Blame Canada!

We made it into Canada by lunch today.  We'll be here for the next couple of days at least.  The towns are getting more and more spaced out and there are less amenities.  Right now we're trying to plan the remainder of our time so we have specific end locations and backups in case the roads are bad.  We've been seeing a lot of snow (even coming out of the sky!) and the lakes up here are all frozen.  It is definitely still pretty winter-like in the middle of B.C.

One highlight today was Hope, B.C.  We didn't know until we dropped into the visitor center that this is the town where they filmed the original Rambo!

The mountains look familiar...I always thought they filmed this movie around North Bend, WA...

Look! It's Sylvester Stallone! Interesting note, like Rambo, Andy was also made in 1982.  

 As we were heading out of town (and I got behind the wheel for the first time in the trip), this is what we ran into:

There's snow in that storm.

Thankfully the storm passed quickly and we had mostly dry roads the whole way today.  The drive was really pretty and mountainy and then kind of scrubby. Not an ugly transition, just different.  It reminded us of the scenery changes on the drive from western to eastern WA/OR.

There were a ton of tunnels going through the Fraser Valley 

On the other side of the really mountainy part. More pines, less fir trees. 

We ended up in Williams Lake, B.C.  Sorry I didn't grab a photo in town.  It's probably the ugliest town I have ever been in. I'll have to get a photo tomorrow because I need to share the depressing surroundings with everyone (I'm not talking about the scenery, I'm talking about the town).  We are staying at a motel that is advertised as a Howard Johnsons on the outside, but they barely had a credit card machine and it identifies on all major signs as "Williams Inn."  Nice bait and switch, hotel people.

The only major (and I do mean major) snag of the entire trip so far is that when we stopped to get gas in some blip on the map, our credit card was rejected.  In all our planning, neither of us thought to call the credit card people and notify them we'd be in Canada.  Whoops. So we called the card people and got it all ironed out...or so we thought.  When we arrived in beautiful Williams Lake and ran the card at the motel, it was rejected again (If I was bank of america and I saw someone was trying to use the card here, I'd probably think the card had been stolen by criminals, too).  After running through the credit card gauntlet, it turns out that by a TOTALLY RANDOM COINCIDENCE our card was flagged in a large group of card numbers that had been potentially compromised by a 3rd party, so even with the travel notification, the card was blocked and they are sending us new ones.  Um, not helpful when we are driving through Canada.  We got some temporary authorizations to keep using the cards since we're in a bind, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it will work for the next couple of days, but this is kind of a huge headache.  Here's to hoping it's smooth sailing from here on out.

Oh, and the kitties are fine.  They slept pretty much the whole way.

Fro is checking out the room.  Zeus is under the bed and will probably be there all night.  

Tomorrow we hope to make it to Fort Nelson, B.C.  Google says it's going to be a 14+ hour day.  Can't wait!