And you thought the blog was over, didn't you?

I've decided to keep up the blog about our new lives here in Alaska, partly because it's so different here and partly because some of the adjustments are a little funny. So, to start it off, here are some random observations from our first few days here in the Great Land:

Ravens are REALLY LOUD.

Wild animals scurry across the road in front of cars with alarming regularity. Sometimes they don't make it all the way across. The moose that walked out in front of Jim yesterday, though, was polite enough to wait for a gap in traffic before taking her time to cross the Spur Highway.

Traffic repair crews here are lightning fast. Under-repair sections of the highway between Anchorage and Soldotna on our way into town last week are completed and baby-bottom smooth. Take note, Texas road crews!

Ravens are REALLY REALLY LOUD.

Our walk-out basement gets pretty chilly at times, but it's perfect upstairs.

Our original plan was to keep Tate and her geriatric hips in the walk-out basement so that she wouldn't try going up and down the stairs, but she got really depressed. So Jim let her come upstairs AND into bedrooms - a former absolute no-no - and now she's happy as a clam. She's started running up and down the stairs at breakneck speed and jumping down from the last three. But she's delighted, and that goes a long way. She doesn't like Nature, though, and does not want to potty in it. That is a problem.

Does anybody know where my cookbooks are? Did I bring them with us, or are they with the freight company? I can't find my blueberry muffin recipe from The Happy Berry in South Carolina.

Ravens sound like REALLY LOUD nightmares.

There is a bee colony that's built a nest in our back yard shed.

Hm, I guess that's about it. Yesterday we went into Anchorage and replaced some office chairs we left behind in Texas, and bought a new treadmill (yahooooooo!), a porch rocker made from recycled milk bottles in a sort of Trex-like material and ordered a porch swing to match it, found some Irish music sessions to try to get to sometime, and Jim priced snow machines and kayaks. We forgot to get the field guides to Alaskan plants and animals, so James and I will probably go out this afternoon and get those.

Later!

Day 9 - Nikiski, Alaska!

Ending the trip with a grand total of 4,513.5 miles!

As you know, we spent the night in Glennallen at the Caribou Hotel. Definitely my favorite stay of the trip. This really cool moose is outside the hotel.

Tate has her first game meat - a leftover piece of reindeer sausage from my breakfast. She's feeling pretty Alaskan now!
The hotel was comfortable and attached to a nice restaurant and gift shop. The lady in the gift shop told us that the smoke from wildfires was causing a lot of people with respiratory problems to leave the state. And parts of our trip were pretty smoky. There are a lot of fires going on in Alaska right now, I'm sorry to say. We also learned that Anchorage hit a new official high temperature - 80 degrees!!!! HAHAHA! Oh, Alaska, you have no idea what "heat" really is. And so we left Glennallen and headed for home at last.

This is Gunsight Mountain in the Chugach Mountain Range. See all the smoke around it? Off and on throughout the day, the mountains would be obscured by the smoke.

Matanuska Glacier, in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Not the best picture, but hey. The Mat-Su was smoky for a good bit of our trip through it. Which is a shame, because I could tell it would have been a pretty area on a clearer day.

We decided against stopping in Anchorage to drop off either of the vehicles. We're going to do that on Saturday instead. So, we drove right on through to our own stomping grounds. It was disconcerting to not be able to see out across Turnagain Arm like we normally can. We did see eagles on the shore, though.

We stopped in Kenai so the guys could wash the cars while I went into the Safeway for groceries. I've got to get over the sticker shock on some of the fresh foods, I realize that, but I'm not going to pay $8 for a watermelon. I know they go on sale and I'll wait. Next year I'm planning to have a garden and grow a few things myself, if I can keep the wild animals from eating them. I doubt Tate will be much help in scaring them off!

Once we got the trailer and both vehicles unloaded into the house, we had to think about unpacking all the stuff. Our freighted belongings are in Montana, we found out today, and we went over the weight estimate by almost 25%. Egads. Cha-ching. And I'm not sure where we're going to put stuff when it does arrive. It was kind of funny, though, trying to make a list of things we need to replace when the last couple days in Texas were such a blur we can't remember what we actually packed and what we gave away! I guess we'll find out soon enough, huh?

Anyway, we're here now. We're home. And we're waiting for you to come visit us! The guest room is waiting.

Day 8 in more detail

One of the things this trip has taught us is that things have different meanings depending on who you're talking to. Remember last night's kitchenette? This is the kitchenette in the hotel in Whitehorse - a single-unit combination of a two-burner stove, sink, and fridge. Cool.

