Today we awoke to cooler temperatures with bright skies, after an early breakfast and quick walk with Jebo, we got on the road by 8:00, we were heading down to mile zero of the Alaska Highway and on to Grande Prairie for 3:00 pm MST to meet Nick for a visit and dinner.
The Alaska highway is fairly flat treed leaving Fort Nelson. There is a fair amount of mid sized industry leaving town, the most we had seen in a while. It seemed to be a lot of industry serving the gas sector and Spectra Energy.
Although there were many signs for wildlife, there didn’t seem to be much out and about this Sunday morning. We did see a little brown bear approach the highway but run back into the bush as we approached, we couldn’t determine if it was a baby grizzly or a small brown bear.
We entered the Upper Peace Region, an area always referred to on CBC broadcasts but we had never ventured into this corner of BC.
It was, I have to say, a rather uneventful drive, pretty but the scale of vistas and wildlife paled against that of recent days.
This seemed like a good day to do some writing and some Spanish lessons. Before too long we hit Fort St John where the traffic increased significantly and the drive between Forth St John and Dawson Creek was really congested and we lost quite a bit of time in this stretch. Unfortunately we were running behind and didn’t have a lot of time to stop for the famous shot of “Mile Zero, Alaska Highway” while in Dawson Creek.
We navigated the traffic in town and got onto the #2 East headed into Alberta and straight for Grande Prairie. Not to play on all the quips about driving in the prairies, but pretty much as soon as you cross into Alberta, the road divides, straightens out and you just need to get behind a fast moving line of pickup trucks with Alberta plates and get to where you need to go.
The one thing that immediately jumped out at us after entering Alberta were the sprawling and rather pretty fields of yellow
These large fields of Rapeseed, aka Canola, are scattered across Alberta and much of Saskatchewan.
We pulled into Grande Prairie on time and hit our hotel driveway at 3:01. Nick arrived and after walking Jebo around the fields nearby, we went up to our room (we had upgraded to a suite just for this purpose) to enjoy a couple of beers and catch up on things.
We had an early dinner in the hotel before Nick had to head back up 2.5 hours north to his tree-planting camp near Worsely, AB.
Tomorrow is a ”rest day”, exploring Grande Prairie and visiting our good friends Lonny and Katherine
Our trip so far looks like this: 59:56 hrs, 5,145 km
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