Un-bear-ably Good Sights in Quesnel [260612]

(Posted 260619) Despite a minor change in our travel plans, we still spent the day seeing some of the sights in Quesnel.

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Despite a bit of noise last evening, the Walmart parking lot ended up being relatively quiet after the store closed and we were able to sleep peacefully until it was time to get up at 8:30 Friday morning. Some time in the night, Christine had decided that she didn't want to spend a second night in Quesnel after all but would rather move on to Prince George this afternoon after finishing our activities in the area today so we could get an earlier start on our activities there tomorrow. The start of our day was a little delayed, though, because Christine also found out about a snafu with her Dad's regularly scheduled medical supply ordering (which she helps manage) that she needed to get sorted out while we were sitting in a reasonably stable data/cellular position.

Once that was sorted out, we decided to check out Dollarama - rumored to be Canada's version of Dollar Tree - across the street. We picked up a few food items, and Tom also was also delighted to find a chloroplast Garage Sale sign for CA$1.50 that he thought he could use as the raw materials for the rain shield frame he had been contemplating building a couple of mornings ago.

We also had to pop back into Walmart to complete the portion of our grocery shopping that we had intentionally left for today, thinking we'd be staying a second night. In the end, it was 12:30 before we finally rolled out of the parking lot.

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We drove 13 km west across town and up a steep-ish hill to Pinnacles Provincial Park. We were really excited (not!) to see the "Caution - Bear in Area" sign on entering the parking lot. The bear spray we've been carrying in the T42 for years now finally came out of the cupboard and made it on to Tom's belt for the mile+ round-trip hike out to see the hoodoos.

We ran into a family whose little son had found this interesting spider - apparently a "goldenrod crab spider" or "flower (crab) spider". Apparently these spiders hunt their prey instead of spinning webs to catch them, and can change their color to match their environment (slowly through a molting process, not quickly like a chameleon). This one has developed purple streaks to match the flower it hunts on.

We didn't see any bears, though.

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We drove 7 km back into town to the Riverfront Trail area in order to walk the Quesnel Fraser River Footbridge, which has the distinction of being "the longest wood truss walking bridge in the world". Google Maps satellite view didn't show any obvious parking for the bridge itself, so we parked at the RV Parking at the Quesnel Municipal Sani-Dump just down the street and across the road.

The Quesnel Municipal Sani-Dump turned out to be a pretty nice place - a little RV-only area with some picnic tables right next to a pair of dump stations and a water fill. We had lunch there, and then realized that with a free dump stations and water fill right there it didn't make sense to not shower, dump the gray tank, and refill freshwater before moving on.

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A 121 km drive north brought us to the city of Prince George, with a light rain starting to fall just as we pulled into town. Our first stop was at Costco, but the parking lot was so packed that we couldn't find a pull-through and went next door to the much emptier Best Buy parking lot instead. We began our shopping trip with a visit to the restroom, when the power went out - along with all the lights. Luckily in this day and age, everyone has a flashlight built into their cell phones so such situations aren't as dire as they once were; Tom also keeps his headlamp in his pocket at all times when traveling, so had it to use as well.

It turns out that Costco can continuing functioning during power outages, because (unlike their lights) all of their registers run on some sort of battery backup. So the checkout lines continued to chug along.

We're guessing that blackouts aren't uncommon either, because folks didn't seem particularly fazed by it. A fair number seemed perfectly content to continue their shopping, so we joined along.

Things were fine until we got to the refrigerator sections at the back of the warehouse. Insulated shades (which we're guessing they normally use at night when the warehouse is closed) had been pulled down over all of the vertical refrigerator cases, making it impossible to browse them, and an employee was trying to herd folks back to the front of the warehouse. But just then the power came back on, and life resumed as normal; employees emerged to raise all the shades and we were able to finish our shopping trip - with greatly reduced crowds compared to when we initially walked in.

Our plan for the night was to stay at the casino a few blocks away, but we were also intrigued by the fact that some folks on iOverlander had reported getting permission to stay in the Costco parking lot. We checked with Customer Service on the way out, and the manager there confirmed that "they are RV friendly" and we're welcome to stay in their lot overnight if we wanted. The fact that on the way back to the T42, it seemed that our phones were able to hold on to the Costco Wi-Fi to halfway out into the parking lot made the prospect even more appealing.

But we decided to check out the casino parking lot anyway so drove the 3 km to the Treasure Cove Casino. The overflow lot was pretty huge, and we found that by parking on the casino end of it we were eventually able to faintly pull in the casino's free Wi-fi with our repeater. But that end of the lot was getting fuller throughout dinner time and we were concerned with the traffic noise from folks coming/going at all hours of the night, so we decided that we'd move back to the Costco lot after they closed at 8:30.

At 8:30 we headed back to Costco, got gas, and then parked at the spot we had sort of scoped out on our first visit - only to be completely unable to pick up their Wi-Fi. Tom walked the parking lot while running the Wi-Fi Analyzer app, and found that Wi-Fi was barely detectable (and completely unusable) more than a few feet from the warehouse wall now. (Maybe it was stronger earlier in the day because the warehouse doors were open? 🤷) Costco's location right on the highway meant traffic noise throughout the night, and without the availability of Wi-Fi to make up for it there really was no compelling reason to stay at Costco at all any more. So we headed back to Treasure Cove.

Of course by the time we got back to Treasure Cove our old parking spot wasn't available any more. We tried parking a few spots over, but the Wi-Fi barely connected from there and was slower than our low-speed Starlink.

We decided to just move to the middle of the parking lot, so that we'd be as far from both the casino (on one end) and the main road (on the other end) as possible. There were very few vehicles there - and no obstructions to block our Starlink - so we thought we'd at least have a moderately peaceful night.

That ended up being a bad lane choice - at least for about an hour - when at around 10:30 a SUV in the next row and 6 spots over started having what appeared to be some sort of tire changing party with (on and off) two other vehicles, and a half dozen other folks total.