(Posted 260630) Tuesday was our first day driving up the Alaska Highway, and it turned out to be a pretty eventful one.
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Temperatures were mild Monday night into Tuesday morning (low of 58.3) but it ended up being quite windy, with the T42 being rocked like she hadn't been in a while. Tom was awake before the scheduled 8:30 alarm time, contemplating his latest issue: it starts getting bright outside around 3:30 a.m. now, and with the new vent light deflector (described in the first Alaska blog post The Alaska Trek Begins! [260603]) working perfectly as designed the brightest spot in the coach in the wee hours of the morning is now actually the Rev. 3 window shade on the bedroom window. Its white foam core material is semi-translucent, and also reflects the light that comes through the top 2 inch open screen section onto the silver cassette shade, which bounces it back into the coach. The "fix" would seem to be to put some sort of black lining in there, preferably opaque and matte. An online check revealed that the Walmart we were sleeping in the parking lot of stocks both Cricut vinyl and several brands of black duct tape.
After morning routine, we popped into Walmart to check out our options and decided to buy some 3M black duct tape, since it was both the cheapest option and the most versatile/reuseable (black posterboard was also considered as a matte and much cheaper option, but we decided against that for durability reasons).
Our next stop was at the dump station, to refill our water bottles and throw away our trash.
Our final stop before leaving Dawson Creek was at the Save On Supermarket, which a Google search had indicated had chocolate covered espresso beans available in their bulk bins. A look at their online ad revealed that they also had the Guayaki Yerba Mate (which Tom prefers to drink to stay awake while driving, rather than coffee) - another item that had been hard to find in Canada - on sale, so it was sort of a "two birds" trip. Since we only had a few items to buy we decided to get a basket instead of a cart when entering the store - but when Tom went to pick up the basket he had a heck of a time figuring out the handle on it since it seemed to be a single long piece jointed on one edge, instead of two half-length pieces jointed at the middle of the basket like normal. Then Christine noticed what appeared to be wheels on the bottom of the basket. Ah!
At 11:30 we were finally done with all our errands, and ready to embark upon the Alaskan Highway! We experienced a wide variety of weather for our first day on the Highway, with periods of sunshine as well as periods of heavy rain - and even a brief period of sleet/hail! Tom cleaned the rear view cameras (we have two, since the rear view mirror is digital) multiple times during the day, but each time they got dirty again within 20 minutes or so. There were also several construction zones where we had to wait for one way lane controls. And of course: plenty of slow trucks to pass.
Along the way, we found ways to pass the time. One of the things we did was to try to document one of the weird bugs in the ProMaster algorithms that we noticed shortly after crossing into Canada. The van has a "Traffic Sign Recognition" feature, that is supposed to recognize speed limit signs on the side of the road and update the display on the dash; this can be tied in to other features like "Speed Limit Alerts" (which Tom turned on after crossing the Canadian border, since we no longer had the cellular data to run Waze, which usually gives us our "over speed limit" alert warnings) and "Adaptive Cruise Control" to automatically change speed with the road signs (an integration we have disabled because of Traffic Sign Recognition's penchant for reading the speed limit signs on exit ramps in addition to the main freeway ones, causing it to decelerate for no reason when you're not exiting. For some reason, she misread the 100 kph signs in Canada as being 120 kph instead about 90% of the time; she'd correct herself a few minutes later (presumably based on the data in the van's built-in TomTom navigation system) but for a few minutes she displays completely the wrong speed limit. (Apologies for the blurry road sign photo; the camera focused on the windshield raindrops instead of the sign outside.)
As we came down a hill approaching Taylor (about 58 km north of Dawson Creek) we saw a view that reminded us of the Badlands in South Dakota.
The bridge over the Peace River into Taylor happened to be the kind that Tom does NOT like driving over, though: with a metal grating roadway that makes van feel like it's shimmying from side to side as it crosses.
Taylor happened to be the location of our first planned stop for the day, since the Tourist Information Center is staffed by one of the moderators of the RVing to Alaska Facebook group, Amanda (and she has a free gift for group members who stop by 😉).
Amanda was very nice and chatty, and in addition to sharing travel info she also had lots of fun anecdotes about growing up in British Columbia. We ended up chatting for about 20 minutes before taking a look at the rest of the Information Center displays and heading out. Oh - and the free gift was the wooden Taylor, BC magnet shown in the center of the photo below (normally sold in the gift shop); the items surrounding it are available for free to anyone who stops by the Center (we're planning on sticking the little miniature Canadian flag(s) on the tracking map in the T42, since it only covers the 50 U.S. States and not Canada).
