I finally got my device to upload photos to the iPad from the camera.  I described the moose cow and calf in an earlier post.  Here they are as photographed from out the windshield of the motorhome with the windshield wiper on the left.  Learning to crop photos is a task for another day.

I am writing this from the city of Fairbanks where we arrived yesterday.  My previous post I believe was from Skagway which is a little town on the southeastern Alaska coast where most of the cruise ships seem to dock.  We arrived there on a Sunday with beautiful blue skies and temperatures in the high 60’s, and we ended up spending four nights there.  I was quite taken with the town on that Sunday, but each day we spent there I liked it less and less.  Upon our arrival there was one cruise ship docked in the harbor, but it appeared to be only sitting there for maintenance puposes.  The streets were pretty much deserted as with many small towns on a Sunday afternoon.  On Monday another cruise ship arrived discharging its load of passengers.  On Tuesday three more ships were in the harbor for a total now of five, and all of a sudden the sleepy little village of Skagway had become all of the things that I hated about Banff, Pigeon Forge, etc.  Also on Tuesday the weather turned rainy to add to the aggravation of being elbow to elbow with the cruisers.  At that point we wanted to leave Wednesday morning, but we had changed our minds about our travel mode.  We orginally planned on driving back up the Klondike Highway the way we had come in to Skagway.  But we discovered a ferry option to take us fourteen miles across Skagway Bay to the town of Haines.  The fourteen mile ferry ride would save us 360 miles of driving to reach Haines by highway, but we could not book passage until Thursday.

I have not been on a whole lot of ferries in my lifetime and I have certainly never been on one with a forty foot long motorhome.  When I was in my 20’s and in college I spent a year driving a school bus to help meet our expenses.  That was a terrific background to have to prepare me for driving the WildaBeast.  But even with that experience, when we bought the motorhome it was with sweaty palms that I arrived at the dealership in Tampa to take delivery.  After almost 11,000 miles I have become quite comfortable driving it, but when we bought the ferry tickets I was expecting that someone from the ship would actually load it.  I had read somewhere that they do that, so I thought that’s how it would be here.  Imagine my surprise when I was told that me driving it was part of the deal.  It involved driving down a fairly steep and narrow ramp to what seemed a tiny concrete dock, surrounded, of course by ocean.  Then making a sharp right turn on the tiny dock to another shorter ramp that led up to the ship.  And from there driving into the belly of the ship through a side door, and making an immediate left turn before driving to the aft portion of the ferry.  Once aft I had to make a U-turn and come back up the other side to park.  Now the key words in those previous sentences are SHARP right turn, IMMEDIATE left turn and U-TURN.  The one thing I have learned about Wilda is she does not do anything SHARP or IMMEDIATE, and she did not do so in this situation either.  The manuevering involved a few back ups and try again.  But the guys on the ship directing me were great and had obviously dealt with geezers in big machines before and they got us situated without a hitch.  The ride was beautiful and disembarking was a much simpler process with just a simple right turn and a level ramp to solid ground.

