Day 23 – Ft. Nelson, BC to Grande Prairie, AB

Thanks again for all of your comments. We enjoy reading them.

Today was sunny or mostly sunny the whole day. It was the first such day since early in our trip and it was very pleasant.

For all of you that did not know, today is Canada Day. They have celebrations in all these small towns. We wished folks Happy Canada Day all day long :-). The parts of Canada we have traveled through are incredibly beautiful and very unspoiled. I mentioned earlier but it certainly bears repeating, there is very little litter up here, the restrooms are usually very clean, the people are friendly and the scenery is……what more can I say? We could learn a lot from our northern neighbors!

In spite of the beautiful weather, we only saw two big black bears and one deer. The deer was too fast for us to get a picture. The two bears were right on the side of the road and within 30 yards of each other. That is rare. They were keeping a close eye on each other.

We stopped in Fort St. John’s for lunch today since we were hungry for a change.

As we drove through Dawson Creek, we came to the end of the Alaskan Highway, so we did it! It was just about the same time that my old mini turned over 100,000 miles. The car looks terrible because of all the dirt but it is running like a top.

Tonight we are staying in Grande Prairie, AB. It is just past Dawson Creek and afforded better accommodations.

We modified our itinerary some tonight. We are headed for Banff again tomorrow but we will re-enter the US a little farther west in Montana than where we came into Canada. We are planning to see Glacier National Park on the 3rd and end up in Missoula, MT. From there we will go to Idaho Falls, ID then to Richfield, UT. We will stay in Richfield a couple of days and kind of slow it down.