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Archive for July 22nd, 2009

Day 226 – 22nd July 09

Posted by TravellingStrom on July 22, 2009

Wednesday – Fort St.John, British Columbia, Canada

I had another great night’s sleep, which means I woke up again without being eaten 🙂 Apparently the last bear sighting in this park was about a month ago, so no real need to panic, as long as I do not get complacent, who me! So, after breakfast and packing I went into the camp office where they told me there was internet, but I had not been able to get it from my site. This meant I sat here for a couple for hours to do some catching up, until about midday, as I needed to charge some gear as well. There was power at the sites, but only for large 15amp plugs and I had no adaptor.

After this effort I fuelled up and headed north, but not far as I had been told about a place called the Sulphur Gates which was a short dirt ride north of town.

After all the reading it was only a short walk to the river lookout, the Smokey River that is.

In the second picture above, you can see where the clear river joins the Smokey River at the top, but to get a better view I need to put the hubs in and climb some pathways.

After that, back on the road after the dirt section, it was very dusty, especially when a semi went past!

I noticed I had picked up a hitchhiker, rather than have him fly up into my face, I threw him overboard about 30kms from home 🙂

The road north was uninspiring, it was just a fast ride, but I had to stop at some construction work on a bridge and noticed the very cool automatic traffic lights. They have a timer built in and obviously just work to a 3 minute timescale from both ends.

I kept on going and if I had any doubt about which way to go, I just looked to the sky for directions 🙂

More pretty straight roads, then I spotted a beaver that was looking at me, I think this was at Beaverlodge 🙂

Shortly I arrived at Dawson Creek, this is where the Alaskan Highway really begins. It is called the zero mile town as it is the start, but really a place up the road called Sasquatch Crossing was the original zero mile town. When they built the road from both directions and they joined up, they changed the zero marker to here.

This was a big town of about 50k people, so I moved on, I decided to head to Fort St John, but on the way I took a small detour to see this old bridge, it is quite an impressive achievement 🙂

On I go and see a lot of bikers around, they are all heading the wrong way, but I guess Sturgis happens in a few weeks, so maybe they are all heading down for that? I go through the town of Taylor and the bridge deck is horrible metal which makes the tyres track real funny.

Not long after I arrive in Fort St John. Here I decided to get a motel and the lady at the visitors centre found a reasonably cheap one and I set about charging everything I had 🙂 As I had had a late lunch about 3pmI was not that hungry, but I could do with a beer 🙂 Now, I asked a couple of local chaps who told me about a few pubs around the area. I had some decision making to do here, because they were in opposite directions. I could turn right and walk 3 blocks and across the highway to the bar next to the Super 8 motel, the prices there would be based on tourism. The other choice was if I turned left and walked 6 blocks I would arrive at a titty bar. Hmm, decisions, decisions, well, let me work this out from a different angle, if I go to the bar across the main highway, I may get a bit drunk and have to navigate the traffic on my way home, this is a safety issue, weras if I turned left I could get mugged at the titty bar. Hmm, well, it would be more fun to be mugged by a semi naked girl than be run over by a truck, so I turned left 🙂

Between me and that bar was another bar where I stopped for a rest, this is where I found out I was in a different time zone and had gained another hour, so it was quite early.