Our next item on the itinerary was the Alaska Marine Highway; but before we could get onto the ferry we had a solid 1200km to drive to get there - from Jasper (Alberta) to Prince Rupert (British Colombia coast).
By the time we left Jasper we had already ticked off quite a few of the animals from our Bingo cards, however we were still yet to see a moose, grizzly bear, or bald eagle. Along the side of the highway we were encouraged by the signs noting to drive cautiously due to moose activity (and these were signposted almost the full distance along the road) however we didn't end up finding any which resulted in us inventing new lyrics to the songs we were listening to which basically went along the lines of "moosey moosey moosey, where are you!" with a number of variations... at least we were entertained the whole way there!
The animals we were lucky enough to see included a grizzly, plenty of black bears (including some with little cubs!) and I even spotted a wolf crossing the highway, which is quite the spot of luck!
Prince George is a nice town and was located central to our travel path so we ended up spending the night. Before setting up we managed to fit in a few little excursions with some frisbee, views of the town from a great little park where we had our dinner and the local pet store where we entertained the idea of buying a fuzzy little friend and figuring out where to fit it in the car like all the other RV owners we have been seeing! This is also the town where we were introduced to the population of bugs which resides in Canda during the summer time... with a small park which was almost completely covered in caterpillars and the even less popular mossies.
There was quite a lot of roadworks between Prince George and Prince Rupert since access to doing maintenance and upgrades is made difficult by the amount of snow which falls during the winter which lengthened our time in the car slightly! Road constructions are done differently over here to say the least... Instead of opening up small sections of the road, they tend to open the full length up which creates a massive dust storm the entire length, we still havnt figured out why they do it in this way! The longest stretch of work we saw was 16km in which we had to be led by a pilot car as the dust was so bad.
We finally found ourselves in Prince Rupert, the little seaside town which from which we would commence our Alaskan adventure. We explored the port, local shops and even splashed out and purchased some real coffees (although they were not quite up to scratch in comparison to the store from Jasper). There were a couple of memorable quotes from our afternoon, one when we walked into the liquor store and Emma was asked for her two pieces of ID which was followed with " it's just the way she is" and then there was the lady at the health food shop which we saw purchasing some baked goods; when the employee picked up the gluten free goods she exclaimed with disgust "oh no! I want the ones WITH gluten".
Unfortunately we were not able to find a suitable place to free camp and ended up heading across town to the cheaper campground which it turned out was a win as we found it came with free wifi... there were also a few interesting families to keep us entertained.
First there was the family of 14 (that's no typo!) from Alaska that was moving home from their previous town in north Alaska which goes from one extreme to the other with months of full darkness followed by months of full sunlight. I guess it makes them go a little crazy up there; and there is NO guessing required to figure out what they do during the dark months is there!
Then there was the couple which had set up their RV which was inherited from a relative and they just planned to stay there in the campsite for 3months. Not entirely sure what they did by day.... but there didn't seem to be a whole lot to do in town, and the mosquitoes were bad as there was a pond right next to their spot!
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