The hotel in Whitehorse was probably the funniest one we stayed in. They didn't mean for it to be, it just worked out that way. The floor was so creaky we tried to stay still as much as we could so we wouldn't disturb the tenants below us, and the bed James used was like a teeter totter. The stairs leading up were slat stairs, and they bothered Tate, so she wouldn't climb them and had to be carried up. And she's heavy. But probably the funniest thing was that this morning, Jim got up to let Tate out to potty. He got dressed, opened the door in his grogginess, and simply let Tate out. Shouts of distress brought Jim to full consciousness and he grabbed her harness and caught up with her down the balcony. Fortunately, she stayed upstairs and hadn't gone far, and was trying to go into other rooms for little visits.

Also in Whitehorse is the World's Largest Weather Vane. It was down for some sort of improvements to the airport the day we were there, so you'll have to click on the link to see it put together. It's a real WW2 plane on a swivel that points its nose into the wind.

The wildlife adventure didn't stop yesterday. We saw a small group of six wild horses (seriously!) by the roadside, more moose, and six elk in the picture below. We also saw our first eagle of the trip, loons, tons of prairie dogs and hares. Our two-day wildlife total is now up to 83, not counting any of the animals smaller than Tate.

You know what that line is in the forest? That's the border between the US and Canada. No kidding. Sort of like in the cartoons. The US is on the left, and Canada on the right.

While all three of us have had a surprisingly pleasant trip through the Alcan, the last couple hundred miles or so lived up to the hype. Extensive construction barred the way and slowed traffic to a crawl, when we could go at all. Pilot cars would drive one queue of cars through the construction zone, then make a U-turn and lead the waiting cars back down it in the other direction, so that we would know how fast we could go and when to change lanes. It was tedious, dusty, and frustrating. It was also dangerous to the vehicles. This is Jim's second windshield damage of the trip, thanks to a passing semi who threw a rock right into the windshield in front of Jim. We're thankful it didn't go on through the glass.

This is our first glimpse of how close we were to the border and getting out of Canada. With the exception of the Rockies, I'm not in any hurry to come back into Canada, eh.

Pretty view from one of the construction areas. I already forgot the name of this lake.

Hooooooooooooome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Y'know, after all the hurry we went through to get Tate back into the US before her vet papers expired, I couldn't get the border agent to even look at them. As before, he wanted to know what was marked "fragile" in the back of the car (the antique violins), gently scolded us for forgetting to sign our passports, and waved us on through. Hm. Another non-event after all the hype.

So, here we are, back in the States. Aaaaaah. We left the Alcan in Tok, Alaska (rhymes with 'oak') where we had dinner and Jim found out that the smoke in the air was coming from a wildfire in Fairbanks, 230 miles away. The air smells like burnt chocolate chip cookies, in a bad way. Now we're in the Caribou Hotel ("We Caribout You") in Glennallen, Alaska. We'll be stopping in Anchorage for a while to get an estimate on a new windshield and maybe trade my CR-V for a rental car so the dealership can check it over after the long trip. We should be in our own house by bedtime, though. Yahoo!

Day 8 - Glennallen, Alaska, USA

4,154.7 total miles, 531.9 miles today.

Oh, how lovely to be back in America!! I'll write more later (probably either tomorrow or the next day), but I did want to let you all know we're back in the USA and mere hours from home. Yay! Thanks for the prayers and well-wishes from everyone, and stay tuned for more news soon. For now, though, it's almost 12:30 a.m. and still light out, but we're all tired and about to go to bed. Sleep tight!

Day 7 - Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada

3622.8 total miles, 599.7 miles today

I was not looking forward to today. Today was the day we were going to be driving the part of the Alcan that makes people run out and buy "I Survived The Alcan" t-shirts. The Milepost warned of steep grades up to 10%, unpaved and unlined portions of road, twisting turns through the Rockies with no shoulder and no guardrails... Egads.

So it was with a sense of nervousness that we left Fort Nelson. However, things were not at all what any of us expected.

The road simply wasn't that bad. Sure, some parts were being repaired, and those were unpaved, gravelly and dusty. Other parts were roughly paved and bumpy. The whole thing was twisty. This is one of the under-repair areas, where the gravel is loose and the dust is thick:

James wanted to show you what we saw most of the trip on the GPS - long expanses where it simply says to stay on whatever road you're on for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

But oh my, the Canadian Rockies are giving Montana a run for its money when it comes to my favorite place ever. This has to be one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

There are things that made us scratch our heads in bewilderment, though. Like this guy:

He's pedaling INTO the Rocky Mountains. He's on his way UP. And there's nothing for miles and miles and miles. It's like these random cyclists drop from the sky into remote areas and have to work their way out again, sort of like Survivorman. Hey, that makes as much sense as anything else, right?

Jim as usual drove in front, and was very good at radioing back to us about where the potholes were, and the fresh asphalt patches, and obstacles in the road such as these:

These are stone sheep. We can't figure out what they're eating on the road, but they were finding something that would keep them munching along no matter how close the cars got to them.

