Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Day 6 What a Sunny Day 423.1 Miles

Today started out bright and sunny and a little cool.  It stayed that way all day long. 

Today we made it to Dawson Creek.  The starting point of the original Alaska Highway.  We stopped at the “zero mile” marker and took the obligatory tourist shots.  Lyle by his motorcycle with the sign in the background and me with my bike and the sign in the background. 

Then we had lunch where I introduced Lyle to Tim Hortons.  For those of you who have never been to Canada before, Tim Hortons is considered a national treasure in Canada.  It’s sort of like a combination of Dunkin Donuts and Panera in the U.S.   Everyone in Canada loves Tim Hortons.  It was one of Sharon’s favorite places to eat when we lived in Toronto. 

If any of you are tracking my SPOT ME and you noticed that the signal stopped somewhere northwest of Dawson Creek and stayed in one place for a while, I have to tell you there must have been something wrong with the SPOT ME because we were riding BMW bikes and they would never be stopped in one spot for any length of time.  Especially not stopped because something came loose or quit working. 

In fact, when I get home I’m going to complain to the SPOT ME people about this problem.  The signal should be updated regularly and should never make it look like a person stopped somewhere for some reason ! @ ! !

For some reason (when I have more time tomorrow, I’ll figure out what the reason was and let you know) it took us longer to get to where we are than was anticipated.  It’s like the clocks just lost almost an hour somewhere.  Anyway, we made it to Pink Mountain (sort of like the Ava area, if you get my drift.  Why else would it be called “Pink” Mountain? )  

They have a restaurant here and we both had the specials.  I had spaghetti with meat sauce which filled a large dinner plate. Plus two LARGE pieces of texas toast.  I was able to finish half of one piece of bread and about 1/3 of the spaghetti.  WAY too much food for one person.  Lyle had a hamburger steak and one of his sides was pasta.   Well, his pasta was the very same spaghetti that I was having as my main course.  But he had enough spaghetti to feed two people.  He didn’t finish his mail either.  We just had to quit. 

We didn’t see a single critter along the way today.  I hope they’re out tomorrow.  Lyle and I agreed that if we can find a bear along the way, we’ll stop and I’ll get a picture of Lyle feeding the bear a piece of his famous jerky.  That promises to  be one great picture.   I won’t be able to compose the picture exactly right though as everything will have to be done while I’ll sitting on my running motorcycle with my hand on the clutch and the camera in the other hand. 

I’ve determined that I made my route incorrectly.  I used Garmin software and it must default to “bypass cities” mode.  This means that it never wants to take you through a city.  It will go miles around a city to bypass it.  That’s not all bad until you think about the fact that most gas stations are actually IN the city.  I’ll now have to program the Garmin manually to fix this.  We want to at least, go close to the cities. 

Tomorrow we head for Watson Lake (signpost city) and put up our real estate sign for all visitors to see.  Assuming they have time to look at all of the thousands of signs. 

There is no internet here at Pink Mountain so this won’t go out today.  Actually they do have internet, they just have HughesNet and it doesn’t happen to be working at the moment.  If I had brought my troubleshooting tools, I could offer to fix it for them.

Tomorrow is another long day so I’m off to  bed. 

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