It was a quiet, dark night at Chubb Lake
We started out before 7am on our way south. We hoped to make it all the way to Abbotsford, the BC town on the US border. It was over 400 miles away. Our route went south on BC 97, the Cariboo Highway, until it intersected Trans-Canada 1, Canada's transcontinental highway, at Cache Creek. From there we followed it all the to Abbotsford.
The routing back to the highway given by the GPS was different from that coming into Chubb Lake. It seemed to be shorter and come out further south along Rt 97. That routing lasted about 1.5 miles until the first turn, which was onto a two track road. Speedy went about 100 yards before the first deep road-width pothole full of muddy water. There was a track around the pothole and we negotiated it only to find ourselves at the edge of a steep hill with another road-wide mudhole at the bottom. Nobody had informed the GPS that Speedy wasn't a Jeep.
We decided this was not a route to take. Harry and Sally hadn't come as far as the first mud hole so they were able to just back out. Fortunately, we were at a wide spot and were able to turn around and drive out. We headed back towards our original way into Chubb Lake and found an extention of the larger gravel road that came out a bit further down 97.
We continued on to Quesnel where we stopped at Granville's Coffee Shop for breakfast. It was worth the stop, with a pleasnt atmosphere, good breakfasts and good coffee. All filled up we were back on the road south. It was a pretty smoky road. We were heading in the direction of the existing wildfires and the haze was very thick. No sun could be seen for much of the time. This lasted all the way to Williams Lake, about 170 kilometers further.
The fires were supposedly burning in that area, but we only saw one patch of burned forest near the Williams Lake. After there, the haze began to abate and the air became clearer the further south we went, but it never went completely away.
It was about 200km further to Cache Creek and we drove through rolling terrain that alternated between open fields and hilly valleys. The valleys were high, dry, eroded grasslands. They probably were forested in the past but were now just sandy sparse grass. This is the one other place we saw evidence of wildfires. Here they were grass fires that left charred bare hillsides. It had been dry here for quite a while as everything was a very dry brown...except for a few irrigated fields in the valley bottoms. The brilliant green was quite a contrast to the brown surroundings.
Once we joined Trans-Canada 1, the road entered a steep canyon along the Thompson River. The hills became mountains and the road hugged the side of the canyon. we could look down into the large clear river and see train tracks below on both sides of the river. This went for abot 80 km until it joined the even larger Fraser River at Lytton. Here the canyon got steeper and the mountains higher as the road wound along the canyon, even going through several tunnels. It finally leveled out by the time we got to Hope and the road was joined by BC 5 to become a four lane highway all the way to Abbotsford.
By the time we reached Abbotsford, Speedy had passed the 10,000 mile point on this trip and was in need of an oil change. We had expected this and drove to the Mobil 1 Express, not far from the highway. Mobil 1 is one of the Mercedes recommended oils for Speedy, so we sought out this shop. They were quick, efficient and didn't try to upsell anything else. I was able to watch the process as well to make sure everything was as we expected...and it was. It wasn't inexpensive, but Speedy takes 9 liters of synthetic motor oil.
We left the shop at about 5:30 and met up we Harry and Sally at the local Cabela's, our stopover for the night. They are quite good about overnight parking and there were no close by campgrounds. The border is only about a mile away, so we didn't want to go far out of town and back in tomorrow morning. There are also several small restaurants in the same plaza, as well as a Starbucks that opens at 4:30am.
Tomorrow it is off to the North Cascades National Park.
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