Day 49

Last night as we were sitting around visiting with Jerry & Nancy, a young buck came strolling through the RV park. He hung around for quite a while munching on the bushes. I forgot to mention that we saw another bear as we were driving; it crossed the road right in front of us. Also, we were visiting with a Canadian woman at Walmart and she mentioned that she and her husband like to ride the 4 wheel trikes out into the bush – we were amused. Jan asked if everyone referred to quads as trikes and she said they didn’t, she calls them that because they used to have a 3 wheeler. Makes perfect sense to me.

We left Quesnel at 9:04 and as we drove through the town I was wishing we had explored it the day before. It’s a very pretty little town. This part of BC is logging country and there are 4 mills in Quesnel. There was more lumber activity and more mills as we drove further. The landscape was about the same as yesterday, farms, forests, rivers, and lakes. There were more lake communities today and they were really busy since it’s a warm summer day (and it’s Sunday). The traffic got really bad and we didn’t like it at all. We’ve been so spoiled by the light traffic in Alaska that this was kind of a shock to the system.

The woman at Walmart also told us we would be driving through the only desert area in BC. She was right – all of a sudden everything turned brown and it looked like the Nevada desert. We went through some really dry, rugged mountains and entered a canyon that took 3 hours to get through. It’s the longest canyon we’ve ever seen, especially when you’re driving through it. At the end of the canyon there were a number of fruit stands with fresh cherries, peaches, and apricots. Jerry really wanted some fresh cherries so we stopped at a stand that would accommodate our RVs. The stand was owned by an old couple who smelled bad and they didn’t have any cherries, only apricots and green plums. We bought some apricots just to be nice – we could probably get better ones in the grocery store. We finally started climbing, went through 7 tunnels, and ended up back in beautiful thick foliage and forests. We stayed in Hope BC and it was really busy here. The town is near the Fraser River and there’s a lot of summertime activity going on, swimming, fishing, boating, etc