting lighter later and later as we continue north.

Travel day....heading north on Highway 97. We see 3 black bears, including a cub and our first MOOSE!

We stop in Prince George for some donuts and coffee at Horton's (a Canadian donut chain). They are nowhere near as good as Krispy kreme donuts. I'm not sure how they made those Krispy Kreme donuts in Washington, but they were incredibly delicious. We are not impressed with the town of Prince George -- it smells. I think they have a lot of lumber factories here and they must pollute the air.

We pull into the visitors center at Prince George and someone pulls up beside us and asks us if we are lost. He says the visitors center doesn't open til next week and this part of town has been taken over by crackheads. So we leave. We drive much north of town and stop at a rest stop for a picnic lunch.

As we head north to travel over the Rocky Mtns, some of the mountains still have quite a bit of snow on then. The lake is still partially frozen and snow covered. Very pretty.

We stop at Chetwyn, BC. They also claim to be the Chain Saw Sculpting Capitol of the World.

We check out their chain saw sculptures and then have dinner. After dinner I start trying to make some window coverings for our bedroom windows -- it stays light past 9pm now and within a few days we'll be farther north and it will be light til 10pm. Our shades filter the light but do not block the light. Not sure if that is going to bother me at night or not, but thought I'd start finding ways to block the light in our bedroom in case the daylight at midnight is going to bother me.

The sun has come out after last night's rain, so we stop in at the lumber industry tower in Quesnel and the farmers market in Quesnel (British Columbia) before leaving for our hour drive to Barkerville, British Columbia. Quesnel has several lumber mills and factories related to the lumber industry. There are tens of thousands of pine logs stacked at various places in town.

On the way to Barkerville we come upon a grizzly bear on the side of the road scrounging for roots, so we stop and watch it for several minutes. Our loud diesel doesn't seem to bother it.

Barkerville was the center of the British Columbia gold rush in the 1860s. In its' heydey it was the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco with a population of 10,000. Then, as with most gold rush towns, it became a ghost town. In the 60s the British Columbia government reconstructed the town and it's now run as a historical park.

We spend time walking around the town and tag along on a walking tour of the town, explained by a costumed guide who protrays one of the women who lived in the town. She is great and makes the park interesting.

Her tour stops at the end of town where Chinatown begins. Almost half of the people who lived in Barkerville were Chinese immigrants from the Hong Kong area.

So we go to take the Chinatown tour with a guide, but soon after it starts, it starts to sleet! We go inside and listen to the rest of her tour and watch the sleet change to snow. We probably get an inch of snow during the hour-long talk about Chinatown. This guide, who portrays a woman living in town in the late 1800s but admits she is actually a social historian by trade, is just as wonderful as the first tour guide. We learn A LOT about the Chinese immigration to North America and the gold rush.

I try to take pictures of the snow but they didn't show up very well. Just take my word that it was snowing really hard. By the time the 'tour' is over, the snow/freezing rain slows down. We finish looking at a couple buildings, but then the cold gets the best of us and we hurry to the warm truck.

The sun eventually does come out again as we get close to the RV. I almost wish it had continued snowing/raining so it would remain cloudy. It is light here til at least 9pm. The clouds last night made it darker a little earlier. Then the sun is up by 5am. We have started stuffing our skylight in our bedroom with a pillow before bedtime to keep it darker a little longer in the morning. A month from now when we're in Fairbanks it will only be dark for an hour or two, so we need to try to adapt to sleeping in the light :-)