Canada

Because our internet connection was so spotty recently, we had trouble getting the Washington summary posted. It just went out a day ahead of this Canada summary. If you didn't read about Washington yet, go to the older posts link at the end to to access it. 

Michael
We made it to Canada and it is really cool. It is scenic and interesting.
I found a Canadian penny at the last gas station, which had a lot of Canadian candy that looks really good. When we stopped at the first RV park in Canada, it had a BBQ buffet that was delicious. The owner was really funny and entertained us while we ate. The second RV park had a pool so John and I went swimming.

Today we are driving up to Smithers and should get to Alaska in about 3 more days. I have been helping Dad hook up the water and electricity in the RV last week, now it is John’s chore. I have been watching movies, using my iPod and playing with Maui to stay entertained. I have also been playing my guitar and my ukulele that I got in Hawaii.

It’s really hard to go to sleep in Canada and Alaska because it doesn’t get dark until 2 AM. It helps having the blackout liners on our windows that Aunt Kelli gave us. We also saw a lot of bears driving up to Alaska. One was a mom with two cubs that were eating berries in the bushes. And we saw the worlds largest weather vane which was a plane on a stick that pointed in the direction of the wind.

John
When we entered Canada the boarder patrol asked Dad a lot of questions. Canada is very scenic and has a lot of wildlife, we even saw our first bear just now as we were driving! Mom squealed, “a bear, oh my...a bear.” We saw eight bears in one day. Sadly, the first one was dead on the road but the second set was a sow with her two cubs. I will remember this one the most. We saw four more black bears and the following morning, Dad yelled, “a grizzly bear on the left!” I jumped out of my bunk bed, almost hit my face on the wall and ran to the front of the RV. Dad had to turn around in the road for us to see it again, It was a grizzly, and it was my first grizzly I have ever seen in the wild. Dad has been driving a lot to get us to Alaska, I have been playing yhatzee with mom and playing solitaire. I watch movies and play my ukulele to entertain myself. I’m almost done reading “The Lost Hero”. It is my favorite book series.

Dad has taught me all about the pumps and hook-ups to the RV. Michael and I have been taking turns helping Dad with the RV and taking care of Maui. So far, the RV trip has been great!

John and Maui passing the time.

Joey and Shelli
After a frustrating morning preparing for the push North, the drive into Canada was so nice it made it a very good day. We went through the Sumas border entry and drove up on the Trans Canada Highway in British Columbia. We continued on Highway 97 and the scenery was really beautiful. The mountains were big with jagged peaks and had really big waterfalls. We went along very fast moving rivers that were obviously swollen from rain and snow melt. In some areas we could hear the water roaring as we drove by. We stopped at a small RV park near Cache Creek and had a nice dinner. There were a lot of mosquitoes - something we plan to have to deal with for a lot of our trip.

The next day we drove up into Prince George and saw a sign that told us the highway was out. We stopped for out first fill of gas by the liter with a pump that didn't quite fit in the tank, and a price that makes California fuel seem like a bargain. We asked the attendant about the road conditions and learned that all that snow melt and rain had washed out a bridge between us and Dawson Creek, and the only way to Dawson Creek was a 300 mile detour. Although we had planned a couple more hours driving that day, we backtracked south to a park and made new plans. Since everyone at the park was headed to Alaska, the topic of conversation among us all was what to do. Learning the repairs to the bridge were expected to take two weeks, we decided to go another route completely and go pretty much due West on 16 and then head North on the 37, the Cassiar Highway. Even though we were told there was a long stretch of unsealed gravel that way, we thought it would be better than going 300 miles out of the way, and we could come back through the other route after Alaska when they would have had time to fix the bridge.

The drive on this route was very scenic and we saw our first black bear. He was huge and was standing up very straight and alert. He looked like a wooden silhouette. I didn't think he was real until he moved. Later I saw another big black bear off to the side of the road, just hanging out in the rain - there has been a lot of rain on this trip. We drove a long day and made it all the way to the Cassiar junction. The RV park we stayed at in Kitwanga had no internet service. We also had no satellite service. We were already working our way into the wilderness. We spent a lot of time driving and looking at things, but no almost no time stopping to take pictures of it. The push to just get to Alaska is strong and there is so far to go.

We started the next day by heading off on a detour through Stewart, BC and into Hyder, AK to go to a bear viewing area. The scenery along the way was really stunning. It was probably the most scenic drive I have even taken. The mountains were very imposing with a lot of snow on them and there were waterfalls all along the way. There were really nice glaciers, the first of the big ones with blue coloration I had seen. There were also rivers, lakes, and creeks along the 35 mile route. It was a couple of weeks too early for the salmon run that brings out the bears in droves to the viewing area, but we saw a total of eight black bears along the road on the way back, and on the highway as we went North.

This was the first glacier that we saw, it was really pretty and blue in areas - Shelli

One hundred people live in the town of Hyder, Alaska - Michael

This was the sow and cubs we saw but you can only see one cub in this picture - John

Now you can see both cubs who quickly left - John

This was another long driving day with about 10 hours of moving time on really bad roads when we stopped at Dease Lake for the night. After paying and pulling in, we realized our campsite had no hook-ups. When Shelli went to ask about a full site, she was told it was too remote for any services and the next campground was over 70 miles away. The view of the lake was nice and we cooked hot dogs on the fire before going to the lake to throw rocks.

