Thursday 13 September 2007

Miles, miles and some more miles

Well, here we are again whacking up some miles. It’s been a fun filled couple of days.
We left the Motel at Tok on the Alaska Highway after a hearty breakfast at Fast Eddy’s Restaurant and continued on towards Whitehorse. This is the section of the highway that we missed on the way up due to someone thinking it would be a good idea to take the gravel tracks instead ;-)
As we crossed back over into Canada at Beaver Creek we noticed an immediate difference in the quality of the road, it suddenly became very bumpy. What concerned us though was every bump we went over caused a loud banging noise somewhere in the vehicle. We both looked at each other each time it happened and decided that we’d best stop to investigate. We wobbled everything, moved stuff about and made sure that all our kit was well secured, and then set off again. As we got up to speed and hit more bumps the banging continued, so we stopped again, checked underneath Charlie, moved stuff about a bit more, wobbled wheels and exhausts, but could still find nothing banging, so off we went again. But the banging continued! Again we stopped, wobbled, re-packed stuff and again we hadn’t solved the problem. Jen had been crawling about inside the car while we’d been driving trying to locate the sound, but it seemed to be coming from a different place each time… weird! Then Hurrah! Jen was watching Charlies shadow as we hurtled along the road… over the bumps we went with a BANG each time! Then she spotted the problem, the roof tent was taking off at each bump! So we stopped again and found that both of the front brackets that hold the tent to the roof rack had come loose and fallen off. Fortunately they had got wedged between either the roof rack and the roof or the roll cage so we managed to retrieve the brackets, but unfortunately a couple of the bolts had disappeared. We managed to make up one complete bracket with the bits we had left and did everything up double tight, then used a mini lashing strap to tie down the other side. Off we went in relative peace and quiet, i.e. no more banging!
We finally pulled into an RV park in Whitehorse at about 7:30pm, had grub and got an early night..
The following day we trucked off to Watson Lake (where the signpost forest is) so that we could pick up the Cassair Highway, route 37. Along the way though we had another flat. We got it changed pretty quick on the shoulder and continued on to hopefully find a tyre shop in Watson Lake. There are 2 garages in Watson Lake and neither could offer us a repair, so with a major grump on we picked up the 500-odd mile Cassair. By 6pm we were at Dease River Crossing camp ground and had the whole place to ourselves :-) As we had a spare inner tube with us (thank you Richard!) I decided to sort out the puncture. The tube that was in there has a lovely big hole in it and couldn’t be patched so the new tube was put in and the tyre inflated using my super doper pump that I got free with my subscription to LRM some years ago.
While at Dease River we had a visitor. His name was John… or at least that’s what we called him as he wasn’t able to tell us what his real name was.

Seeing as there wasn’t another house around for several miles, we guessed he lived with the camp ground owners. But this didn’t stop him spending all evening with us. As we desided to go to bed, so did John. He curled up on Jens chair and went to sleep. When I got up for a pee at stupid-o’clock in the morning he was still there! When we got up in the morning, John hadn’t budged, he was still in Jens chair. But with the obvious commotion of getting up and having breakfast he decided to have a bit of a funny five minutes chasing bits of grass! When we packed up, we said our goodbyes to John who by now had realized that we were going and just sat there looking at us. We both felt so guilty for leaving him. It was like he’d found his new best friends and we just turned our backs on him. We drove off in silence.
At some point in the day our heartbreak was forgotten as we saw a Wolf! It’d been casually walking along the road, but with the sound of a clanky old Defender being caned along it decided to make a hasty escape into the undergrowth. We stopped nonetheless and had a good look from the safety of the car. And there, about 10 meters away was the wolf, watching us, peering through the bushes. It was just as curious as we were and stayed there watching us for a good couple of minutes, adjusting it’s position every now and then to get a better look. It’d obviously never seen a Camel 110 before!
A few hundred miles later we came across a mummy and baby black bear munching away on the grass at the side of the road. They’d obviously seem a million Camel 110’s as they didn’t bat an eyelid, just kept on eating.

Several million miles later we arrived in Stewart and realized that we shouldn’t have been there… We’d taken a wrong turn! Unlike Blighty, you can’t just find another route as generally there is only one road to a town. Think of it like Hamble, but on a massive scale, sometimes with a couple of hundred kilometers between towns. So we had to turn around and retrace the last 60-odd miles. But I’m glad we did go the wrong way. We were treated to some amazing views of Glaciers, and to top it all off, the Bear Glacier.

Having spent an hour going the wrong way and another hour going back again, we had some miles to catch up on. We’d hoped to get to Smithers on Highway 16. By 7:30 we had made it. We decided to grab a Maccy D’s as we couldn’t be arsed to cook and still needed to find somewhere to camp for the night. We found the Tyhee Lake Provincial Park about 20km outside Smithers (just up the road from Burns Lake) and were overjoyed to find that it had warm showers on offer :-) But the real bummer about these places is everything runs off propane… which means no electricity… which means we had to shower in the dark! Hey ho, all good fun, init!
Today we hoped to get as far as Whistler, about 570 miles south from Smithers, so a long hard day of driving ahead, but the sun is shining and we are swapping seats regularly. Its now 4pm and we are still on route 97 with about 400km to go once we reach Williams Lake, so probably another 4 hours on the road yet.
Update: we finally reached Whistler and the extraordinarily expensive campsite at about 9:30

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