Friday 7/30/99
Day 2: Prince George, Houston & Smithers
We woke up at our Lac la Hache Provincial Park campsite at 5:30 am to the sounds of noisy birds. Tent and campsite were dry and the weather was warm with blue skies most of the day. In fifteen minutes are campsite was dismantled and we were on the road. We stopped at the town of Williams Lake for gas, on our way north along Highway 97. Dale bought out the gas stations stock of Sen-Sens. The scenery along this part of the highway is mostly rolling green hills and forest. McLeese Lake was a medium size lake. The town itself was pretty small and dead at 7am. Approaching Quesmall, the largest town before Pronce George, there was quite a bit of construction. We crossed several bridges, a KFC, and several motels. This is both a tourist town (the historic towns of Barkerville and Wells and the Boon Lakes Provential Park are just ??? miles east of here) and an industrial town with lots of smokestacks and mills. A little ways north of town we stopped at 10 Mile Lake Provential Park to make breakfast. This park has a large, grassy picnic area near the lake. The only one around was the park ranger. There are 140 campsites at this park. The drive north of here was boring. At 10:30am we pulled into the Visitor's Center at Prince George. This is the largest town in the area and boasts ??? number of parks. We turned west onto Highway 16 and stopped in the town of Vanderhoff for gas. We passed Fraser Lake, which was a pretty large lake. About 10 miles east of Burns Lake Dale got a speeding ticket for going 130 kmh in a 100 kmh zone. By now it was overcast and sprinkling. We stopped at Burns Lake for chicken at KFC, a bank to exchange our US money for Canadian and a hardware store for an alarm clock (the only thing we forgot to pack). This small town had a museum, an old cemetery and a visitor's center.
East of Houston the land was mostly farm and ranch land with snow on the peaks of the mountains straight ahead and to the south. We stopped at the Steelhead Park in Houston which has on display the world's largest fishing reel and a large grinding wheel used to grind ore. It was donated to the town by a Mexican mining company in appreciation for allowing them to examine mining methods in Canada. We continued on toward Smithers and decided to take the turnoff for the Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park. The decision to take this 11 km. gravel road may have been the worst or the best one of the day. About a quarter of mile from the parking lot to the canyon the kids informed us that there was something wrong with the back of the truck. Dale stopped and investigated. We had anticipated having problems with our canopy. For the last couple of months we had been unable to lock it. Now one side of the door was just hanging and the tailgate was open. He closed the tailgate and backed up to see if we had lost anything. It didn't appear that we had. We decided to continue to the canyon which we found to be disappointing. We took a quarter mile hike crossing a bridge to an overlook of the canyon. Prehistoric fossils were suppose to be imbedded in the wall of this canyon but we could not see any of them.
We headed back to the town of Smithers, a town of 6,000 people. We felt fortuanate that we were close to a decent size town when we had problems with our can0py, but yet we were also upset that this had happened on our first gravel road of the trip and it was only the second day of a long road trip. Since it was almost 5 pm on a Friday night we knew we had no time to waste looking for someone to repair the window. We stopped at the first auto parts store we saw. They told us to talk to the man who had just left there store for the auto glass shop next door. We were in luck. This guy said it was definitely fixable and set us up with an appointment in the morning.
We've always found Smithers to be a nice town with some businesses wer'e familar with (ie Subway) and friendly, helpful people. Highway 16 goes through the middile of town. To reach the businesses on each side of the highway you have to take a parallel road on each side. There is also a mainstreet of town running perpendicular to the highway. A couple other towns in BC are set up like this. We've seen larger towns in California set up like this as well. We stopped at the Sandman Inn. They wanted $70 for a room and appologized for not having air conditioning. They did tell us they are due to be renovated soon. The front desk sent us to the Fireweed Inn which had air conditioning and charged $60 a night. We walked downtown from there and stopped at a used bookstor/cafe where someone was playing their guitar. The kids didn't like the movies that were playing in town so we went back to the room. Later Dale and I went Alpenhorn for drinks and appetizers later in the evening. The town was pretty quiet for a Friday night. The waiter suggested the Hudson Bay Inn for live music. We got lost finding it and almost went to the ski resort which was closed for the season. It turned out the Hudson Bay Inn was right on the main highway. This place was busier than the Alpinehorn and had a woman playihg country music on keyboard, sax, flute and guitar. She was pretty good if you like country. We left at midnight. The sun went down around 10 pm. The weather was warm all day today.
421 miles today 850 total