Me throwing a rock that Maui almost jumped in after - Michael

It looks like I'm shooting the water... Quickdraw style - Michael

I built this platform and dad took the picture, but I built a lot more to it after - John

We got on the road early the next morning and got our first grizzly bear sighting just a few miles into the drive. Then the road conditions started to go downhill pretty quickly. We had a long, long day of teeth jarring, white knuckled, forearm straining driving. Driving a big RV with a towed van behind it forces you to pay attention on good roads, but on bad roads with a lot of rain, the fatigue factor really goes up. We joined the Alaska Highway near Watson Lake where we would have come through if we had gone to Dawson Creek. We thought it would have been much better if we had been able to avoid the rough parts of the Cassiar Highway, and that it would be better now, but in reality, the road conditions are absolutely horrible on this stretch too. We made it into Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory and stopped for the night. The internet service was extremely slow at the RV park and they blocked Facebook and YouTube sites.

I had heard how bad it was, but I think you have to experience it first hand to really understand what a thousand miles of bad roads really means. It gets into your mind and eats at you. Just when you think you should slow down to avoid breaking your axles, you think about how long it will take to get there and you just plow through it. Although we have been on the main roads (sometimes the only road), we have gone through many unpaved stretches with a mix of gravel and big rocks. In some spots the dust cloud behind us is big enough to hide the entire view in the side view mirror. In some places I can see a spray of rocks going out in all directions from the back, and we can hear the rocks banging into everything. The van is getting trashed. It has a coating of tar, rocks, and a perma-coating of dust. As bad as the unpaved road sounds, in most places the gravel roads are better than the paved sections. There are huge dips and ruts in the road that bounce us around like a plane in severe turbulence at times. Some spots are marked with signs, but many are not. It actually seems like the worst ones are not marked. We go through areas where we slow down because of the signs and realize it was nothing worth slowing down for, then we hit a big unmarked one that almost snaps the van off the tow bar. I think it is the Canadian’s way of getting back at us for acid rain. We had been through bad, then horrible, then we got to worse when we went through an area about 125 miles from the Alaska border, Shelli described it as driving through a mine field. Then about 10 miles later it got even worse. The kids got air a couple of times and the entire RV did at least once.

The picture doesn't capture how bad the dust coating is. The rain washes it away some and then it builds back up. This gravel stretch was pretty smooth. The bad ones are too dangerous to be up taking pictures.

Although I am making light of some of this, and there are real challenges with roads that freeze and thaw, but honestly, it shouldn't be this bad. Canada should do more to improve this, and Alaska should pitch in to help fix it if they want people to be able to come visit. Maybe the airlines and cruise ships got together and paid off the highway departments to make sure sane people would fly or cruise there. There isn’t much traffic out here. Frequently there is nobody in view in front or behind us, and I like it that way. Traffic close means rocks being thrown up. As one jerk in a small truck flew past us on a really bad spot, and kicked up rocks right into our front, I realized why Canada doesn’t let you pass through with handguns. Good call on their part..... Seriously.

Now that I have painted a picture of how bad the driving can be, I should point out the fact that we get to come back through most of this again on the way out.

The scenery continues to be amazing. In addition to the natural stuff, we saw the world's largest fly fishing rod, the world's largest weather vane, probably the largest sunflower, and probably the largest gold pan. We didn't stop for those things because we had a long way to go and had enough slow driving from the road conditions. We didn't take a lot of pictures in general because while we were driving they just didn't do much justice to what we were seeing, and timing shots in between bumps was tough. After leaving Whitehorse, the St. Elias mountain range was in view and it looked very much “Alaskan”. We also had big views of Yukon wilderness. The parts with nothing but thousands of trees leading up the mountain ranges miles and miles away in the distance make me thing of the gold prospectors coming through for the first time when there wasn’t even a horrible road to go on. A person could disappear out here very easily.

A rest stop as we were getting close to Alaska.

It's hard to get the scale here, but this dandelion was huge (maybe the world's largest)!

Shelli drove a while during a long straight stretch with little traffic. It turned out to be one of the roughest parts of the road. When the RV got air, she was driving and this bone flew up all the way from the back to the front. At the same time, Maui was hurled up off the couch, did a flip, landed up front and caught the bone after it bounced off the back of my head.

On the morning of July 1st,  Shelli and the kids had a birthday cake and gifts for me. It was a nice way to start my 43rd year and my first day of actual retirement from the military after my terminal leave ended.

We had played scrabble the night before

We had been timing our drive to make it to Alaska by my birthday, and after a lot of driving we finally made it to the border. The roads in Alaska were better right off the bat and that was like a birthday gift for us all. In total it was the worst day of driving, but we saw a big moose, another black bear, and two huge trumpeter swans (the world's largest - really they are the largest in Alaska). It was a really nice day.

We will probably start doing the blog updates once a week while in Alaska. We will shoot for Sunday mornings as long as we have good internet service.