Friday, June 12, 2009

Day 7 With a Little of Everything 486.7 Miles

Moving average was only 54.8 today.  We were slow.  And you’ll find out why in a minute. 

Today, we saw several animals, met new friends, experienced weather that we had not seen so far on this trip, encountered many road workers, got told there “were no rooms at the inn”, met even more new friends, saw ladies of the evening (didn’t talk to them though, and they weren’t the new friends we met!), What a busy day. 

Where to start?  Well, with our first new friends we met.  We were just going down the road (at our regular elevated speeds) and up over the hill some people were coming towards us and they wanted to meet us.  Now how they knew we were people they would want to meet just boggles my mind because they were at least a half mile ahead of us and coming towards us.  A real puzzle. 

Anyway, as soon as they saw us they put on these real bright lights they had and I knew right away that they wanted to meet us.  They even made a u-turn in the middle of the highway to come back and see us.  Figuring I would make it easy for them to meet us, I pulled over and waited for them to catch up.  It took a while but they were persistent and finally got to us. 

They got out of their car and asked us how we were doing and I told them we were doing fine and asked how were they doing.  They asked where we were from and where we were going and I told them and then they said a most peculiar thing.  They said “the speed limit on this highway is 100 kph and we clocked you doing 124.5 kph”. 

I was so thankful for that information I almost asked them if they would write out a document certifying that speed.  Thankfully, I didn’t say anything because they were so kind they had already planned on giving it to me. 

I did try to tell them that the reason we were going that speed was because Lyle was following me too fast.  I told them that if he hadn’t have been following so fast, I think we would have only been going 100kph.  They didn’t seem too interested in my explanation though so we took their silly papers and cranked the bikes up and did wheelies on down the road. 

After looking at the documents in my room later, I determined that what they gave me was a “faulty equipment” ticket that in the comments had the words “warning for speed”.  I am only guessing but I would say the faulty equipment they were referring to was my speedometer.  I’ll have them know Garmin is my speedometer and nothing is more accurate!

We saw three moose today.  One right by the side of the road and the others a little distance away.  We saw buffalo too but not on the road like the last time I was here.  We saw one small black bear cub off in the grass by himself and I saw another bigger one later on about twenty yards off the road.  When we were going by one of the lakes a stone sheep with a really small kid walked out in the road and just stood by a cliff.  Like the mom was saying, “go ahead junior, you can do it”.  He didn’t like that cliff.  Straight down from the road. 

We went through a pass today that was all dense fog.  I mean really dense!  We had to follow a truck through it and at times you couldn’t see the truck and then there were sections of the road where they had repaved some spots and had not painted the lines back in the middle.  I was getting really nervous on those sections as I could see the road right in front of the bike but didn’t know where the middle of the road was or whether I was going towards the drop offs on the side or not. 

Also a lot of rain today.  It started out bright and sunny and then developed into rain later in the day. 

Lyle got to ride across his first “grated iron” bridge today.  It wasn’t a bad one though.  Also, he got to ride through our first “construction zone” on the Alaska Highway.  It was dirt with a little mud.  Not too bad either. 

We were feeling our age a little bit and we stopped for gas at a little camp grounds along the highway.  While there we met a couple from Wichita, Kansas.  Now get this; they started out from Wichita nine weeks ago riding recumbent  trikes, both pulling a small trailer.  That’s a three wheel bicycle with two wheels in the front and one in the rear and you pedal it while sitting down like in a chair.  NINE WEEKS!  You can google and see how far it is from Wichita to Cold River Camp in BC.  Unbelievable ! ! !.  So Lyle and I quit feeling our age right then as this couple were both older than we are by far!  Every time a person gets to thinking that they are doing something special, you meet someone who is truly doing something special.  Then you feel a little humbled. 

And finally to, what I know you’ve all been waiting for, the working girls.  Well, there is currently a forest fire going on north of Watson Lake and a lot of  fire fighters are in town and they have all the rooms booked so we couldn’t  get a room at the place we wanted to stay.  But, since we were there, we had a late lunch in their restaurant.  From our observations while having lunch, all the fire fighters coming to town, also brought in waves of working girls.  I don’t see the correlation, but I know those girls weren’t in Watson Lake last year when I was here.  And they certainly didn’t come to town because Lyle and I were passing through. 

There were even two of them out at the Sign Post Forest when I was putting up the Ozarks Country Living sign.  They seemed to be everywhere in Watson Lake. 

We finally found two rooms at a little camp grounds just north of Watson Lake.  The camp grounds is owned by a Czech who used to live in Praha about thirty years ago.  His name is Vlad (short for Vladimir).  He said “I used to live in Prague” and I corrected him by saying, “you used to live in Praha”.  He agreed that Praha is the correct name for what we gringos call Prague.  He’s just been living here so long he started talking like us. 

We took the last two rooms he had and turned in early.

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