May 19 - moved on to Fort Nelson

We started the day by driving to the Dawson Creek visitor center.  David wanted a picture of the MH with the Alaska Highway sign, but oops...we were heading the wrong way. 

 It was ok though.  We just parked there and walked the three blocks to the church in the round.  Very unusual looking building.

 One of the first people we met when going in was Sister Connie.  Extremely friendly.  She and David talked music after Mass too.  The celebrant spoke without any lateral movement of his mouth/lips.  Try it, and see if you can be understood. 

Statue of Mary at Notre Dame Church

Notre Dame Church with very unusual round skylight above the alter.

Dawson Creek graffiti

 I showed you several of the murals from around town in yesterday's blog.  With all that art on the walls you'd think they would clean up graffiti.  We saw incidents of it all around town, from out in the country to the city central.  What was odd to me was I saw no sign of any of it being painted over or scrubbed out. 

What do you think?  Should we tow the rail car???

 There were several places I wanted to take pictures while on the road, but we had lots of wind today and it wasn't easy to take hands off the wheel.  I really prefer where they have painted lines on the road surface delineating lanes.  The places I miss lines the most is where they have the third passing lane.   I just stay to the right and hope no one comes into my space.

The Kiskatinaw is the only wooden bridge left from when the Alaska Hwy was built 71 years ago.

But oops, how many pounds is 20,000 kilograms.  That was one conversion I hadn't worked out ahead.  {I was really glad I had made a cheat sheet of how much vertical clearance we needed in meters}.  David was working it out in his head, but he didn't sound very sure of his answer.  That bridge has been here all these years, I wasn't going to take an overweight vehicle over.  It was a long way down.  We were way under than though, so all was ok.

Just to be sure, David walked across first.  Well, maybe he walked to get a picture.

Kiskatinaw bridge from a different vantage point. 

A lot of today's 286 miles was looking like this. 

With some like this.   We were at the Suicide Hill historical marker.  Stopped to look at the marker, which apparently had been used as a bird roost.  Looked like it had a swath of guano...just wasn't attractive enough to take a picture.  Had a nice chat with Ken from Texas who is making his 4th trip to Alaska.  He said last time he spent 4 or 5 months (he knew, I just forgot), but they only spent 12 nights in campgrounds.  He said BC is pretty liberal with people camping any public property that isn't signed prohibiting it, but Yukon has most of the rest stops signed "no camping". 

Our windshield was given a pretty good chip today 83 miles out today.  Any idea what this was?

This moose had just crossed in front of me.  When David tried to take a picture as we got closer, he got a great one of all the bugs on the windshield (which you saw a part of in the photo above).

We decided to stop in Fort Nelson.  It was either boondock or get a campground with wifi.  We are supposed to have good weather tomorrow with rain/snow hitting about midnight. 

The campground building is a Quonset.  The door handles are rifles.  There is a whole caravan of people from Australia here.   Talked to a couple from Alaska tonight.  They are driving south, said the frost heaves were horrible, and we can plan on driving slow for hours.  They had heard about putting Pam on the mh front too.  Said bugs weren't a problem north of here; said it was to cold for bugs BUT, they said Simple Green will clean the Pam off.  

 

S

 

So  

So something else for the shopping list.  We will either enjoy the nice weather tomorrow here and get some biking in or try to get up to Watson Lake before the weather goes crazy.  I talked to a couple locals tonight.  They suggested to wait until tomorrow to decide.  They said the weather changes very quickly.