Friday 22 August 2008: Fort Nelson, BC to Edmonton, AB via SUV and Greyhound bus

When I arrived at the Greyhound bus station in Fort Nelson, BC at 2:30 AM today I was very surprised to be told that there would be no southbound bus!
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The northbound Fort Nelson-to-Whitehorse bus had broken down on Thursday afternoon. The Fort Nelson-Dawson Creek, BC bus was put on that route, which left no bus available for the southbound route. Luckily, I was considered a transit passenger; so I was given first priority to board the GMC Yukon SUV which Greyhound had chartered to transport five of the nine waiting passengers (and Adrian, the jovial African American southbound Greyhound bus driver) south to Dawson Creek. Four unlucky passengers were left behind in Fort Nelson.
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Our GMC Yukon departed from Fort Nelson, BC on time at 3:00 AM; and, after two stops, we arrived at Dawson Creek, mile zero on the Alaska Highway which runs all the way up to Fairbanks, Alaska, at about 9:30 AM. However, the bus to which I was to have transferred at Dawson Creek had also broken down. So Adrian, the Grande Prairie-based Greyhound bus driver who had accompanied us all the way from Fort Nelson, asked our female SUV driver to continue on to Grande Prairie, AB where he lived. In Grande Prairie I waited for about 90 minutes for a Greyhound bus which had been sent up from Edmonton especially to bring me and a couple of dozen other passengers from Grande Prairie down to Edmonton, AB.
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Incredibly, I managed to arrive in Edmonton at 8:10 PM, only about 15 minutes late, after a 16-hour journey from Fort Nelson, BC by SUV and bus. Barbara, who had flown into Edmonton that day from Las Vegas via San Francisco, surprised me by meeting me at the bus station. We spent the night at a nearby Holiday Inn Express in Edmonton (but we didn't do any brain surgery the next morning!).
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The total mileage driven today by Barbara on her Pontiac G5 Avis rental car was 78 miles.
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I will post pics from today soon.