Scott has been hoping to see some more wildlife.  We have seen some deer and caribou.  Scott saw a moose far down a side road while driving, but we haven’t seen any bears.  Some motorcyclists had stopped to fix a mechanical problem and along came a black bear.

I thought, “Yikes!”

Scott thought, “How neat!"

Scott hopped out of the car with the camera.  After snapping a few pictures, he hopped back in the car and drove in reverse on the Alaska Highway so we could all have a close up view.  “Yikes!”

The bear  looked peaceful , and unafraid of us.  So now we have seen a bear outside of the zoo and we don’t need to see anymore.  Yeah!

We had lunch at Fort Nelson which happened to have a spray park and a fun playground.  We roasted up some hotdogs and watched the park staff put up a tent in preparation for tomorrow’s Canada Day celebration.  When the sun is out and the wind stops for a minute it actually feels like summer, and today for ten minutes Brooke was able to run and giggle.  Yeah for beautiful happy toddlers!

We are back on the Alaska Highway between Fort Nelson and Steamboat.  We are hitting a lot of gravel patches.  We were warned about these before we left.  When the road is in disrepair they just throw down some gravel.  It definitely slows you down when you are flying along and suddenly start surfing across gravel without warning.  Here’s another Scott centerline photo.

More wildlife along the road

Along the road we snack…a lot.  Cody is limited in what he can eat in the car due to messiness and his age.  Apples tend to be one of his favorite fruits right now – the whole thing.  He just spits the skin back out.  He does this with cut grapes too.  Anyway, I tucked an apple up front prepared for his mid-afternoon snacking needs.  When he started squawking I told him I had an apple with his name on it and handed him the apple. Brooke frequently tries to steal his food.  I told him that apple had his name on it and when we stopped I would get her one too. After I gave her an apple she kept looking all over it puzzled, and finally asked me to write her name on her apple just like Cody’s.  I had to giggle.

We stopped at Toad River Campground to make dinner.  I saw a very cute bumper sticker, “For the Record…There is not a SINGLE Mosquito on the Alaska Highway.  They are all happily married with many, many children.”

While at the Toad River Campground we ran into a Ontario couple who had a VW microbus with camper conversion.  They have one of the last made.  The couple happened to have picked up another hitch-hiking couple.  The story behind the hitch-hikers is almost too crazy to believe.

The guy decided he wanted to go into the Canada bush for three months, and he wanted a companion.  He decided to place an ad on an Internet travel site.  He had several responses, and he chose the cutest respondent.  Emily was an adorable young lady from Paris.  Scott was incredibly intrigued by the story mostly because he would like to have the hunting and trapping skills to be able to survive in the bush for an extended period of time.  However, later after we both had digested the story we were both wondering, “Who would let their daughter answer an Internet ad to live in the bush with some guy they have never met?”

We went down the road a little and came across The Village, an abandoned campground.  We met two very nice guys from Fort Nelson camping there.  They called the moose swamp donkeys.  The moose do move like horses with heads that are disproportioned.  Scott stayed out chatting with the guys until about 11:30.  We were much warmer this night.

Happy 30th Birthday Mom!