Canada- worse then america

The name of our blog is inspired by the late Gandalf the grey. through his many travels across middle earth he was known by many names, but the one that struck us the most was "the grey pilgrim". That name has been adopted as the name of the van.  the trip so far has been littered with these sort of LOTR (lord of the rings) references. On our seemingly endless drive through what we now consider to be the worst country in the world, we have listened to countless hours of this epic tale. We just finished the second book and plan to blast through the third in the next day or two. Enough about that though. On the first day we went to tok and slept in a pullout about a mile past town. Thanks to macrina i have had about 5 energy drinks to fill my empty tummy. (thanks creen and nate, they were really good) We had cajun chicken and cajun beans for dinner and nutella saltines for dessert. The next day, june 2, we drove to Watson lake. Crossing the border was  a pain. We answered the questions as well as we could and in the most respectful way, but they sill found something suspicious about three young men, one with a  molestash and two with ponchos and long blond hair. They quickly asked us to pull to  the side and stay in the vehicle. Your typical 30 year old canadian came out and went throughout he van. We were mostly exited because he was getting  a grand tour of our masterpiece and we just expected him to congratulate us when he came to " debrief"  us on the search. instead he holds up a black can of mace and proceeds to ask us a string of rhetorical questions about what it was, how it got there and if we knew what this ment. He basically told us we had tried to bring a "weapon" into canada and  he now had the power to seize the van and force us to buy it back. ( this was the genasis of the hatred of canada) He ended up letting us go and we had to "abandon" the mace to the "crown."    Coming through  the  pass at about 11:30pm it began to dump snow and rain and the visibility was pretty bad.It was so bad at times it was better to turn the lights off and drive int he dark rather then be blinded by the snow. Even on day two our conversation topics have deteriorated and been reduced to various forms of the phrase,            " canada is gay." if the conversation dies and LOTR goes off, the silence void is quickly filled with something about how canada sucks so much. When we woke up this morning we found out  the Cassier hwy. was closed due to a wildfire. we took the alaska hwy. to Fort nelson. We enjoyed some tasty subway(7 dollar footlongs) and went back to  driving.  about 20 minuets on the road we got a flat. when we went to get the spare we discovered it was a doughnut and we needed to buy a proper tire. so we drove 40 miles an hour ( all forty were awkwardly silent) back into town and the only tire place closed at 6. So now im sitting in a parking lot where the Indian owner said we could stay for the night and come in and get coffee in the morning.  tomorrow be plan to get a new tire and push on through. Wish us luck,
ben d
hans i
peter l