Day 4: Prince George

I'm sitting in Mark's brother's house in Prince George and Mark has just left to collect our truck from the mechanic. Yes, that's right, car trouble! The best part is, our car trouble started 15 minutes into our three week road trip.

Damn!

When we left Victoria we noticed almost immediately that when the truck was idling it was making some pretty intense "vroom vroom" racing noises. I was not so happy. We pulled in to a garage on the way to the ferry and even though they were booked up until 5:30 that evening (it was about 9am) once Mark mentioned that we were on our way to Dawson City, the mechanic's eyes lit up and he started telling stories about how he used to live up in the Yukon. As a result, someone was literally peering into our engine within 2 minutes of our arrival at the garage. (Thank you thank you lovely garage employees!) Their diagnosis was that the engine wouldn't be destroyed if we kept driving, so we kept driving. About 400 km later the "service engine soon" light came on. A harrowing 400 km after that, we arrived at Prince George and finally put the poor truck into the shop. I was waiting with baited breath for the diagnosis, which turned out to be: there was a piece of plastic in our something-or-other assembly, which thus had to be taken apart, emptied out, and re-assembled, and I blame the "mechanics" who did an oil change for us less than a week ago. You know how your car is great, then you take it to the shop for some innocent reason, and then every other part of the engine breaks down after the mechanics are done with it? What's up with that?

In any case, car trouble aside, our trip's been pretty decent up until now. We haven't been covering any new territory yet, as we've been to PG before, but starting tomorrow it's all new. We'll be heading out of Prince George and the next destination will be Whitehorse. Yay!

So far the weather's been passable, with the notable exception of today's fishing trip. To get to the fishing spot we had to drive 20 minutes out of town, 10 minutes down a nasty dirt road, then hike about another 20 minutes down a VERY rough, steep, overgrown, wet path in the forest with two cliffs that we had to use ropes to transverse, and then another 15 minute hike down an uneven rocky riverbed. We finally made it, dogs and all, and the boys (Mark and his two brothers) fished for a while and cought NOTHING. Not a bite. They had fun anyway though, and we started hiking back to the truck.

Some lovely dark clouds had rolled in while they were fishing, and once we got into the forest (did I mention already that it was a very steep, very muddy, very wet path?) it started to rain. It was an absolute downpour and even under the cover of the trees we were soaked through almost immediately.

Then we lost the path.

As soon as that happened, it started to hail.



It wasn't fun any more at that point. Mark's younger brother had a run-in with some Devil's Club and ended up with some nice welts on his arm, and the rest of us really weren't doing that much better than him. We luckily found the path again before anyone started panicking and finally climbed, sopping wet, into the truck - which at that point started smelling like wet dog, sweat, and a few other things. The dirt road was pretty mucky on the way out thanks to the storm but it felt lovely to sit inside the cab and not be rained on.

As soon as we reached town, the skies were blue and the rain was gone - go figure!

Anyway, the journey continues tomorrow, with our fixed-up better-than-ever truck. I don't know whether we'll set a distance goal tomorrow or just stop when we want to - probably a combination of both. We'll have to put some serious mileage behind us each day until we reach the Yukon though, or we'll run out of time.

I'll put some pictures up when I get a chance. I'm not sure when I'll have access to the internet again but I'll try to collect some good stories to tell you.

Off we go, into the unknown!