Travel Blog

The drive through Wyoming to Montana was pretty uneventful. Sue and I agreed that even though the scenery was not much different, Wyoming had a color about it that the previous day in Colorado couldn’t touch.

We spent Saturday night in Great Falls, MT. The town seems like one of those places that still marches to its own drummer.

Sunday we crossed the border, but not without excitement. At the border we saw more people getting pulled over than in any of our previous crossings, so we were not surprised when they told us to go inside and see the immigration officers. We are not sure if they were training new border agents, or were just bored, but we got to cool our heels there for about half an hour answering questions before they sent us on our way without even searching our rig.

We think the thing that set off our little stop was that we said we have a can of bear spray. Once we had described the spray to a couple of agents and why we had it, they let us go. But we did see three RV’s get the rubber glove treatment, one couple had to pay $2,000 on duty tax for something they were carrying, and one guy got turned away altogether. So if you are coming through Canada this year, be prepared for a little extra probing.

As soon as we crossed the border we started to hit some weather. Most of the time it was just flurries, but that evening, outside our least favorite city, Edmonton, AB, we hit a bad combination of black ice and crosswinds. We knew these roads could be bad because some of our friends lost their rig here last year, but neither of us realized how bad it could be (sorry Pat. Breathe, breathe. We're ok - Sue).

We made it through safely and found a nice rest stop to spend the night. The next day we woke up to sunny skies and open roads. Around Grand Prairie we hit some of the roughest roads of our trip. It was a ten mile series of frost heaves that shook the house so bad that our hanging clothes jumped off the bar in the closet and our desk must have leapt up and crashed down hard enough to break the legs off.

When we reached mile zero of the Alaska Highway we hit some unexpected traffic.

We figured out that it was a combination of seasonal icy roads and unseasonable road construction that lead to the backup, but it cleared up after Ft. St. John, and we made it to Ft. Nelson for the evening.

The next day the flurries were back with some almost zero-degree temperatures (or -20 for our Celsius fans). The roads dictated a slower pace with some snowy hills to keep our attention:

The only traffic we saw on this leg was buffalo, moose, and these two fellows who would not leave the road:

We managed to get lots of pictures of the buffalo and carabou, but the moose would not stay put. (They're surprisingly fast for so big an animal - and through knee-high snow drifts to boot. Plus, I was too slow with the camera anyway. - Sue)

That afternoon the sun broke through and we had clear sailing through the rest of Canada down into Skagway. As we rolled down to the bottom of the hill, visions of a quick setup and a warm shower pushed us on, but as we pulled up to the entrance of the campground, we saw that was not going to happen because the lot had been flooded, and the entrance we were planning to use had been turned into a wading pool/skating rink.

Instead of fighting to get set up that night, we did one more night of boondocking. Yesterday we got busy pulling in and setting up and finally we were home for the summer.