Day 20, 21, and 22 - September 6-8: Fort Saskatchewan to home

Our flight was at 3:30 in the afternoon or something, and it only took 10 minutes to get to the airport, so we needed to fill up an entire day.  We headed for a walk to the most northerly stoplight in BC.  It looked exactly like every other stoplight. But on the way there, we found Nahanni Drive, which was slightly interesting.

We got to Edmonton at about 7:30 or so, and then we drove to Fort Saskatchewan (just south of Edmonton), where Heather's mom's friend Laurie lives and we were spending the night.  Laurie was very entertaining; he doesn't much care for children and he really likes cats.  He and his wife have about 1 000 000 Siamese cat things around their house, which was kind of ridiculous.  But it was very nice not to have to sleep in a hotel.

What followed was two days of driving.  Heather and Eric both finished all their books before arrival in Brandon, we spent a brief (two hours) time period lost on Saskatchewan back roads, and Heather became the ultimate champion of the cow counting game.  We got home late in the evening before Heather started school, and Eric missed his first day (which was probably fine, since you don't do anything on the first day of school anyway).

And that was our canoe trip vacation!

Day 19 - September 5: Fort Nelson (again)

We woke up in the morning, the sun was shining, it was quite nice, and Mrs Lindberg made some tasty, tasty breakfast.

After breakfast, we cleaned up our cabins, and we all hopped into the van, headed back towards civilization.  And by "civilization," I actually mean Fort Nelson.  Jim made Dave promise to stop if we saw any interesting wildlife on the highway, since our entire trip had been devoid of sheep.  We came across a bison and a bear, both of which were hanging out on the side of the highway not doing anything.

We made a stop at Ford Liard, where they had a nice little craft shop.  A random guy on the street told us we would be much better off finding the artists who made the crafts, and not buying things from the store, because it would probably save us some money.  However, since we didn't have a whole lot of time, we didn't track down any artists.  I nearly bought a canoe that I fit inside, but they were not quite in Heather's reasonable price range.

Eventually we got to Fort Nelson, where we needed to spend the night since the airline had decided to cancel our flight, since it was a long weekend.  Ultimately, I'm really not sure if you're going to make any money if instead of flying people when they want to fly and you put them up in a hotel instead.  Oh well.  We had already been to the Fort Nelson museum, and the pool table in the hotel wouldn't let us play, so it took about 7 seconds to run out of things to do.  It was all rather uninteresting.

Day 5 - August 22: Travel day

This morning, we drove to the parking lot, where the van would be living for the next two weeks.  Then we got into the shuttle van and headed to the Edmonton Airport to catch a flight to Fort Nelson via Fort St John. Essentially, we spent most of the day plane hopping into progressively smaller airports.

In Fort St John, we met Gord and Jim, a father and son who would be tripping with us.  In Fort Nelson, we met Dave, the owner of the outfitter who was leading our trip.

In Fort Nelson, Dave needed to pick up some groceries from our trip (there's a chain of grocery stores in BC called the Overwaitea, which is a ridiculous name for a grocery store (seriously, try saying it loud)), so he dropped us off at the Fort Nelson Museum, which is approximately the only thing to do in Fort Nelson.  It's not a very big museum, but it is absolutely full of stuff!  There were lots of old things that were used for the building of the Alaska Highway (one of Fort Nelson's claims to fame is that it's on the Alaska Highway), and a bunch of other things.  I'm not in any of the pictures because the lighting was kind of lousy.

The only grizzly we saw on the whole trip was a stuffed grizzly in the museum, which was most unfortunate.  However, it means that Heather didn't get eaten by a grizzly bear.

Heather's dad got a little bit excited by the old fire alarms and fire extinguishers and stuff that were kicking around in the museum.

Some of the old cars were a little bit exciting.  There was a whole garage full of them.

And of course, Heather got a little bit excited about this sign:

Which was the first in a long series of geology things that she got excited about.  We weren't even on the river yet!

Some of the old power tools were entertaining.  Heather got excited about those too.  Particularly the most terrifying chainsaw she's ever seen.

Once we were done at the museum, we started our trek down the highway.  Once we crossed the border into the Northwest Territories, the road stopped being paved, and we spent the next two hours driving down the gravel road that is the Liard Highway.  We made on brief stop at a very hilarious biffy on the side of the road.

We also saw a couple of bison on the side of the road.  The look even bigger and even stupider on the side of the road!  But it was still very impressive, considering they weren't even in a park.

The end of the road for us was Blackstone Territorial Park, where we would be spending the night before heading to the Nahanni.  There, we met Luke and Dan, who would be our guides for the trip.  We also got our first good look at the mountains.

There was snow on the top of the mountains, which reminded me of home!  

Once we got to the park, we did some packing so we'd be ready to go bright and early in the morning and head to Fort Simpson to another even smaller airport...  I was definitely starting to get excited to get onto the river.  We were so close!  At least now we were in the right territory...

And of course, this sign on a bike at the museum was probably a sign as to what was to come: