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This has been an exciting week. We left Montana on Saturday, 3/31/2007, and headed into Canada. We made the following stops:
Saturday – Calgary, Alberta – Mountain View Farm Camping - 15 Amp service Sunday – Edmonton, Alberta – Glowing Embers RV Park – 30 Amp service Monday – Grande Prairie, Alberta – Country Roads RV Park – 30 Amp service Tuesday – Dawson Creek, British Columbia – Northern Lights RV Park – 30 Amp service Wednesday – Dawson Creek, British Columbia Thursday – Fort Nelson, British Columbia – Blue Bell Motel & RV Park – 15 Amp service Friday – Watson Lake, Yukon Territory – Downtown RV Park – 30 Amp service Saturday – Whitehorse, Yukon Territory – Mountain Ridge Motel & RV Park – 15 Amp service Sunday – Tok, Alaska – Tok RV Village – 30 Amp service
In Edmonton, we visited the largest shopping mall in the North America, the West Edmonton Mall. It’s quite an experience with over 800 stores and services and parking for more than 20,000 vehicles. More than 23,000 people are employed at the property. In addition to stores there is an indoor amusement park and an indoor water park. For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Edmonton_Mall.
We stayed an extra day in Dawson Creek because of weather. Not because it was snowing, but because it was COLD. Temps dipped to –20C at night and got up to –8C during the day. We decided to sit tight for an extra day because there was warmer weather on the way. Sure enough, Thursday got up above 0C at Fort Nelson, and today we hit 5C, and since we are now in Alaska, that’s 41F.
Those of you who live in an RV will appreciate what a problem –20C can be on your water supply. None of the parks we have stayed in this week provided water at the site. Since we knew this in advance, we filled our 100 gallon fresh water tank in Polson before we started out. The good news is we did not burst any pipes when it got to –20C. The bad news is we couldn’t pump any water out of our tank for a couple of days. We managed on bottled water that we purchased in Dawson Creek. Once we got to Watson Lake, everything was working fine again, so we were back in business with out fresh water tank.
Since we left Montana, we have covered 2,289 miles or 3,363 kilometers. Along the way we saw eagles, coyotes, caribou, bison, and moose beside the highway. All in all the highway was in pretty good shape, with only a few miles that were gravel plus a few miles with lots of frost heaves. The frost heaves were mostly on today’s leg between Whitehorse and Tok, mostly around Kluane Lake. When we got to Tok this afternoon the inside of the RV looked like a Law & Order crime scene from all the bouncing, but nothing major was broken. We just had to be real careful in opening the slides so we didn’t crunch up any of the stuff that was scattered about.
Moosie Johnson watches the road
This shot was taken by Paula from inside the cab of the Ford F550. Moosie was loaned to us by our friends Sarah and Dallas Johnson. They used the moose as a companion and navigator on their 2004 trip to Alaska. This section of road is between Watson Lake and Whitehorse, where Paula says we did more “skating” than driving. It was a bit slick, and, frankly, I wouldn’t want to do it again! But we made it through without incident.
Tomorrow we do the last leg to our summer home in Fairbanks at Chena Marina RV Park and Resort.
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