Jane and John – we travel and we ranch!

We are on the road fairly early again today at 7:45 am.  Today is a significant day as we will drive through Dawson Creek which is officially the beginning of the Alaska Highway (in the early days it was called simply the “Alcan.”)  Our fuel stop was in a little village about five miles before Dawson Creek and it turned out to be a good decision because the pumps were easy to access with our 65′ long coach and Jeep in tow.  It has been raining off and on and the wind is blowing we estimate about 25 mph with higher gusts; naturally it is yet another headwind which probably takes our fuel mileage from the usual 7.2 to maybe 6 or even less!  We drove through Dawson Creek and didn’t even stop for the mandatory picture at the Alaska Highway Mile Zero sign post.  The timing just wasn’t right to spend the night there as we still had more driving time available for the day.

John planned on staying at a campground called Sourdough Pete’s based on research but in spite of our GPS navigation we unknowingly pass right by the entrance because of the confusing signs.  We stop a couple of miles down the road and phone the campground but all we get is an answering machine.  We have a conference and come to the conclusion of where the park must be located.  So we backtrack and hooray we found Sourdough Pete’s!  We park and Jane goes to the office to perform our check-in ritual.  She returns too quickly to the coach; the office is closed until two pm.  So that’s why nobody answered the phone!  Since two pm is only a ten minute wait, we decide to .. wait.  Two pm and Jane goes to the office – nobody home.  We wait until two fifteen and when nobody shows up we decide they really don’t need any business and we leave for another park just north of the little city.

We stayed at the Rotary Club RV Park which turned out to be very nice, right on Charlie Lake and the sites were quite large.  Unfortunately we had a site (#27) with only electric and water and no sewer hookup.  We got settled in at 2:30 pm and all was well!  It was quite windy and we recorded a gust of 36.1 mph on our recently added anemometer.  John loves his gadgets!

We are experiencing longer and longer days the farther north we go and as we draw closer to the summer solstice.  It is still twilight at 10 pm and light at 5 am.  Trekkie, the young cat, was quite naughty last night playing and messing around at 3:30 am, 4:30 am, and 5:30 am.  We finally gave up and trying to sleep and got our day started.

We got on the road at 8:30 am and arrived at Whitecourt a few hours later.  We got fuel for the coach and then settled into the very cramped Sagitawah RV Park.  The park was about 90% filled with long-term campers; most of them worked in the oil and gas industry.  We are getting pretty good at maneuvering our 40′ long coach into tight spaces so this challenge was easily overcome.  We were in site 25 and we had what was to be the first experience with poor Canadian RV park voltage.  I suppose the wiring is either too small or the parks are not supplied with adequate current.  We would frequently get voltage sags which causes the UPS that John has on his desktop computer to beep in protest.  We had this problem over and over again!  Our long-standing problem with the air conditioning not cooling happen again.  The weather was warm enough for the air conditioning which was unexpected.  After the third cycle of starting and stopping the AC it finally began to cool.

We were expecting it and it finally happened on this leg – our much revered DirecTV and Tivo began to lose the satellite.  The DirecTV satellites were parked in an orbit to cover the 48 states and NOT Canada.  It will work however all the way into Alaska if you have a large enough dish; the correct size dish for Alaska happens to be FOUR FEET in diameter!  The little automatic tracking dish we have on the roof has worked extremely well up till now, but sadly we turn off our “entertainment device.”  John isn’t giving up however and he drags out the portable DirecTV dish and manages to find the satellite.  This will be the very last time we watch DirecTV until we return back south in the fall.

The excitement is mounting as we finally are getting close to “going international” in our quest to get to Alaska.  We leave Dick’s RV Park (Great Falls) fairly early for us (8:05 am) and stopped just before the Canadian border at a truck stop to fill up one last time with reasonably priced diesel.  Fill-up time is always exciting because we always put anything from $100 to $200 on the handy Visa card.  I figure the coach costs us $0.40 to $0.50 a mile just in fuel costs. We arrive at the border about 10:30 am and only wait 20 minutes in line; finally it is our turn to be interrogated by the customs/immigration guy.

Him: Identification please! we hand over our passports,
How many people on board? two,
How long are you going to be in Canada? not long – we are driving through to Alaska,
Any animals on board? two cats,
Are they current on their rabies shots? yes,
Any alcoholic beverages?  yes, several bottles of wine and two fifths of rum,
How many is several? oh maybe 13 or 14

Finally we are driving the coach in a foreign country!  It is a good thing our neighbors to the north speak English, that makes navigating and communicating much easier.  One of the first things I noticed was that Canada doesn’t have the Interstate highway system like we do in the lower 48, but the highways were pretty good at that point.  Our stop for the night was going to be Pine Creek Campground and we pulled into our site at 2:45 pm and got set up quickly.  Our site was large but we only had 30 amp power.  On the plus side, we were in the open which was great for the Internet dish.