August 10 – Taking the air mattress
with us gave us the best solarium experience we’ve ever had. Our ferry was
scheduled to arrive at 8:45 am which meant that we could have gotten around 7
hours of sleep. Unfortunately for us, the arrival time was stated in Pacific
Time (1 hr ahead of Alaska) since we were arriving in that time zone. So, we
only got 6 hours of sleep (actually less because some rude people started
talking loudly at a really early hour). We didn’t get such a great spot on the
car deck and we were almost the last car off the boat. We waited in line for
customs and we were the last car through. The grilling wasn’t as bad as the
first time and we were relieved to find out that the case of beer in the truck
wasn’t over the import limit (Stacie hadn’t considered that when se bought
it). We drove for a few hours and stopped for lunch at a small town. After
lunch we saw signs advertising the “world’s largest fly fishing rod” in nearby
Houston, B.C. Well, we had to stop and check out a claim like that and it was
huge! We weren’t sure how far we were going to drive, but being fairly well
rested we did a full eight hours and stopped for the night at a provincial park
40 miles east of Prince George. The park was lovely, with well spaced
campsites in a heavily wooded area. The restrooms looked like outhouses but
had flush toilets inside. We might have gone further except there is a sort of
a no man’s land stretching for 100 miles east of the campground. There aren’t
any gas stations, restaurants, hotels or campgrounds.
August 11 – We woke up on the early side
for us (especially since our body clocks were still in Alaska) and broke down
camp. We hit the road and crossed no man’s land arriving at Jasper National
Park at around noon. Upon entering the park we lost another hour as we
were now in the Mountain Time Zone. We took a slightly different route and
stopped at Athabasca Falls (another spot where a really big river has to
squeeze through a narrow spot). We also sighted an elk crossing a stream (it
was just about in the same place as where we had seen the caribou on our trip
north). When we had started the day we thought that we would be lucky
to
make Lake Louise in eight hours of driving and had tentatively planned on
stopping there for the night. It was much closer than we thought and after
visiting the lake and seeing the giant (and really expensive) hotels that are
on the lake we jumped back in the truck and continued south (as it turns out
the campground was full so we couldn’t have stayed if we wanted to). We drove
about another hour and stopped in the town of Banff, which is at the south end
of the park. There are three park run campgrounds side by side and they have a
combined capacity of over 1,125 sites. When we arrived there were still sites
available. You didn’t get to drive around and pick your site, they picked one
for you. The campground was wooded, but the trees were small and there was
grass and gravel between campsites. Our site had a gulch on two sides so there
was only one site near us and it was empty. The bathroom building was on the
other side of the empty site and it featured flush toilets, lights and free hot
showers (we could get spoiled).
August 12 – We broke camp and continued
our dash for the border. Routing on this part of the trip was as easy as
1-2-3-4. We started out on route 1 and then picked up route 2 to route 3, and
finally took route 4 to the border. On the way we had to stop briefly and admire
a large fiberglass dinosaur at
another town’s visitor’s
center. Before leaving Canada we stopped at a gas station and used up our
remaining Canadian money on fuel (the clerk was amused when we got $22.07 worth
of fuel and paid with a lot of coins). The border crossing into Montana was a
slow process. We waited at least half an hour, driving through a torn up mess
of construction the result of a new border station which hadn’t opened yet.
When we finally got to a booth the agent seemed much more concerned with
finding out if we had any ivory, antlers or the like. We told her the only
animal products we had were Stacie’s leftover fish and some Italian sausage we
had bought in Ketchikan. On hearing the word sausage she held onto our
passports and told us to pull into the inspection area and “show her our
sausage”. The links were confiscated as no uncooked meat is allowed into the
US from Canada due to that one incident of mad cow disease a few months ago
(don’t cry about the sausage, we got it on a buy one get one free deal and it
really wasn’t that good). We got our passports and returned to the truck to
find a Department of Agriculture inspector waiting. He looked at us and asked
if that was our truck. We said “yes” and then he said that he used to be
stationed in Newport News, Virginia and after that lived in Alaska. Having
seen the license plate he was curious about our
trip. We breathed a sigh
of relief and talked with him for a while. As we pulled away from the customs
station a border patrol truck pulled out from a hiding spot and zoomed up the
road and pulled in behind us. We were nervous until he pulled off at the first
exit and parked by a liquor store (our best guess is that he was picking up
some beer to go with the sausage). After a few miles Stacie started making
subtle hints about ice cream (“do you think this exit has a Dairy Queen?”).
These were tiny little towns that were lucky to have one fast food place, but
we got off at every exit on the way until we did find a drive in that offered
all kinds of shakes and ice cream. With frosty treats in hand we continued
south towards Great Falls and a longer visit with Dave’s Aunt Marilyn and Uncle
Doug.
We arrived just in time for dinner, Doug was making pizza and Dave’s cousin Jeff and his family (who lived a few blocks away) were over for dinner. We had seen them in Idaho the previous summer, but we never got a chance to talk for any length of time so this was a great visit. We were going to be in Great Falls for a few days and we all agreed to get together again. Doug’s pizza was excellent (especially the taco pizza) and we finished up with strawberry shortcake. After desert we hooked up the computer and sent in a bunch of web pages. During the session the computer started acting up and the anti-virus program kicked in saying it had found something. Dave started a full system scan and we retired for the evening.