Fantasy Caravan Day 56 part 1 - Dease Lake to Stewart

On Friday, we headed out south and then east toward Stewart, British Columbia.

The sign says that the construction project is COMPLETED -- whoo-hoo!!! But... the lines aren't painted on the road yet? And, different topic... that's our tail gunner in front of us - we had left the campground (one of the last to leave), and then stopped for fuel, so our tail gunner got out before us. They stopped at a pull off and let us get in front so they would be there behind us in case we needed assistance.

Cloudy day, but we could see that there were some mountains in the distance. And, now there is one line painted on the road!

Coming up to a lake - still one line.

Another construction project COMPLETED!

Eventually, we got two lines in the middle *and* white lines on the side!

And then quite a while with no white line on our side... but the road was nice a smooth!

You may think it is weird that we are noticing the existence or absence of lines so much -- that's because we've learned to use them to let us know if there is a frost heave coming up -- the lines will suddenly make a funny curve even though the road is not curving, and sometimes the side line has a greater curve than the center line (meaning that the road is probably going to drop more severely on the side of the road than the center). 

A little while later, I was driving... we are working on a project to evaluate pullouts along the road for their suitability for RV boondocking (part of the Days End Directory from the Escapees RV Club). I had printed out the directory listings for our route and we were stopping and marking updates for this crowd-sourced tool -- doing our bit as people in the "crowd" to keep the directory in good shape. The directory indicated that there was a pullout at kilometer marker 214, so I pulled off to verify the information in the Days End Directory listing...

When I pulled off, there was a passenger vehicle further down in the pulloff -- and, what I thought might be their dog near the woods out to the side of the vehicle -- I was thinking that it *might* be a fox, so I woke Carl up from his nap (he likes to take a short nap in the afternoon and while I am driving is a good time to do that)...

... he confirmed that it was a fox...

The fox had been standing, but then sat down. It was pretty far away for us to get a picture (using the zoom on our phones makes a rather pixelated image). I didn't want to pull forward fearing that we would make the fox run away and the other folks would lose their view, but they pulled out...

... and I started pulling the rig forward.

Interestingly, the fox didn't run away, but rather turned down the pulloff and trotted toward us...

Here a video of the fox trotting toward us -- please excuse the beeping, I had neglected to turn the turn signal off:

A photo out the side window as he was passing us

We were pleased that doing the crowd-source project (spending a little of our time to help fellow travelers who may be coming after us) gave us the opportunity to see this fellow. We were concerned that he might have been fed by humans as he was relatively unconcerned about us (even in our big rig); he also appears to have a limp as seen in the video.

We turned off Cassiar Highway onto 37A to head east to Stewart. We were getting a bit more rain...

... so we didn't get a clear view of Bear Glacier, but we at least got to see it a little! Maybe we'll get a better picture on our way back on Sunday.

We got settled in to our site at the campground and then headed out to Hyder, Alaska -- more on that in another post!