Hahahaha, before you get the wrong idea about the title of today's blog, it should probably be title "Oh the Wildlife" because that is what we have seen today.
So last night (Day 31.5, Monday, July 11, aka Free Slurpies Day at 7-11) we drove and drove and drove. We were going to stop at this place in northeast British Columbia called Watson Lake, but there was no rest area with restrooms. And by restrooms, I mean outhouses. We kept driving. And driving. And driving. We went through an area of about 200 kilometers (since we're in Canada after all) where there were no rest areas with potties. 200 kilometers! Eventually we found one, we all used the outhouse, and we set up the van for sleep time.
Oh, big news story of the trip. It kind of got dark! As in, our headlights were both necessary and useful! As in, the moon was big and bright. It must have been setting, but we kept going up and down in elevation, so it just clung to the mountainous horizon all bright and a week-from-being-full for what seemed like hours. It was beautiful. We saw the morning star. That was the unfortunate bit, I guess. We drove for so long that the morning star was coming up and I think the sun was about to come up too.
But we did eventually make it to the rest area. We tried this new thing the last time we slept in the car. We shuffled things around and laid down the middle seats in the van so we could unroll and blow up one of our air mattresses. Then three people can sleep on the air mattress and one person sleeps up on the two front seats. Dad slept up front the last time but didn't actually get much sleep because we had our cooler up there too. This time we shuffled things a bit more and had the cooler on a floor. No cooler up front. I slept up front and with all the clothes stuffed between the seats and only minimal fighting with the seat belts, I actually had a pretty great night's sleep. (I pride myself on being able to sleep anywhere. I can almost sleep standing up. It's a gift. I enjoy it.)
Anyways, we didn't wake up until almost 10 o'clock this morning. This is crazy because who knew when the sun came up. But we didn't go to sleep until around 3 am local time, which was still 2 am Alaska time, so... But we got up and got moving. We saw so much wildlife on our drive so far today. We saw a herd of bison with a bunch of babies within 15 minutes of being on the road. We saw a black bear soon after that. We saw a moose. We saw some mountain goats with a baby goat. We saw an elk and a porcupine. Dad saw another bear. We were half expecting to see porpoises jump out of the lakes and rivers!
We are now in Dawson Creek, British Columbia about to head into Alberta. Then we'll only be 2 hours off home time. One last bit of wildlife to tell you about here. The mosquitoes are ridiculous here. More ridiculous than anywhere else we've been this entire trip. They are monsters. They are bigger than any other mosquitoes we have seen this entire trip. There has been erratic driving to try to breeze them off so people can get in and out of the car. They just flocked to the car for a while. It was gross. I think we have pictures.
Sorry for another day with no pictures. The internet is not so great in this McDonald's parking lot. In fact, I think I'm going to have to fanagle with it to make it work just to get this up. We'll be in Calgary in a couple days, so hopefully I can do a couple picture posts by then.
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