One reason that we wanted to eliminate driving the 360 miles to Haines was a problem we have been having with the car we are towing.  On several occasions we have arrived at our destination at the end of the day with a dead car battery.  This continues to plague us. At first I thought there must be something wrong with the car, but I have come to the conclusion that when the wiring between the motorhome and the car was done a mistake was made somewhere.  This is something that I will investigate when we get back to the “lower 48”.  On the trip over the Alaska Highway there are many desolate stretches hundreds of miles long.  There are lots of big wide places along the way to pull off and park overnight at no charge.  We did this very late one afternoon and when we went back to the car the battery was really dead.  I have a charger and hooked that up and got the battery charged back up overnight.  However, this car has something called an Intellikey.  It is just one of those key fob clicker things which works electronically, but there is no actual key.  The problem is that if the battery in the car goes dead it is sometimes hard to get the clicker and the car communicating with each other again.  And the car ignition switch needs to be in “accessory mode” to be towed so that the transmission lubricates properly.  With the key fob not working I had no way to put it in “accessory mode”.   Fortunately Ford has a roadside assistance service that you can call.  However, we were in a spot where there was no cell phone service.  We had no choice in the morning but to unhook the car and drive away.  We drove 60 miles before we could get a cell signal.  The nearest towing service and Ford dealer were in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory and that was 140 miles from where the car was sitting.  Ford sent the tow truck out, they picked up the car and towed it the 140 miles to the Whitehorse Ford dealer.  280 miles round trip for the tow truck driver.  Glad I did not have to pay that bill!!!  The dealer at first was telling me they would TRY to look at it, but they were backed up and could not promise to get to it anytime in the next week.  But my begging/pleading/whining paid off and the following day they had the keys reprogrammed and we were back on the road.  Since then we have been stopping about every three hours to start the car and let it run enough to charge the battery.  So far that is working well, but it is a nuisance.

Alaska is in the Alaska time zone which is one zone further west than the Pacific time zone.  There is a four hour time difference between Alaska and our home in Florida.  So far Joan and I have adjusted well to the time difference and to the long hours of daylight up here.  This time of year it never gets really dark, but rather just what I would call twilight.  The twilight does not happen until about 1:00AM and then it starts to brighten up again about 3:00AM.  By 4:00AM it is fully light just like noon in Florida.  Daisy, who is our ten year old sixty pound Border Collie, and the third member of our traveling party has been a different story.  In Florida she comes into the bedroom about 6:00AM to roust us out.  In Alaska she was doing this about 4:00AM which is too early even for me.  In just the last few days however she seems to be beginning to get used to the time and daylight hours difference.  And when we were traveling on the aforementioned Alaska Highway we were having to spend what seemed like hours walking back and forth with her to get her to “go potty”.  (Joan’s term, but probably more appropriate for this forum than what I usually say.). My theory is that there were so many wild animal smells out there that she was not familiar with that she was somewhat distracted.  But since we have been back in civilization this problem seems to have solved itself also.  She’s back to being a “regular” dog again.

We have decided that Fairbanks is as far north as we are going because the roads north of here get really rough.  From here we will head south to Denali National Park and then on toward Anchorage where I hope to get the crabs.

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Before I retired we lived in western Pennsylvania and in those days both Joan and I were serious long distance runners.  For a period of over 30 years we trained on almost a daily basis and frequently competed in road races on the weekends.  I was just a middle of the pack racer for most of those years, but Joan was better and usually brought home a trophy.  In those days we watched what we ate and all of the miles we put in kept us on the slim side.  In other words, I didn’t always have this big gut that I am carrying around now and I was very weight concious.  This was the environment that Mandy was raised in, and she actually was instrumental in starting the first girl’s cross country team at her small high school.

When it came time for Mandy to pick a college she decided to go to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.  Blacksburg was about a seven hour drive from where we lived, so when we dropped her off there in September we did not see her again until she came home for Christmas vacation.   When she arrived home I could see that she had “porked up” some as kids are wont to do on dorm foods and when they discover beer.  I didn’t say anything to her about her weight over the two or three weeks she was home.  She returned to college and was there for her January 10 birthday.  Being the subtle dad that I am however, I bought a bathroom scale and sent it to her as a birthday present.  Usually when I would give her something I would get a call or a card.  But this time no acknowledgement whatsoever.  At some point, perhaps a year or more later, the subject did finally come up and she was still mad about it. Oh well!

