Day 7

DAY 7

Is it bad on a roadtrip when you’re keeping a journal like this and have to look back at old entries to see what day it is now? Roadtrips like this, where you get up and drive, drive, drive are kind of like that movie Groundhog Day. I could almost promise you that it’s the same day over and over, with the exception of the changes in the scenery.

Today has been SO full of everything. Scenery, miles, fun, animals…We woke up this morning and were on the road around 6:40, which is the earliest we’ve left so far, since the first day. Within a span of two hours we saw a moose, a deer, a rabbit, and another black bear! Today has actually been full of black bears. Four have been spotted from the camper today. My dad saw all of them, John saw three and I kind of saw three (the cub John saw was just a dot out the window by the time I saw him) and my mom saw two of them. I cannot BELIEVE how many bears we’ve seen! In all the times we’ve driven this, we’ve never seen so many. We have seen tons of buffalo too, which I thought was really exciting. And rock sheep (they eat rocks). And at least a couple caribou. Just a few minutes ago we saw the only animal we felt like we were missing—wild horses. John and I even saw an otter, happily swimming along on his back.

I was reminded (again) that British Columbia is my favorite province for a reason. Today was so breathtaking as far as scenery—I told John earlier that I’m on sensory overload, basically. My brain is still trying to process everything we’ve seen today. We drove around and up some mountains, stood on the side of the road at a mountain lake and later a river and just enjoyed the scenery. We saw some mountains that were entirely made of rock as we drove into the Canadian Rockies. And then there was Muncho Lake, which is traditionally one of the reasons I would rather drive to Alaska than fly. The water is a irredescent robins egg blue. It seems almost like it glows from a light underneath it, but the color is from copper oxide in the water. There are seven miles of coastline that the Alaska Highway follows and they were all gorgeous. I must have taken a dozen pictures of the same scenes because I wanted to capture them on my camera. The blues and greens mixed with the soft white clouds made the whole scene look like something from a fairy tale or a dream. Pictures kind of show you why it’s so special there, but they don’t really capture it. We were talking about that today, as we drove along a windy mountain road in a country that apparently doesn’t believe in the value of guardrails—this whole landscape, just like Alaska, is so BIG that it’s hard to get perspective from a picture. You try to record what it truly looks like, but you really can’t. But, judging by the hundreds of pictures on my memory card (and we’re not even to Alaska yet!) I am going to keep trying.

It’s raining again—it seems to do that a lot in Northern Canada. We’re almost to Watson Lake, which is the town where we’d originally planned to stop today, but I’m not sure right now if we’re going to stop there or keep going. Probably stop, since it’s past six and today has been a looooong day, even though I feel like time flew by today more than any other day. Probably because I spent so much time looking out the window…

We ended up driving a little further. I've decided it's the daylight that makes everyone want to keep going. It's hard to think about going to sleep when there's no sign of the sun setting anytime soon.

The RV park where we are has wi-fi (finally!!!), which is good. What's not so good is that as we pulled in my mom shared a fond memory with me from last time we stayed here when she saw a grizzly bear track. Great. I told her she should have told me that tomorrow AFTER we spent the night, but it was too late.

Stay away, grizzlies. We have a gun and we know how to use it.