Day Eight: Dawson Creek, Canada

After an amazingly warm and comfortable night's sleep, we woke up to this:

The "free continental breakfast" consisted of extremely stale lemon pound cake (...for breakfast?), little store bought fruit cups loaded with high fructose corn syrup and 3 other forms of sugar, fake orange juice and gross coffee. Since we were about to be driving all day, we decided to get a good meal, so we defrosted our car and went down the road to Denny's before hitting the road.

I used a traveler's check and received Canadian money back. Cool.

We drove all the way through Calgary and a few other places. The towns are only about half a mile long, if that. Some of the towns have a trailer park, others just very small houses and a school or church.

Every time we drove through a new town, there was a Subway, Boston's Pizza and A&W. Once in a while there would be a Safeway, their supermarket, and a Tim Horton's, their version of Dunkin' Donuts. We decided to see what the big deal was about A&W, so we stopped for a root beer float.

I forgot I don't really like root beer floats and got on to myself for being so impulsive, but Adam like it... except for when he spilled it on his foot and all over the floorboard.

We finished listening to/watching season 5 of The Office.

We saw a field of buffalo. They didn't like us.

A few fields of old, run down sheds and barns.

And a few fields of... well, nothing.

The farther north we get, the lower the clouds are. Cool.

My Canadian friend, Jesse, says that everything in Canada is better than America. I beg to differ. It costs $70 to fill up the gas tank to my tiny, almost hybrid, compact vehicle. Also, the "rest areas" are terrible. They are all very small and smell like dead rats and rotten beef in a bowl of hot swamp water. Because of this, I have peed in the woods more times this week than I have in my entire life, even growing up in the woods and hunting with my grandfather. Here are a couple examples of the rest areas in Canada:

They're pretty much permanent port-a-potties. Uh... perm-a-potty? Whatever.

We crossed over into the Pacific time zone, which threw us back another hour. Right before we made it to the Alaskan Highway, we stopped at a small restaurant that was connected to a motel for some grub.

The waitress thought it was cool when we ordered "soda" instead of "pop." When she delivered Adam's club wrap with fries, she asked if he wanted vinegar. Gross. Apparently, Canadians like vinegar on their fries instead of ketchup.

It's so weird seeing French translations on everything instead of Spanish or just nothing. After dinner, we got some coffee to go at a place called Tim Horton's...

and started our journey on the Alaskan Highway.

By this time, it was about 10 p.m. and the sun was just setting. We drove until almost 1 a.m. before pulling over at a rest area to get some sleep.