Now we fast forward to today.  I am not running any longer and I take a ton of prescription medications for various ailments I am plagued with.  These meds come to me by mail and I have it set up that they are automatically sent by the mail order pharmacy when I am about to run out.  While we are traveling on this extended trip we had our mail forwarded to Mandy in Houston and when she gets my meds she finds out where we are going to be in a few days and sends the meds to me “General Delivery” in that city.  On Monday I picked up a package of meds at the post office in Skagway.  Also in the package were two very nice Father’s Day cards, one from Mandy and Dave and another from the twin grandbabies.  But a more curious inclusion in the package was a set of toe nail clippers.  Clipping toe nails is something I frequently neglect and in the warm South I am almost always in a pair of flip flops.  I can only conclude that she noticed while we were visiting, and decided after almost twenty years to pay me back for that set of bathroom scales.  GOTCHA DAD!

Today we leave Skagway.  There is only one road to Skagway and it ends here.  Rather than drive back up the way we came we have decided to load WildaBeast and the car on a ferry and cruise the fourteen miles across the bay to the city of Haines. If we did the drive to Haines it would be 360 miles.  My friend Fred highly recommends a visit to the hammer museum in Haines so we certainly do not want to miss that!

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I am writing this in Skayway, Alaska.  We left home in Florida on May 6 and finally crossed the border into Alaska yesterday, June 15.  For those of you who questioned whether I could stand Joan 24/7 (or was it vice versa?) be advised that after six weeks on the road we are still best friends.

I have not had an internet connection in almost two weeks until arriving here.  In Canada we shut off the data connections to our phones because it is too expensive.  And the campgrounds we stayed in in Canada either had no wifi or also wanted to charge us for a connection.  I really do like keeping you people informed of our progress, but when it comes to paying to do so I have my limits.  So this post will be a “catch up” and will really be a combination of posts I would have written along the way.  I am now doing all of the driving and therefore have plenty of time to think of topics for posts, so this one will be a little longer.  Titles for these posts could have been:  A Tale of Four Cities, Come Out of There You Little Booger, The Moose Is Not a Myth and That’s No Bull!, Grin and Bear It, and finally What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar???.

I think my last post came from East Glarcier Park, Montana.  That is a small town on the East side of Glacier National Park, thus the name.  The town is bisected by US Route 2.  Traveling west on Route 2 the park is on the right and all of the land on the left is part of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.  At the edge of the park are the typical little businesses you would expect such as restaurants, gift shops, a motel or two, a restored train station, etc.  Also there is the Glacier Park Lodge which was built 100 years ago and is absolutely beautiful.  Logs from the area were used as columns in the lobby.  These are not ordinary logs, but rather are about three and a half feet in diameter and about fifty feet long.  Joan read that they were about 400 years old when they were cut and there must be about fifty of them standing upright in the lobby.  The other side of the road where the Indian land is (I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with real cap pistols so I still call them Indians) is a sharp contrast to the park side.  Just about the only decently maintained building there is the Post Office.  The houses quite frankly were a disgrace.  I understand the residents being poor.  I do not understand a lifestyle where you open the front door and throw a garbage bag into the front yard.  And you keep doing this for years until there is only a small path through the accumulation to reach the door.  I do not understand putting every old junker car and truck you ever owned into the front yard.  I do not understand a town full of mangy stray dogs.  I could go on, but you get the picture.  When we left this town we drove north about fifteen miles through the Reservation and passed through Browning, Montana.  Browning is actually some type of capitol or headquarters for the Blackfeet nation.  Here there was no good side of town as in East Glacier.  The whole of Browning was like the south side of East Glacier.  From Browning we continued heading north for fifty miles or so still on Blackfeet land.  The few houses we passed were still very substandard.  This continued to be the case right up until we crossed the Canadian border into Alberta.  At that point it was like a switch had been flipped although I believe we were still on Indian lands.  Often times over the years when I have entered Canada I have been struck by what I would describe as the pristeen condition of the country side.  There seems to be less litter along the highways and no billboards.  (There are many things to love about Canada and a few to not like.)  The first town we came to in Alberta was Cardston.  We camped there and went into town for lunch.  Virtually all of the faces in town were obviously of Indian heritage.  But this town, unlike those south of the border, was spotless, and a refreshing change from what we had just left.

