I just returned, about an hour and a half ago, from Terrace, where my wife an I visited relatives and did some site seeing. Along the way, we also went to Prince Rupert.
Over the five days we were gone, we travelled a total of approximately 2,800 kilometers (that’s over 32 hours behind the wheel). During this time, I made the following observations:
- The Provincial Minister in charge of Transportation, Kevin Falcon, needs to drive the highways of B.C. at night while it rains. I don’t know what kind of paint they use to make road lines these days, but when it’s dark and the road is wet, it’s almost impossible to see the lines.
- On a similar note, Prince George needs to actually paint road lines other than the centre line and the fog line. Six lanes of traffic, three in each direction, with nothing to separate them makes for a lot of confused drivers and a very dangerous situation.
- Once we passed Kamloops, there was no 3G Cellular connection with Rogers – only Edge, and that only covered the bare minimum distance for each city we went through.
- Terrace itself had excellent Edge coverage, but Thornhill, the area we stayed in, was very spotty. No reception in the house, and I had to walk down the street to get enough of a signal for Edge to register a suitable connection for Twittering.
- Our car, a 2006 Pontiac G5 Coupe, has a trip counter that only goes up to 1,500 kilometers before it resets to zero. Not that helpful.
- Again, on a some-what related note, our car seems to get it’s best mileage at ~110km/h @ 2,500rpm. We made it from Terrace to our house on only two tanks of gas (filling up before we left Terrace, and once again in Prince George. Our average mileage was ~35MPG.
- We spent a total of $186.48 on gas alone.
- On the entire trip, over all five days, we saw only six police cars, and four of them had cars pulled over this afternoon near Williams Lake.
- Much to my joy, and my wife’s disappointment, we didn’t see any wildlife on, or near, the road, with the exception of a few deer.
- It was completely overcast on the trip up to Terrace with a little bit of rain along the way.
- It rained and/or snowed almost the entire way home, with the exceptions of Prince George, Williams Lake, Kamloops, and home itself. It was sunny in all four of those places.
That’s about it for trivia. The Photography section will be updated tomorrow with pictures from the trip. Until then, I’m off to catch up on five days worth of Slashdot!
