The auxillary battery of the rv was not working, evidently. This is not a good thing when its cold at night. Also not a good thing if you are in a place with no power and want coffee. Frank had woken up with doglet early again and after letting me sleep for a few hours, he just had to have that coffee. But to start the generator now required starting the motor home first. That freakin battery! So I woke up fully with Allie jumping up in horror at the idea of the rv starting up already, the engine noise and the generator starting all at the same time. That warmed me up... By now it was a good and respectable time to wake up - 8.30am.
It was a cloudy sort of day, with both of us a bit quieter than normal....... there were no signs to read, no awesome mountains all around and not even roadkill to identify! It is amazing, though, how the first big bug of the day to hit the windscreen always lands splat in the centre of my vision and to try to clean it off with the wipers just results in the semi-permanent smearing all across the window. About an hour into the days driving a screaming alarm went off in the back of the rv..... both doglets came to high attention as did we. I dashed back to see what was going on - it sounded like the smoke alarm. Boy do those things get an instant reaction in such a small space as this! And then it stopped. It beeped one more time so I took the battery out, a bit too smugly evidently. A little further down the road we went over a fair sized bump in the road and all hell broke loose in the back of the rv! It was not the smoke alarm - it was further back. So here is Frank, driving on this teeny tiny little road with no edge at all, steep drop offs and even rivers down the side so no chance to pull off, me thundering to the back of the rv pushing buttons as I go - frantically trying to get that absolutely awful sound to stop!
It's quite amazing how sound can sound as if its coming from 20 different places all at the same time and there really are not that many options in an rv either. There was no smoke - all the dashboard gauges were fine, rv and bakkie rolling smoothly but now we had two near hysterical doglets, me wondering what the heck else to press and Frank, bringing the motor home to a shuddering stop in a tiny little space on the side of the road right before a bridge. It was the carbon monoxide alarm. No - not because we had a problem, but because one of the little temporary fence thingys I put up to stop the dogs from going under the bed while driving, slipped on to the test button and set it off. Sigh. Problem solved and on we trundled, mightily glad that we were not going to be stranded alongside the road.
We headed towards Prince George in a mix of rain and sunshine. Every time the rain came out, it lit up the colors along the road - the yellows particularly, popped out brilliantly. The pink and reds of the fire weed lit up the sides too - all the colors are just lovely..... We saw a few deer but nothing else at all. There are signs all along the way warning of caribou and "Moose on the Loose" but none showed themselves. Blondie was living up to her name and telling us to "turn around and then turn around again where possible". Would that not put us right back where we were? It was very tempting to follow her orders just to see - but I don't think she has a sense of humor at all!
We had no idea of the time - the clock said 4.30pm, Blondie said 5.30pm and our cell phones said 3.30pm.. So we stopped even thinking about it. Spoiled! :)
There is a definite problem with the pine beetle here in British Columbia - the hillsides and mountains are laid bare in so many places and much of the time there are more dead and dying trees than green ones! There are little ponds all over the place that have only skeletons of trees, all bleached white, standing in them. They all look stagnant and I bet house a gazillion mosquitoes too. They do throw the most beautiful reflections though and my camera took on a life of its own whenever we came across one of them. We came around one corner and there was a beautiful rainbow coloring the hillside behind it too, so it seemed.
We stopped at a campground quite late and we went to take a nap before having supper....... well, we fell asleep and stayed asleep all night long! I woke up at around 3am and saw that I had even left the laptop on and the door was still unlocked. We must have been tired! Before stopping for the night we pulled in to one campground and I immediately felt just a little uncomfortable - no particular reason right then. But after going in to the office there we just no way we were going to stay there. The campground was deep in the woods and made me think of Little Red Riding Hood - it was that kind of dark in there and the guy in the office was in a gown! He had a face the did not smile often at all and just stood there with his hairy, spindly legs with socks on his feet and a loosely tied gown asking me how many nights we wanted to stay! I told him that I thought we would just head on down the road some more, at which he just turned away - still no expression at all. Totally weird!
On Thursday we tootled up the road, through Chetwynd that had some gorgeous hand carved statues of animals and things all over town.. The scenery was lovely and pretty much the same as the day before - many farmlands, rolling hills, ponds and just lovely to be up here again. We came up this road in 2003 on our first trip to Alaska and its quite amazing to see what we did or did not remember.
The gas prices up here in Canada are really high - equivalent of around $5 in USA, but this does not seem to be stopping the rv travellers at al and there are many, many big rigs still going. At one of our gas stops, as I got out of the rv with Allie, one guy laughed and asked "why is the rat on a rope??" Instant laughter all over the place!
We arrived in Dawson Creek before lunchtime, found a campground and just relaxed for a while. It was good to be stopped early in the day and the doglets really enjoyed it too. I changed Allie's 'travel residence' again........ she was sort of all isolated in her little black home so I turned Sophie's bed upside down, propped the edges up with some pillows, threw in a blanket and now they have a cave that they can, and do, now snuggle up in together..... This is really helping Allie cope and we see a definite difference in her 'freak level'. Its about freaking time!
And so I checked the weather, checked the northern lights prediction center, checked again and again and then went to get some rest.......... I was hoping, so hoping, to see those lights!
And did we!!
love and light
Annie
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