My Canadian friends who are reading this are now saying to themselves what’s not to like about Canada?.  Three things spring to my mind—hockey, cold winters, and not being able to transport my pistol through the country en route to Alaska.  And now I can add a fourth.  The city of Banff.  I detest little tourist trap towns.  Places like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in Tennessee or Jackson Hole in Wyoming.  Now I can add Banff to that list.  Terribly crowded, horrendous traffic, way too many shops selling home made candles and soap.  The one thing Banff has going is that it is in one of the most beautiful areas anywhere.  Which is of course why everyone was there.  

One of the things I have always liked about being “out west” is the dry air.  Joan keeps reminding me to drink plenty of fluids to stay hydrated.  Joan’s career was in healthcare.  She spent many years working as a microbiologist in a hospital lab.  That is a rather specialized field where she dealt with all of the disgusting things that come out of people, especially sick people.  When Mandy still lived at home with us, we three would sit down for the evening meal, and over dinner Joan would often start telling us about her day.  The conversation might turn toward how she smeared a stool sample on a piece of glass and looked at it under a microscope to see if it had worms.  Or perhaps how she examined a sputum sample. Finally Mandy and I had to make a rule that Mom could not talk about such stuff until after dinner!!  But for Joan old habits die hard.  A few days ago as I was eating my oatmeal with plumped up California golden raisins, Joan started describing how because of the low humidity she was getting these big old crusty boogers in her nose.  All of a sudden those raisins did not look so great to me.  Again, I digress.  Back to the journey.

From Banff we made a quick stop at Lake Louise.  This is perhaps the most beautiful spot I have ever been too.  Others must feel that way too because there is an old hotel on the lake where rooms go for $850 to $1,250 per night.  From Lake Louise we jumped on a road called the Icefields Parkway to the town of Jasper.   It is about 100 miles of the most beautiful scenery anywhere.  The only thing that detracted from it was that diesel fuel was about $8.00 a gallon and Wilda needed a big drink of it.  After Jasper the next stop was Dawson Creek, Alberta which is mile zero on the Alaskan Highway.  So after about a month on the road we were finally at the beginning of the road to Alaska.

On the four days that we drove the Alaska Highway the wildlife was in full view.  The first time we spotted a black bear we were braking and running for the camera.  Same thing the second time.  And the third.  Then for maybe the next 25 we began to just stop and look at them without taking a picture.  Then for the next 25 or so we began to just keep driving and say “there’s another bear”.  And after that we would just drive on and not even comment.  Kind of like driving along and seeing a crow picking at road kill.  

Many places along the highway there are moose crossing warnings.  We drove past these for three days without ever seeing a moose.  I was beginning to think that the Canadian government was playing a cruel hoax on us tourists.  But then we crested a hill and there was a moose cow and her new calf on the berm of the road.  We slowed and they trotted along ahead of us for maybe a half mile.  The calf only came up to mom’s belly and it would cut in under her between her front and rear legs as they moved along.  It reminded me of the scene at the beginning of Christmas Vacation where Chevy Chase drives the family station wagon in under the trailer of a log truck while going down the highway.  So I have named this particular moose calf Chevy.  We only saw one other moose cow in the 1,000 or so miles of the highway that we have covered so far.  We have yet to see a bull moose on this trip.

From Whitehorse, Yukon Territory we decided to get off the Alaska Highway and head south to Skagway.  This put us on the Klondike Highway.  While not quite as beautiful as the Icefields Parkway this road is still pretty spectacular.  When we finally crossed into Alaska on the Klondike we were thinking we needed to find a bar and toast ourselves for finally getting here.  But no bars were to be seen and I started asking Joan “What would you do for a Klondike bar?”.  She just rolls her eyes and frowns at me when I say stuff like that.  Mandy and I used to call it Mom’s look or just “the look’.

