Dawson Creek Walk-About

Good morning, my friends. We'll be heading out again this morning. Before I talk about our next stop, let's back up to yesterday's activities. We had a day of rest and took care of a few "life" things. There's a pretty nice laundry at this park where we're staying, and so it seemed like a good idea to wash a load of socks and underwear. We're five days into the trip in which we each packed enough socks and underwear to get us through a week. Right now, the biggest challenge with laundry is coming up with the right coinage. We're in Canada, and so I needed "loonies," which is their $1 coin. While we were in town, we broke the Canadian currency we had with us into smaller denominations, and I was able to use a change machine to get the coins I needed.

We first had breakfast at Le's Family Restaurant. I didn't take any pictures of the place, but I found this one online. We sat there at the table to the left of the "Closed" sign.

The food was good and served up fast. I only ate about a third of mine. We'll have the rest for breakfast this morning.

After breakfast, we returned to the Dawson Creek Visitor Center. I neglected to get a picture of this grain elevator the day before. It has historical significance.

These signs are posted on the side of the building.

It's just to the left of where we took this photo the day before.

Across the parking lot, there was a farmer's market going on. This was more of a craft market. It was fun walking through, but I didn't see anything I couldn't live without.

We went back to the visitor center where I found the first shot glass and refrigerator magnet of the trip. It's always a treat when I can find both.

The day before, they'd given us this map of the walking tour, and that was where we headed next. It seemed like a good way to familiarize ourselves with this charming little town, and we just enjoyed walking around and being out of the truck for a day.

You can see the tour comprises only a few blocks of the town, but we enjoyed looking at the murals. There was no real explanation of their significance, and so we just looked. I don't have much to tell you about them beyond describing where they were. These first two were on a very long wall. I couldn't fit the whole thing in one image. The next image was on the right. 

This one continued on to the left. I can only assume these folks are significant to the history of Dawson Creek.

These next two were posted on another long wall. The first one was to the right. They were not continuations of one another, but two separate murals.

I liked the sled dogs in this next one.

Walking on...

You'll see that some of them have supporting cables for power poles blocking the view.

This next series of three were seen working from left to right.

Some of them were painted as store fronts and gave us the feeling we'd stepped back in time.

This one tells a little bit about the project that resulted in all of these murals.

In addition to murals, we came across plaques describing what once stood or happened in the place where we were standing. I didn't take pictures of all of them, but some of them seemed worth showing.

That one is another reference to the milepost we saw the day before.

This one was interesting. It was hanging on the side of the bank, still in existence today.

Walking along, we came across this pretty blooming tree. My phone tells me these are apple blossoms. (That was my guess too.) I noticed these are painted into some of the murals.

Walking on, these next three seemed to remind us of the difficulty of traveling this road back in 1942.

I liked this next one because the hotel is also still in existence.

Walking on...I liked the colors in this. The left side would make a cute quilt.

Oooh...and look! There's the quilt shop. It wasn't open yet, but we came back. I'll tell you about it in a separate post.

I captured this next one because of the Quonset hut. My family lived in a Quonset hut back when I was too young to remember. (Now I'm getting too old to remember...anything.)

Continuing on...these next three images were taken standing in a small courtyard between the buildings.

Look at these pretty lilacs!

And this next one was another that was too large to fit all in one image. Walking from right to left...

Turning around 180 degrees, there was a series of windows high up on the wall. They seemed to be covered with plywood (or something) and then painted over.

After that, we did some grocery shopping. We only had a few things on our list. While there, we found these in the produce section. They're about the size of a large olive. What are they? I asked the young man stocking produce, but he didn't know. There was no label specifically labeling these. My guess is lychee fruit. What do you think?

And yes. I just consulted The Google who told me all about them. We don't see these where we live.

Okay, and from there, we headed back to the RV and relaxed for the remainder of the day. I did the laundry. We had a light lunch, and we took naps. Then, we provided laps for the feline travelers. All-in-all a good day. I'd planned to make dinner in the RV, but we both kind of wanted to get out of the camper. We ended up having dinner at this restaurant. They had some unusual things on their menu. The food and service were excellent.

I had their "Dragon Bowl." It was a teriyaki chicken over coconut rice with lots of stir-fried veggies.

Mike had a beef noodle bowl. 

Our next stop is Fort Nelson. I'm a little concerned because wildfires are burning on both sides of the highway between Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson. We have reservations in Fort Nelson, and we'll just be there one night. My biggest concern is being inundated with smoke, but I don't know if that's warranted or not. I wrote an email to the RV park, and they simply confirmed the presence of a fire. Aside from that they couldn't give me more information. 

It was fortuitous that we decided to go out for dinner because our server told us about a free app called Drive BC that gives us all kinds of information about the fires and any other road hazards. As it turns out, the fires won't affect us on our drive, and we'll receive notifications if there is anything of concern along the way. I'm told there are also "511" websites for Alaska and Yukon Territory. I haven't investigated that yet, but I plan to. And, Canada, I'm so sorry about the wildfires.

So...off we go. Time to close things up and get on our way. I still have a quilt shop to tell you about. I'll do that in a separate post.