Let me tell you, boys and girls, I’ve just about had it with re-positioning this glorious camper in the truck bed. This time it shifted backwards and to the right, and took the mat and plywood with it.

So the first thing we did tonight, after securing a spot at the Shady Rest RV park here in Houston, BC, was to jack up the camper and put it back straight and centered.

This time, Jeff did the driving and I did the running around and measuring with a tape measure. We declared it “close enough” after about an hour and 75 adjustments back and forth. It should be the easiest thing. The easiest! But why isn’t it?

This time Jeff torqued the fastguns a bit tighter and we hope for the best.

Anyway, back to our lovely day!

It poured all night. I read more of that marvellous novel on the Oregon Trail. People dying of cholera. Others being scalped. Really, a great romance.

First up this morning, well after my $2 hot shower, was Hyder, Alaska. It is a small, old American port town. It makes no sense that it is in a separate country. You can only arrive by boat or drive through Stewart. There is no American border guard but there is a Canadian one.

We were headed to Fish Creek, all the way through the little town, where you can stand on a board walk and watch the bears catch and eat salmon!

Only we are a few days to weeks early. No salmon yet, no bears. So it was free admission.

I have to imagine that being this close to a grizzly ripping apart a salmon would be exhilarating!

It stopped raining so we walked the boardwalk anyway. It is so moist here. Rain forest I guess. The trees were HUGE! Easily 5 foot diameter.

And there was so much moss and lichen hanging off them!

We drove further down the road. It turned gravel, as my Uncle Paul told us. We drove maybe 20 kilometres, expecting to see a glacier, but then a map showed us it was much further so we turned around. Don’t need to get the rig all dirty or bumped out of place!

When we got back near the bear observatory, there was a bear on the road! But it took off back into the berry underbrush before we could get close enough for a picture.

We headed back to the downtown of Hyder for a couple more pictures before heading back to Canada.

Here’s a view of the Canadian border guard station. Look for the Canadian flag.

I thought it would be easy peasy but she asked so many questions, carefully looking from Jeff’s eyes to mine for any twitch that she should pounce on, asking everything from Hank’s shots, to any CBD or cannabis or bear spray and how many beers on board, and even asked if we bought any fudge in Hyder.

But she let us back into Canada (I wasn’t worried, just surprised. What a silly border crossing.)

Back in Stewart, we went to their grocery store. What a nice blast from the past. The way grocery stores always were. You know, with the office over to the side and up some stairs? Looking over the store? With the meat cutter in the back. And the round rotating checkouts. With people working the cash. And no credit cards accepted. And they packed the groceries in a paper bag! ❤️ We were only getting another 4 litres of drinking water and some ziplocks we forgot to pack and a couple pops for the road.

There are plenty of old buildings and vehicles and even a toaster museum, but most things were closed.

It feels like we are early, here, for tourist season. There is still snow in the lower crevices of the mountains coming into town.

And glaciers!

We saw two grizzlies right on the side of the highway, maybe an hour outside of Stewart, neither with a fear in the world. We couldn’t stop because someone was right behind us, but I did get a picture on the real camera that I’ll have to post later when I download it.

It wasn’t raining much so the driving conditions were good. We pushed it all the way here to Houston, a nice forestry town I remember mentioning often on my forestry news blog of the past.

After the repositioning of the camper, we actually sat outside on lawn chairs for an hour and had supper! But it is freezing and now I’m shivering on the bed, ready to crawl under the duvet. It’s too cold for even the mosquitoes to be out!

Tomorrow we move on towards Prince George!