Jumping dishes junket

Friday, June 22, 2007

DAWSON CREEK, BC — Whenever we encounter some rough highway, and the truck and trailer go over bumps, in my mind’s eye I picture all the dishes in the trailer jumping up in the air and crashing down again. The din inside must be incredible, but there’s never anyone there to hear it. We have placed rubber-cushioned shelf liners in every cupboard, and each time we put a glass or cup away, we plant it firmly in the rubber to keep it from shifting around. It’s really quite effective for keeping stuff in place. The other place I’ve put it is on each shelf of the medicine cabinet, but in spite of that, the first one to open the door after a day’s drive usually has to have lightning reflexes to catch a flying toothpaste tube or aspirin bottle before it crashes into the sink below.
Today’s drive from Whitecourt, AB to our current location was a dish-tester par excellence. For some reason, the Alberta highways department has let the northern route get pretty worn, and in addition to cracks, patches and potholes, there is a series of crosswise ridges and depressions that makes everything bob up and down! Mind you, we passed miles and miles of construction work where the divided highway is being re-paved as well as extended, so it’s not like they’ve neglected the region entirely. They just didn’t get to the part we were driving on.
Northern Alberta is a vast land, with many flat prairie vistas, but with gulches, streams, creeks and trees aplenty. A huge sky still stretched above us, with a thin cloud cover in the morning, burgeoning into cauliflower bunches by afternoon that smouldered into a dark, bluish grey and spat some fat, wet raindrops on our windshield for part of the way. Luckily this never happened when we were outside the vehicle! There was quite a lot of traffic on the road in both directions, mostly trucks or 18-wheelers but a few RVs as well.
We followed Highway 43 through Little Smoky and Valleyview, turning westward to Grande Prairie after lunch. Now that’s one bustling town. Our route took us right through the centre of it, and we must have seen a thousand RVs in one dealership or another. Everything was set back from the road with huge parking lots and big box stores like WalMart, Zellers and Costco, as well as car dealers, trucking equipment stores and other industrial service centres — it was a huge shopping centre from one end of town to the other!
It was good to be in the countryside again after that. We drove through a couple more small towns, including Beaverlodge, where a huge figure of a beaver with large white buck teeth greeted us by the roadside, and then said farewell to Alberta as we crossed the provincial border to BC. Dawson Creek boasts its claim to fame: Mile Zero of the Alaska highway. We turned off just at that point to get to our campground, but will return and start our real northward trek at that spot tomorrow.
The evening’s entertainment tonight is going to be a small repair job we have to do to the drain system of our grey water. At one of our pit stops, Val noticed a small pool of water under the trailer and saw that it was dripping from a spot that had supposedly been repaired for us by the dealer nearly four years ago. So we picked up some sticky goop that should plug the drip till we can get some professional attention. It will do the trick for now.