Prince Rupert

Sunday, June 13 -- Today was a better day, even though we still have rain.  As Joe said this morning, "we're back to our favorite pastime, driving in the rain."  We stayed in a municipal park campground right across the highway from the Skeena River last night in Terrace, after our frustrating day of car issues and rain.  This campground was very wooded and pretty, but when the wind gusted, it blew some small branches on top of the RV and scared us to death.

We left Terrace about 8:20 and headed to Prince Rupert, a very pretty drive.  Picturesque mountains, waterfalls.  Didn't see any wildlife until we got into Prince Rupert, though.

In case you can't tell, the white strips are actually waterfalls cascading down the mountainside.  Very pretty.  We saw several of these.  We had a river on the other side of us, that eventually dumped into the bay at Prince Rupert, which connects to the Pacific Ocean.  It was probably good that we waited until today to make this drive because most of the mountains would probably have been obscured yesterday, plus they had some pretty high winds here.  We followed a railroad track for miles, and we met one passenger train going the other way.  Then we caught up with a really long freight train heading into Prince Rupert.  Prince Rupert is actually one of the seaports that the Alaskan cruise ships stop at, and Collins and Marilyn had visited this port on the cruise they took a few years ago.

It had some train cars we don't usually see -- Canadian ones.  Most were tagged with graffitti just like in the U.S.  I thought this one was especially colorful.

We stopped at one campground at Port Edward, but it was very steep, camp sites were too short, and they didn't have full hookups, so we wound our way through that mess back to the highway and came into Prince Rupert.  They were celebrating "Seafeast" here but the weather did not cooperate, so we didn't see much going on with that, although we did have fish (halibut) and chips again for lunch.  They had a boat parade this morning, but we missed that.  We drove around, toured the Museum of Northern British Columbia, tracked down the 7 totem poles in town for Mazie, and drove out to the Seaplane base, but no planes were coming or going, probably due to the weather. I forgot to take the camera with me, so I didn't get any pictures in town.  I'll try to get a few as we leave in the morning.   We saw one deer eating grass in the front yard of a house, which was a bit surprising.  Joe just stopped in the middle of the street (Mazie got a picture), and a car passed us on the right, then stopped, and backed up once they had spotted the deer.  It's always an adventure riding with Joe!

This is a pretty nice campground, and I even did laundry again -- this time it only cost me $10.00.  The thing about doing laundry in Canada is that you need Canadian money, and you never know what denomination the machines will take.  The expensive ones the other day took quarters, so you had to change your Canadian paper money into Loonies ($1 coins) or Tooneys ($2 coins), then change those coins into quarters.  This one here just took two Loonies per machine.  As I was waiting for my laundry to dry, I stood in the doorway of the laundry room and watch an eagle soaring high overhead.  This was the fifth eagle I saw today.

We were able to use the Skype program to make a few phone calls this evening, which is a nice plus to this laptop.  That Skype program is a lifesaver while we are in Canada without cell phone service (too costly).  We just have to have access to the internet, and we don't always have that.

It's raining again, so I hope it gets finished with that tonight and that we have a sunny day tomorrow.  We will backtrack over part of the same road we took today back to the Cassiar Highway (Hwy 37), and then head north.  That's supposed to be a beautiful, scenic drive, and we are all looking forward to it.