To Fort Nelson

Robert, Wednesday, September 10

I got up this morning at 8:00 a.m. as I normally do on a travel day. Leslie was still in bed when I informed her that there were either small pixies dancing on the roof or it was raining. And the outside temperature was 47 degrees. It quickly became apparent that this was not the morning for the hot springs. We ate breakfast, packed up, and headed for Fort Nelson. The road yesterday was as good as we have seen it in months. It was fairly smooth with very few bad places and it was fairly level. As I was waiting for Leslie to get ready, I read that the road yesterday was a great improvement over the road today. I had been thinking that as we got further south, the road would steadily get better. No such luck! Today the road was “twisty,” hilly, and rough. On the other hand, we have been seeing signs along almost all of the roads in Alaska and Canada to watch out for wildlife. Before today I took that as a joke. Today we hit the jackpot! We saw bison, stone sheep, caribou, and Leslie saw a moose off to the side. All the rest were right beside the road or they were on the road. In all cases we saw animals multiple times. We got pictures of all except the moose. I had been figuring that we would need to refuel in Fort Nelson. I hadn’t counted on all of the hills we had to drive over. Hills can cut the milage a lot and when we got to Fort Nelson, both fuel tanks were almost down to fumes. We found a campground and setup. Then we went looking for fuel. After that we decided to eat out and have pizza, something we haven’t had since before we left Colorado. After that we came back to the trailer, wrote blogs, and crashed.