Catching Up From Last Week - Part One

To start, we made it to Anchorage this past Thursday afternoon, safe & sound.  It felt SO great to get here, and know we did not have more long days of driving ahead of us and no more hotels motels to stay in for the night.

Brief summary of the rest of the week's trip:
Monday ~ drove from Cache Creek BC to Smithers BC - beautiful backdrop of mountains surrounding the town; I took the dogs out around 10:00pm and this is what the sky looked like ~ so pretty!

 Smithers, BC

 Amy in front of our buggy hotel :)

I have a friend, we'll call him Matt.  Matt is an entomologist.  Matt does pest control when he is not teaching classes up at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.  Matt has shared many horror stories of things he finds in hotel rooms.  Matt has told me WHERE to look and WHAT to look for when staying in a hotel room.  One of the first things I always do now is pull back all of the covers, sheets and mattress pads to do an inspection of mattress I will be sleeping on ~ so far, I have been fortunate in finding nothing.  However, my friend Amy was not so lucky...and found two questionable moving objects (BUGS) on her mattress...The hotel manager was very nice and apologetic...we gave them the benefit of the doubt and opted to stay in the motel and switch to another room rather than try to find other lodging (our options were rather slim anyway).

We also saw our first wildlife on this day ~ a black bear that was debating whether or not it should cross the highway...he opted to stay put on his side of the road...we also saw our first moose, standing off the side of the road munching on some greens.   (No photos were taken as I'm not talented enough to snap photos of moving creatures and drive at the same time ~ Amy and I have to vouch for one another and what we saw) :)

Canada observations:

The average speed on the highways we are on is 90km ~ approximately 62mph.  This works out well with pulling the trailer, but makes our progress feel slow.

This was the first night we noticed the longer days with light ~ after taking the dogs out, I went back in to get Amy so she could see how pretty it was!

The 'towns' on the map are all pretty much so small that if you blink, you'll miss them ~ there seem to be just as many abandoned / empty buildings as there are active / open businesses. 

More trip updates to come...