This guy on the right has a radio collar on. They were losing their winter coats.

Down the road a ways, Jim alerted us to the cutest thing we'd see all day:

A black bear sow and two tiny cubs. Before the day was out, we'd see another mother bear with another set of twins, and several lone black bears. We also saw a grizzly, but we didn't get to take his picture.

Moose aren't exactly rare to us anymore, but getting to take a bull's picture this close is something special.

And here's something you don't see very often, even in America - a herd of wild bison, grazing by the side of the road. Look at the calves!! There were 31 bison in this herd that we were able to count.

Our wild animal count for today came to 69. We saw black bears, a grizzly, bison, moose, and stone sheep. It was like going through one of those safari parks but without having to buy a ticket.

You'll probably be relieved to know that Tate has cut out the drama and is back to being the fine traveler she was at the beginning.

You may also be relieved to know Jim isn't having any drama, either.

Our big touristy moment today was a visit to the Signpost Forest in Watson Lake. People from all over the world come here and leave little mementos of their visit. From license plates to road signs to plaques with names on them. I don't know how much land the Signpost Forest occupies, but it's pretty big and must have thousands of pieces of stuff in it. Jim left his license plate from his first car, and I left a license plate from the brief time when the Metropolitan was registered as a driver.

I guess that's about it for today. We're hitting the road again in the morning and will be back in the good old U.S. of A. by the middle of the afternoon. See you then!

Random stuff from the trip so far

Hello again. I'm waiting my turn in the shower after a half night's sleep (thanks, Tate) and thought I'd get a bonus post in before I go clean up.

This was one of our change-of-address cards. I blurred out the address, obviously. Our neighbors on our street, and the friends we got to see before we left got these.

Silliness for the road...

One of the few touristy things we did was try out the local specialty of Idaho Huckleberry Cordials.

They're a lot like Cherry Mash, except they have a smaller amount of filling and it's obviously huckleberry instead of cherry. It tastes pretty much like grape. We also shared a huckleberry soda in Montana. For the record, Montana was my favorite stop so far.

We could see this building from our hotel in Helena. You can't see it here, but maybe if you click on the photo it will enlarge enough for you to see the lizards twining around that spire. Since I've left the sweet little house geckos back in Texas, this was a fun thing to see.

We didn't know this type of thing existed. We see them all the time for the last couple days... Trucks hauling around two ATVs on these things. I'm not sure what I think of them, but I think I think they're a good idea.
Okay, the shower's empty now and it's my turn. I just heard the neighbors in the next room leaving, too. I think they were paying us back for all the noise Tate was making last night, and weren't exactly quiet themselves. Oh well. Time to start another day and drive the worse part of the AlCan. Today's goal - to get to at least Whitehorse, YT.

Onward!

Day 6 - Fort Nelson, British Columbia, Canada

3,023.1 total miles. 635.3 miles today.

James is collecting pictures of the budgies in their current surroundings every day, and since Jim was holding them in this pic of us leaving Spruce Grove, I thought I'd include it here. I think the budgies are ready to apply for their own passports and become full-time world travelers.

Tate, however, is not. She's decided that globetrotting is not for her, and she has developed a death wish that I'm going to make come true if she doesn't cut out the drama.

Anyway. Canada has stopped looking quite so much like Kansas, but it's still a great big lot o' nothing out here.

We have been under a time crunch to get back into the US before Tate's medical papers expire on the 9th. We'll make it, barring some unforeseen event, but in order to make sure, we haven't done anything remotely touristy. Except for the photo Jim took of all three of us at the Mile Zero marker for the AlCan Highway. It's still on his camera right now, so you'll have to settle for my non-peopled pic of the marker:

Once we got a few miles beyond Dawson Creek, where the AlCan begins, we were back to having nothing to look at but trees. We'd go for miles and miles without seeing another person, and then, in the middle of nowhere, there'd be a house, or even more bewildering, a jogger. We always wonder where they came from, and where they are trying to go. Here's James, driving across the metal grate Peace River Bridge:

The Peace River on the other side of the car:

We stopped for the night in Fort Nelson, BC. We're in a cute retro-type hotel - with a kitchenette!! Here are the budgies, on top of the kitchenette:

Yes, that's a microwave on top of a dorm fridge. :^)

And here's Tate, finally settling down for a little while. So help me, she'd better sleep through the night. Jim's working while he has the chance.

While driving along the AlCan (which is actually called the Alaska Highway, but that doesn't sound as cool), we saw our first serious Do Not Feed The Bears sign, and down the road a couple hours, saw a black bear standing on the rise near the road, watching cars go by. Awesome.