Oh Canada... Where the sun never sleeps and the internet never works! We entered Canada on June 11 and I would have had this post online much earlier except many of the places we stopped, the internet was too slow to get it online. In fact for many miles there was no telephone service either. Glad we didn’t have a flat tire or other trouble out there.
We drove up Highway 97 to 37 and the road conditions were much better than people had been warning me about. There were no potholes; no dirt roads; no washboard roads. Just miles of forest and an occasional small town or village. It was sad to see, however, that as far as the eye could see, it was second growth forest, i.e. all of it had been clear cut at least once before. The main industries in this part of Canada are lumber and mining. Don’t get me going on how the landscape looked where the mining operations were still going.
The best thing that someone had told me before we went was “Don’t make reservations at campsites up the road from you.” It was true. We drove as long as we wanted and stayed at different campsites as long as we wanted. And there are plenty of camps to stop at along the way.
We also stopped at an Indian cultural center along the way where both Zhenya and I went swimming in a mountain lake. No, not for the fun of it, but rather because it was there and it was glacier-fed and COLD. We did it for the challenge of it… we’re almost “polar bears.” Just have to do it in some water up in Alaska with some ice around now!
