my travels in pixels

Lindsay has always wanted to go to the Boeing factory which was only half an hour away. The place is gigantic as you can imagine and 41,000 people work there. 30,000 work on the day shift that starts at about 5.30am, in 6 minute increments. We got to see the new 787 which is made out of composite - carbon fibre; what Lindsay used to make his yacht masts out of 20 years ago. Qantas had one on the production line that will only carry about 200 passengers and will cost about 300 million. For obvious reasons you aren’t allowed to take anything in there that could take a picture or movie. While they sound like they are the only ones making planes and they do make a lot, there are other competitors out there. They have orders for the next 20 years and as you have to make a one third down payment at time of order, they must make a fair bit of interest on their customers’ behalf. The first night it rained but since then the days have been lovely, warm and sunny. The guide at Boeing said it wa...

Unlike our previous trip to Jasper, the weather was divine. 27-29C with sunny blue skies and not many mosquitoes. The campground we had planned on staying in was closed as the summer season had finished and all the electric and full hook up sites were taken in the campground we had stayed in before. But as we are self sufficient we were able to take a non serviced site, which was really nice and even though we could have got another site on the third night, we decided to stay where we were. We got caught by the time zone thing again and didn’t realise until the second day that we had been putting our generator on at the wrong times the previous day. Jasper is in Alberta and we were another hour ahead. We went looking for moose in a couple of places and even hiked the 3.5kms around moose lake, but you guessed it, no moose! The visitors’ centre has a book that people write wild life sightings in and there were a few entries for moose and bears but not many. We saw a coyote walking a...

Stewart, BC & Hyder, AK We had decided to take the Cassiar Highway instead of continuing on the Alaskan Highway just before Watson Lake. My original copy of the Mile Post had said it had 15% gravel roads, but my new copy said it was 100% paved, yay. We knew there were some long sections on the Alaskan Highway that had road works, with one being about 15 miles long, so we really wanted to avoid that if we could. We had also heard that there were bears down at Fish Creek in Stewart/Hyder, which was a big draw card for us. The Cassier is a lovely drive. The first 30km has permafrost and the forest hasn’t got over a wildfire that happened a few years ago, but it is still more interesting than the Alaskan Highway. On the second day we saw seven bears on the side of the road. We decided that we had come to the right place. As soon as you turn off the Cassier to go to Stewart, you get to see one of the few blue glaciers in Canada right next to the road. Stewart (Canada) and Hyder (...