Mon, Sept 21: On the road to Barkerville, British Columbia.

The weather is not co-operating very well these last few days. It is misting again this morning. We don’t rush because we aren’t planning to drive too far today. We turned onto Hwy 97 just before we stopped yesterday so it is just about 150 miles to Barkerville where we are stopping today. We get to Barkerville about noon. It is not raining, but looks like it could at any minute.

Barkerville is a gold mining town dating back to the late 1850's Canadian gold rush. It has been painstakingly restored to the way it looked in the 1870's. No one lives in the town now, the last citizen died in 1978, but it looks like people live there. The general store’s shelves are stocked with goods of that day. The drugist shop has shelves full of bottles of the medicines of the day.The church and the school houseare ready to begin the day.The homesand officesare furnished with actual period pieces and of course there are people dressed in period dressdoing chores that would have been done then. During British Columbia's gold rush many chinese were brough to work on roads to the gold fields and in the mines. Barkerville had a thriving Chinatown. There is a laundry complete with wash hanging to dryand a fully stocked herbalist shopalong with various homes and other shops.

We spend an interesting two hours walking around looking in all the buildings and visiting with the shopkeepers about the area. We have a nice bread bowl of soup and some rootbeer at one of the restaurants and then watch a movie on the town history. It starts raining as we finish the tour. Since it is still early in the afternoon we elect to drive on. We are tired of camping in the rain!

The highway follows the path of the original road built in the early 1860's to bring supplies to the various gold rush towns in interior British Columbia. There are some nice vistas of pretty lakes and rolling farm land, but the road is narrow and the traffic is very heavy with many heavily loaded logging trucks.

By 4PM we are ready to stop but pass several less then wonderful looking campgrounds. About 5:30 in Lac La Hache we see a nice, small, grassy campground fronting on a pretty lake and stop. It finally stopped raining about 75 miles back and the sun came out. We drove 290 miles today after all.

After setting up the rig,

we walk along the lake shore as the sun sets. Then Dick makes garlic spaghetti for dinner.