It’s snowing. I don’t like it. I just want to be honest about that. While I love seeing snow up on the mountain tops or even by the side of the road, when you are driving around in a 40 ft. long tin can, watching snow fall around you is just not pretty. Thankfully we are not driving today and hopefully in the morning all of this mess will only be a memory. Then again there’s the fact that it’s supposed to get into the twenties tonight, but that’s another story.

So Today – Sunday, May 17th – Day 7 of our Alaskan Adventure
After six busy days on the road, it was wonderful to just sit still. We were blessed to be able to worship at a nearby church, enjoyed a nice lunch out and then checked out the visitors’ center and watch a couple of videos on the building of the Alaskan Highway – 1500 miles (through wilderness) in just over 8 months. Amazing.
Go North, Young Man

Mile ZERO!

A quiet day in downtown Dawson Creek!

The rest of the day called for naps and eating leftovers and watching that pesky snow falling.
Yesterday – Day Six – Saturday -May 16, 2009
Our first stop of the day was at Huble Homestead – the early 20th century home of a local entrepreneur who established his own mini-community along the Fraser River. Since we were absolutely the first visitors of the season (it was their opening day), we enjoyed a lovely guided tour of the homestead.

This fellow pretty much did it all – freighting, guiding, surveying, fur trading, along with supplying provisions and accommodations for travelers. His wife traded the crops from her extensive garden for meats from the passing paddleboats. It was a great tour – and as an added bonus, the rain didn’t start until after we left.

And then it rained off and on pretty much the rest of the day. But still we managed to put in our longest day of driving so far. 262 miles. All the way to Dawson Creek, and Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway. We made a couple of stops along the way – a visitor center here and there and then a quick driving tour of Chetwynd, home to the Chainsaw Sculpture Contest each year and all of its previous years’ entries – but pretty much we just pressed on to Dawson Creek. Here are some windshield shots of our drive through this stretch of beautiful British Columbia (They’re in order so you can see how the scenery was always changing!)-

(ok – this is not a windshield shot – it’s a picture of our back-up camera when the guys were investigating why our “warning” light came on. Nothing could be found, so we continued on.)



Crossing through Pine Pass



(can you feel it getting colder?)


Through Pine Pass – and back into some green. Phew!

Civilization – Chetwynd!

Bunches of the chainsaw sculpture. They were amazing!



It wasn’t until I downloaded my pictures that I realized this bridge had been graffitied (is that a word?) just for me!

One more pass over the Pine River

And then suddenly we were in farmland?


And then, finally – Dawson Creek is in view –

I was surprised that this area is such a ranching/agricultural area with a little industrialization thrown in on the outskirts of town(I guess I figured we’d be more in the mountains), but then again if I had studied up on any Canadian geography I’d probably have had a better idea. We didn’t do a lot of exploring in the downtown between the weather “issues” and the fact that we were beat, so I can’t say much about the town itself. The visitor centers were excellent (we’re becoming quite the visitor centor connoisseurs), the videos much longer that 12 minutes (but then again it was a pretty big story) but they were excellent.

But now, it’s off to bed. Tomorrow we hit the road again – hopefully they’ll be dry!
Here’s a map of our drive on Saturday – Prince George to Dawson Creek.

I don’t know how far we’ll get tomorrow – maybe as far as Fort Nelson. I’m not sure what the Wagon Master has in store for us! 🙂

Oh – if you’d REALLY like to see more of the pictures from our drive on Saturday – Go for it!