Some Updates

July 2

This is not Charlie Lake. The road just goes on and on.

Here we are happily camped at the Charlie Lake Provincial Campground just outside of Fort St. John. It’s a beautiful place.  The sounds of the birds:  chickadees, golden crowned sparrows (that sound a bit different from the ones in Anchor Point), and other birds I don’t recognize.  Of course, Zelda recognizes the sound of the squirrels, but she’s behaving—for the time being. This campground is awesome.  The sites are separated from each other by lots of trees, the spaces are level, and the picnic tables are sturdy and new looking. 

The most interesting event of the day was meeting up with the people from the motorcycle accident.  I was coming out of the bank when they pulled up in their truck; they recognized the T@B.  Their friends were doing OK.  The man had broken his wrist, and because he had neck pain, the hospital had kept him overnight.  I was relieved to hear they were all doing well.

The wildlife count is up to nine bears.  One black bear was standing at the edge of the road looking curiously at the passing traffic; the other one was running up the road embankment.  I also saw two live long-tailed deer and one dead one.  The live ones were running AWAY from the road; their friend obviously hadn’t seen the signs that had cars smashing into wildlife (yes, they do have them). 

British Columbian road signs, when they choose to use them, are kind of funny.  In a “ha ha” way.  The sign for bumpy road is pretty self explanatory ^^^^^^^ .  Add to that a picture of a car tipping over, and you have a VERY bad patch of road!  Slow down to some indecipherable amount of kilometers.

Mrs. Tom Tom could calculate the distance in kilometers, but I prefer to exercise my scanty math skills by trying to remember how many kilometers in a mile and vise versa.  I pretty much have 2 kilometers mastered – the actual distance, not the miles.

Today’s random thoughts:

I love the smell of OFF in the morning (and all day long).  Apologies to Apocalypse Now.

If the British Columbians can put a sign on BOTH sides of the road every whipstitch announcing that it’s STILL British Columbia, why the Hell can’t they afford restrooms.  Zelda has a field day at pull outs, what with her toilet paper fetish and all.

The bark beetles have attacked the pine trees here.  The trees farther north are red; it looks like fall foliage.  The trees nearer where we are now have lost all their needles. They seem to be logging them off. 

Haiku:

Pine bark beetle kill

Fall in a coniferous

forest. Orange with death.

This museum was full of cool old equipment and cars

The Tacoma and the T@B

One last thing. If you ever come this way, you MUST stop at the Fort Nelson Museum.  It is wonderful.  It’s a collection of random historical stuff more or less organized by type.  Most of the good stuff is outside, and I took a million (OK, that’s hyperbole) pictures of it.  The car shed alone is worth the price of admission.  They have a 1928 Model (something) Ford that drove up the Alaska Highway, and two beautiful Packards.  Parked all around the periphery of the grounds are all kinds of antique construction equipment and vehicles.  It was amazing.  I haven’t done much tourist stopping, but I’m glad I did that.