Hello from British Columbia! We have made it to mile 0 of the Alcan – we are in Dawson Creek, BC, Canada. We arrived here this afternoon around 4:00 local time (we are now on Pacific time), made a stop at the inevitable Walmart to stock up on some groceries, and then to our camground for the night, aptly named “Mile 0 Campground”. Very nice campground, we’ve already met several folks here who are also heading up the Alcan. Our neighbors right behind us have a German Short Hair, 3 1/2 years old. He’s more brown than Jaeger was, but it was good to see another big one that acted a lot like Jaeger.
I think Dawson Creek is sort of a “staging area” for folks to get ready for the great beyond – the trip up north. This is the kind of campground we like…well kept, friendly folks and not a mud hole – more on that in a moment. We plan to stay in Dawson Creek until Sunday. We have to move to a different campground tomorrow, there’s no availability at the one we are at now. Hopefully we’ll like the other one just as well.
Saturday is Canada Day – sort of like our 4th of July. They are celebrating 150 years, and we’ve heard things will be shut down Saturday, crazy people will be on the roads, and there’s no use trying to travel on that day. So we’re going to take that good local advice and stay put until Sunday. I want to catch up on laundry and be sure we have all the supplies we need, I’m expecting services like grocery stores to be much further and fewer once we leave here. I could be wrong, we’ll find out and I’ll let you know!
Back to the mud comment….the previous 3 days have been non stop rain. The campground we were at in Hinton, Alberta (I think I referred to it as “eclectic”) became a terrible mud pit in the rain. We left there Wednesday morning and were glad to go. We literally were sinking into the mud. While we were packing up and getting ready to leave, a nice couple stopped by to say hi. There were only 2 other RVs in the place, and these folks had just pulled in the night before. They were leaving too. They were from Auckland, New Zealand. They keep their RV and truck in storage in Canada and come over each summer to tour. Super nice, we exchanged contact information and they invited us to come visit them in New Zealand. We needed to dump our tanks (grey tank which is all waste water except for the toilet, and black tank, which is only toilet), but the sani-dump was so small and placed in such a terrible location we couldn’t get to it. So we left and planned to dump upon arrival at the next campground.
We then arrived yesterday at a campground in Grand Prairie, Alberta. It took us about 4 1/2 hours to drive about 200 miles. We were in the mountains, rained all day, foggy, and it was a 2 lane road with lots of logging trucks on it. That all was stressful, but, it got really stressful when we saw where we were staying. I had reserved 2 nights here. The entire campground was one giant mud bowl. I can say this with certainty because we had to circle the entire “loop” 3 times – once looking for the check in office which was not on the loop but also not marked so we had driven by it when we came in, once more to get to the sani-dump, and again to get out of the sani-dump because we were too big to turn out, we could only go in the circle again.
We were put into a separate area called a “group camping” area. We see these alot – I’m guessing they are reserved by church groups, weddings, etc. We were the only ones in this area that had about 10 campsites. Kind of nice on one hand to be secluded, but, it was not maintained very well at all. We had to fight through high weeds to get to the electrical hook up, and the water hook up was so burried in weeds I couldn’t find it at first. Steve got shocked when plugging in the electric since the “on/off” indicator was backwards – we put it to the “off” position before plugging in, but it was really “on” and he got a nice shock.
The mosquitos feasted on us the minute we got out of the truck. I don’t think they had seen fresh meat in days. There was standing water all over the place. We looked at each other and said, “we’re not unhitching, we’re leaving tomorrow morning”. We can stay for a night without unhitching from the truck. We can’t put down the leveling jacks, but we can still put out the slides.
This is when I was thinking – Seriously?! The water is probably not safe to drink, we are covered in mud, the floor in the RV needs mopping in the worse way, and Gerry keeps wanting to drink the standing gross water all around us. Not fun.
So after all that, I made us a cheese plate with hot peppers from MaryAnne – thank you, they are delicious, we have used the entire jar now! And our favorite comfort food, creamy noodles. No internet or cell service so I couldn’t search for a new campground. Ugh! Then, at about 11:00 at night, when the sun was just about done setting (yes, there is a lot of daylight up here) and it was almost dark, 2 pickup trucks drove back to our area. We were completely separate from the main campground, and were immediately worried. But after a few minutes they had kids get out of the trucks and play on the 2 swings that were there for a playground. They left soon enough, but it gave us a bit of a fright…probably because our nerves were already on edge.
It was sunny in the morning, we did some chores around the house and washed the RV and truck the best we could to get most of the mud off. Then it was off to Dawson Creek. All is well. I only have a few pictures here. Hope to have some great photos as we travel up the Alcan.
