NORTH TO ALASKA - DAY 8 - DAWSON CREEK, ALBERTA

Waking up and looking up the window at this view is absolutely beautiful. We are leaving Fox Creek in a little bit. But first we needed to take a little walk around and enjoy the campground one more time.

Steve started up a nice breakfast with bacon and eggs and hash browns. This is one of his favorite breakfasts to make. Now that we've added the three burner stove instead of the two burner cooktop, he can keep all three pans going at once!

We got "road worthy" and headed on up to the dump station, driving through the other loop at the campground. These are the sites that have electric and water and sewer. A lot of them are seasonal or maybe construction workers on the road. Every site in this park was taken up.

After the dumping was done, it was time to hit the road. It was again another beautiful day with sunshine and blue skies dotted with fluffy white clouds. 

We saw this huge Beaver at, where else, the city of Beaverlodge, Alberta? Lol.... Got to love the quirky roadside attractions. 

We passed from Mountain Time zone into Pacific time zone. My body has to figure this out, I keep waking up at 5:00 a.m. My body keeps thinking at 7:00 a.m. It has nothing really to do with the daylight coming in from outside. We have darkening shades as well. I can sleep during the flight or dark. We just have to start going to bed a little later and waking up a little later??

It's less windy today. So when we fueled up we got 14.5 miles per gallon. Steve likes that. I keep a conversion chart right on my phone that converts it from liters to gallons, then Canadian price to US, and then figure our mileage from the last fuel up. 

We drove along through some flat areas around Grand Prairie, but it's starting to get hillier as we get closer and closer to our first real goal. Which is...

We have arrived! 

We are now at the very first mile of the Alaska Highway! It's also known as the Alcan highway. The Mile Marker sign is here in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The specific original one is downtown at an intersection in the middle of the street. So they erected this one a block or so away where there is a parking lot for RVers and tourists to stop in.  WE MADE SURE TO STOP!!

Steve lifted Nick up to set him on the marker stone. It was pretty windy and he was a little nervous.

When it was Steve's turn to pose with him, he sure did not look happy about it at all. We took him down shortly after.

I have a video I'll load it up on YouTube with our actual time at the Milepost 0 mark. Here is the link: 

We drove on about a mile and a half up the highway to the Milepost Zero Campground. The wonderful friendly host helped us out with a site and also offered us an array of brochures of things going on in the area and stuff to see up the road. Reading material...

We backed into our site, but the winds had kicked up so strong that it was vibrating and rattling our slide topper and making a lot of noise. So we backed out turn around and aimed into our campsite nose first. That really helped with the wind. Just after doing that, somebody else came and pulled in the site directly in front of us and helped block the wind too. How nice was that?

It was great to get settled in a little early this time. It's been 8 days now that we're on the road so we took a load of laundry over to the little laundry room. What a hoot! We couldn't figure out the crazy machine that ran with a credit card. I think we ran our credit card through it 20 times!  It just was not working properly. Then we tried our debit card and it worked. Who knew? Maybe they only operate on debit cards cuz they know they get the actual cash? 

(We did check the credit card to make sure it didn't get hit 20 times with a $6 charge. It didn't) 

Anyhow, just the wash machine ran on a credit card. The dryers ran on coins. We had stocked ahead and had an assortment of Loonies and Twoonis. The $1 and $2 coins issued in Canada. Loonies have a loon on them, and Twoonies are just $2 with a polar bear on it. 

It wasn't so bad having a campground at the edge of town, and we we're plugged in for the night because it was going to get cold. The winds finally died down about sunset... 

And we were treated with a really pretty glow to the west. We were told there's some wildfires out there and that might have added to the beauty of the sunset.

I've been struggling a little bit with the road noise on my videos. I had a nice setup with a wireless system of a transmitter and two microphones. One clips to Steve and one clips to myself as we're driving down the road. That way both of our comments show up on the video. For some reason the transmitter is not working correctly.  Everything is fully charged. If I plug it into my Samsung Galaxy phone, it functions correctly. But for some reason it is not playing well with my GoPros. Either one of my GoPros. It used to work just fine during the first few days. So I'm not sure what's going on with it...

In the meantime, I've transferred back to my corded Purple Panda microphone. It works well, but it's always dangling the cord around. I have a shorter cord for when we're inside just reaching from the dash back to clip on my shirt. But then it can't clip on Steve's at the same time. And I do have an extension if we want to be further away from the camera.

I guess I'll just have to get it figured out. There aren't any Best Buy stores or even Walmart's to buzz in and buy another set! 

207 Miles traveled 

1988 Total miles so far