While we are enjoying these beautiful parks and the Canadian Rockies, we are anxious to continue on with our journey. You see, Canada is nice - nice and expensive!!! Gas is over $4/gallon here! And groceries are expensive, and it costs $17.80 a DAY to just BE in the national parks, and camping is an extra $20 on top of that, for unimproved campgrounds! So we're talking about $38/day just to camp in the national parks in the Rockies. Didn't make us feel like lingering too long, though it was beautiful.
We went up to Dawson Creek from Jasper via the "Scenic Route to Alaska" - a bit of a short cut. We missed seeing the neat couple we met in Baja who live in Edmonton by doing so, but it is getting late and we want to get to Alaska before it closes! Just kidding. I really regret not taking the extra side trip, time and miles to visit Alethea and Bernardo - they were just a wonderful couple, but we needed to get to a place with WiFi by Monday so Devin could do some work, and we wanted to be on the Alaska Highway asap. Dawson Creek is "Mile 0" of the Alaska Highway.
We drove through forested rolling hills, crossed a big river, and drove by a very large coal mining operation of some sort - not a mine, but where the coal was either shipped from or processed or something. We passed one small town at the crest of a hill before descending into another river valley, and ultimately getting out onto flatter country.
Getting up to Dawson Creek we left the Rockies and were on the prairie - the towns could be anywhere with malls and housing tracts, except for the Real Canadian Markets and the Tim Horton's. Some beautiful fields of bright yellow flowers - I think it may be Canola oil (Rapeseed) plants. Also, more hay.
The Northern Lights RV Park where we stayed had some nice views of the sunset over town and was across from more fields.Nothing too exciting happened in Dawson Creek - Devin worked three days remotely; we got the RV oil and leveler fluid changed. Devin went to clinic for more antibiotics. Friday, my eyelid started swelling again (the same one that sent me to the emergency room in Jackson Hole), so I started on the eyedrops (which I had leftover), and washed the lid with baby shampoo, and it went back down.
The clinic experience is worth recounting: we called to see if we could get an appointment and they said to come on in - they were really nice, of course. We saw the doctor and got a prescription, which we were able to pick up in their pharmacy, no problem. The interesting part was paying - Canada, as you may know, has national health care. So when I asked how to pay, they asked if the price they quoted sounded fair and reasonable. I wonder if they would have lowered it had I said no? But $55 for an office visit and $40 for prescription (10 days 3xday penicillin) seemed quite reasonable. They weren't used to dealing with cash - no credit card method, checks were "a problem" and so they let me go get some cash from the credit union around the corner, and the nurse made change from her purse!
The Northern Lights RV Park has some nice services for travelers - one of their sons does work on RVs - he changed our oil and hydraulic leveler fluid, as I mentioned before, and they also repair windshield chips and make special rock guards for tow vehicles. The rest of the trip we would see these guards and know that those people had stayed at Northern Lights! More on the need for rock guards later.We had a thunderstorm!! The rain was nice, and it cooled things off for us, finally.
Beautiful sunsets at the Northern Lights RV Park.
- an exhaust system that not only increases power, but gives our model of RV 7% better gas mileage!
which has digital gauges letting you know fuel economy - allows you to figure out optimum driving speed/rpm for best mpg
lets us know what our tire pressures are at all times (keeping tires properly inflated can make a big difference in fuel economy)
(for filling tires using our batteries and keeping them at optimum pressure)
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