Our next stop was at the Mile 80 Rest Area (another 69 km northwest) for lunch. Mile 80 was the nicest rest area we had seen in British Columbia so far. In a previous blog we had noted how most rest areas had nothing more than a garbage can, and maybe a vault toilet if you were lucky. Mile 80 not only had running water bathrooms (albeit with non-potable water) but also a huge parking lot and a playground for the kids to burn off some pent up energy in.
Shortly after we arrived, an older model silver G Travato parked a couple of spaces over from us. We went over and introduced ourselves (bearing one of the "B-ee Bags" we carry as gifts for other Travato owners we encounter "out in the wild") and met Tammy and her sister Debbie, who were on their way home to Alaska. We chatted for a while, and Tom was particularly heartened to hear that Tammy has made the trip back and forth along the Alaska Highway multiple times in her (unlifted) Travato without any problems.
We had joked on a couple of our previous hikes that the dandelion must be British Columbia's provincial flower, because it seemed to be growing everywhere. Huge patches by the side of the road looked like snow as we drove by.
The plan for the night was to boondock at a turnout by Jackfish Creek, about 30 km south of Ft. Nelson (and 424 km from where we started out in the morning). About 3 minutes before reaching it, we saw another turnout that looked promising, and then: a black bear by the side of the road. We pulled over so that Christine could snap a few photos on the Nikon, using our "new" zoom lens.
Ah yes, we haven't really talked about the little last-minute lens buying spree we went on literally
weeks before leaving for Alaska. For years, Tom has almost exclusively used a
AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR lens on his Nikon D7500 - mostly because it's the perfect combination of "reasonable weight" and "zoom range we typically use", and partly because the zoom lens we do own (a
AF-P DX NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-6.3G ED VR) has such crappy image quality that Tom doesn't feel it's worth carting around or swapping in most of the time. Unfortunately, we managed to put a small chip in the front element of the 18-140mm while on our Arizona trip; we were supposed to look into replacing it, but forgot about it until our Alaska departure date was almost upon us. And while thinking about
that we also thought that maybe we ought to finally buy a
decent zoom lens. A few days of frantic research ensued, during which Tom determined that the "really nice" zoom lenses with a lot of reach are also
way heavier (~5+ lbs) than we would ever want to carry with us in a backpack, and so would probably never get used if we bought them. The one lens that looked promising was the
AF-P NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6E ED VR - but it was discontinued years ago, and can now only be purchased used, which sounded risky. But there wasn't much time for hand-wringing, so we bought a new (gray market) 18-140mm to replace the chipped element one, and gambled and ordered the used lens through Adorama - with both arriving days before we left. Tom only had time to slap both on the Nikon and take a few test photos to make sure they weren't DOA before we departed. So today's bear was the first "real" test subject for the 70-300.
We proceeded to the Creek, where there was already another truck/trailer parked in the turnout and proceeded to park. But Christine was absolutely
swarmed by mosquitoes when she got out to check our positioning, so we decided that this was
not the place for us (since Tom is usually the tasty one that mosquitoes go for while ignoring Christine completely, and he had to get out of the van this evening to clean windows and sensors again). We decided to return to the previous turnout we had seen.
The bear was still there when we passed by again, but was on Tom's side of the van this time so he got to play with the new lens for a while. We were quite pleased with the results. And apparently, bears like snacking on dandelions - who knew?
Christine took a little video on the iPhone as well (although it's from quite a distance).
We left the bear to his munchings, and continued on to the pullout entering to face southbound, so that we could put the Starlink up on the dashboard instead of the roof tonight. We estimate that our total transit time today was about an hour longer than expected, due to the construction delays. Tom donned long pants and a sweatshirt to go out and do his cleaning and was buzzed, but not bitten.
For dinner that night, Christine whipped up a corn, black bean, cheese, and guacamole on fresh tortilla dish that we ate off of paper plates. After dinner, we applied the black duct tape we had purchased in the morning to the underside of the window shade, and then Tom worked on blog post #7 while Christine worked on trip planning. Bedtime was around midnight. Tomorrow would mostly be another travel day.
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