Thursday 7/5:
Deflated Das Bot and packed up our boating stuff this morning. It was hard work getting both up from the lake to the RV. I need to explore options on handling this stuff more efficiently. This day we turn east and drive through the Canadian Rockies. We’ve got snow covered peaks on our right and waterfall laden crags on our left. Early in today’s journey, we hit the theoretical halfway point of our trip to Fairbanks, 1551 miles. Theoretical because we’ve decided to take a different route on our way up to Fairbanks, leaving the Alaska Highway at Watson Lake and taking the less-traveled northern route via the Campbell/Klondike/Top of the World Highways (with a Cheap Jeep side trip north of the Artic Circle to Inuvik). Ultimately we’ll cover every mile of the actual Alaska Highway, but we won’t hit the Watson Lake-Tok section until our return. Most of this morning we traveled the Peace River Highway which parallels the Pine River--a little confusing, but spectacularly beautiful. Early this afternoon we arrived in Dawson Creek. This town is situated at the actual beginning of the Alaska Highway so this afternoon we really begin to travel the AKH. Dawson Creek was a key stop for us to do last minute shopping and connect with the internet for the last time in possibly a week. Dawson Creek has a free community WiFi system. Great concept. We connect and are midway through our blog upload when the system crashes. We combine shopping with looking for alternate internet options. In a wireless phone store we meet Most Interesting Person number 3. Late-60’s lady from east Texas. She’s traveling by herself and eating and sleeping in her Pontiac sub-compact (we saw the car, don’t know the model—all these GM cars look the same to me—but it’s very tiny). She’s on her way to the same northern terminus point as we (Inuvik, Northwest Territories), and then she’ll make a second artic circle side trip to Prudhoe Bay and the Beaufort Sea/Artic Ocean. She left east Texas on Saturday 6/30. It’s taken her 5 days to get here and taken us 8. We take obligatory pictures at the Mile 0 starting points of the Highway (there are actually 3 places to take these photographs all strategically located near Dawson Creek retailers). We also volunteer to take picture of MIP 4. He’s a 50ish Harley biker, replete with leather, tattoos, and bandana. When we ask, “would you like us to take your picture next to the Mile Post 0 Marker, we’re half expecting grunts and expletives. Instead we get a mild-mannered and articulate-“thank you”. The biker is from New Hampshire. Living a life dream of driving the AKH. He left New Hampshire on Sunday 7/1. It’s taken him 4 days to get here from New Hampshire—us 8 days from northern California. I am very proud of our pace. We also take pictures in front of the Dawson Creek Art Museum. Surprisingly this is an actual art museum and not a tableau of famous Arts (Carney, Linkletter, Godfrey, Garfunkle, Nouveau, Deco, et al.) Many towns along this route attempt to distinguish themselves by asserting some superlative. We’ve seen “Biggest Cross Country Skis”, “Chain Saw Carving Capital of the World”, “World’s Biggest Gold Pan”, etc. Our family has a particular penchant for superlatives. I think we all inherited it from my dad, who was always experiencing the best, biggest, longest, straightest, kindest, dirtiest, cleanest, ugliest, prettiest things in life. As you read this blog, be sure to watch for superlatives. I’m sure this blog will have the most you’ve ever seen. We left Dawson Creek late this afternoon after completing our most important (superlative) purchase—two frozen pizzas! Driving north, the Rockies were now in the distance on our left, and the terrain was again flat and again looking like northern Wisconsin. We had intended to overnight at Charlie Lake Provincial Park, but both of us decided it was just too plebian. Trudged on for another 30 or 40 miles swimming upstream against construction backlogs and gave up and stopped at a rest area near Wonowon. I think this town was named after the background of some Canadian rock and roll song the same as Dadoorunrun, Nebraska or Papaoomawmaw, Rhode Island. We started to park between a flatbed truck and RV, but the truck driver waved us off. Turns out he was waiting for another truck, and they were going to transfer a load of pipe from his truck to the other. We went to sleep to the mellifluous sounds of clanging pipe and thundering trucks screaming past the rest area.
