Day Six Prince George and Onwards

Day six began with us waking up late after getting a good sleep after driving so far and so long the day before. We also both felt rather stiff and a tad lazy after not getting any real exercise for about a week. We headed that off by turning on our P-90X DVD and doing the Kenpo-X. It felt great to move around and get a sweat worked up. We are not so sure anyone sleeping in a room below us appreciated our running and jumping around but…

After grabbing a quick breakfast we decided to make Prince George our “get it done” town. We needed to do some laundry as we were running out of clean clothes to wear. We also needed to buy Catherine more cold-weather gear for camping, and our little Nissan Cube needed an oil change. We attempted to do that when we left the Greater Vancouver area but no oil change company would touch the car as it was too new and they didn’t have any manuals or part numbers for it! So we booked an appointment at the local Nissan dealer to have it done. We also made sure to purchase some extra oil filters so oil change companies couldn’t so easily turn us away in the future. We know we will be putting a ton of kilometers on the car in short order so this is sort of a necessity to have going forward.

We managed to get everything done in good order but it seemed to take forever to get around this northern town. It wasn’t because it was big, or we couldn’t find anything, it was that there was so much road construction, that everywhere we went we were faced with a ton of slow moving traffic. It was like being stuck in Vancouver at 5pm all over again…

Being that it was now after 5pm and everything was closed that we wanted to do in town like see the local museum, we decided to head even further north before the weather started to turn even more foul. So we headed out on our way to Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon territory. There was no way we could drive straight there so we went as far as we could without falling asleep at the wheel.

We stopped in the town of Smithers for dinner before continuing on again. We saw many wild animals on this stretch of our drive including a mother bear and her two cubs crossing the highway before us. Catherine was absolutely thrilled by the sight of the two small chubby looking bears and was smiles from ear to ear. We snapped some pictures of them and took a short video before they headed off into the bush. This was outside the very attractive small town of Burns Lake.

Burns Lake was to this time one of the nicer small towns we traveled through. It was nicely laid out, nicely kept and the houses were all well-maintained. It seemed like everyone in town took some civic pride in their surroundings and it sure showed. It wasn’t long before we turned onto the Cassiar highway for our trip north to Whitehorse. Catherine was sound asleep by this point and Tyler was doing his best to drive as far as possible before pulling over to get some sleep in a roadside pullout.

Tyler says of day six – Day six wasn’t much more than a normal day before we embarked on our adventure. We took care of many small nagging things that needed our attention. I spend a lot of time in the local Canadian Tire and Marks finding items to help keep my sweet dear love warm at night. I knew she would appreciate the portable propane powered heater that I bought, as those nights in Manning Park were not easy come the early morning hours. I wish we had more time for Prince George but we just wanted to get north before the snow starts falling.

Catherine says of day six – I had a tender feeling after seeing the mother bear taking the cubs across the highway. Prince George was a big stinky town (pulp mills), but the people were very warm and friendly.