We plan to stay in Skagway for three days and then we will travel that same Klondike Highway back up to Whitehorse where we will again get on the Alaska Highway and travel it the rest of the way into the main part of Alaska.

One final note–some readers of these blog posts have commented that pictures would be nice.  I agree with that and we have taken a ton of pictures along the way.  However I have not had any way to download them from the camera to the iPad.  I am about to remedy that by having a connection shipped to me at our next Alaska town.  Since a picture is worth a thousand words hopefully my next post can be shortened.

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Joan made a new friend in Billings County North Dakota.  She always follows whatever rules are imposed on her and tries to be a good citizen.  However there are a couple of places where she sometimes goes astray.  Like many of us she will set her cruise control at 5MPH over the speed limit.  This usually works fine until the speed limit unexpectedly drops by 20MPH, and you don’t notice the sign.  In that case, all of a sudden you are going 25MPH over the speed limit.  When this happened to her, the new friend in the Billings County Sheriff’s Department explained how she should make a mandatory “contribution” to the well being of the citizenry of Billings County.  At first I was irritated by this, but as I thought about it I realized that it was a good opportunity for me to tease her about being an outlaw and a criminal—which I did relentlessly until she threatened me with battery (and even a big flashlight!).

As we left North Dakota and Joan’s new friend, we traveled I-94 West.  I’m not sure if it was actually in western North Dakota or eastern Montana, but soon we were passing through a town called Home On The Range.  Seriously!!  I was driving at the time (5MPH UNDER the speed limit) and as I looked around there was not a cloud in the sky.  And while it’s true that we were not in the town very long, in our time there I did not hear anyone mutter a discouraging word.  From I-94 we headed north to US Highway 2.  Route 2 is the northernmost federal highway in the USA.  It goes clear across Montana just a few miles below the Canadian border and its true that in Montana the sky really is bigger than other places.  Montana is aptly named the Big Sky state.

Route 2 took us to Glacier National Park in the northwest corner of Montana.  This was our second trip to Glacier, but this time we spent four days exploring it thoroughly.  At least as thoroughly as we could at this time of year.  Because of its high elevation and northern location some sections do not open until later in June.  But the snow capped mountains are beautiful right now.  We have been to about 100 national parks and monuments in our travels over the years.  Joan calls Glacier her favorite for natural beauty.  I am still partial to Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, but Glacier is right up there in my book too.  While exploring yesterday in the car we saw, and got a couple of nice pictures of, a bear.  It was brown, but not exceptionally large so we’re not sure if it was a grizzly or not.  And in one of the parking lots there were three mountain goats.  We had our Border Collie, Daisy, with us and she was all set to jump out and start herding them.  The other wild life that it is common to see both inside and outside of the park are wild horses.  They are everywhere, as are what we in West Virginia refer to as road apples.

The WildaBeast has a king size Sleep Number bed.  A Sleep Number bed is actually just a fancy air mattress.  It has a control for each side that causes air to be pumped into the mattress if you want it to be firmer.  And it releases air for a softer feel.  When we bought the motorhome the guy who did the walk through with us explained that if we drove the motorhome to higher elevations we needed to let some air out of the mattress or it could be damaged because the surrounding air pressure would drop and it could over-inflate.  We bought Wilda in Florida at sea level.  In the Dakotas we were camping at about 3,000 feet and in Glacier at about 4,800 feet.  Joan has been diligent about letting the air out of the mattress as we moved.  Now since I am always thinking of blog entries, I have thought several times about what a good story I could tell about our bed exploding right behind us as we drove through one of the high mountain passes in the Rockies.  But I guess it’s not to be.

I must have backed off of the teasing about the speeding ticket in time because we are still together.  And we will celebrate anniversary number 44 today, June 4, with a dinner somewhere in the park admiring the vistas.  

Tomorrow, its on to Canada with a stop planned at a duty free store at the border to feed another of our nasty habits.  What we’re after is what the Canadians called “forty ouncers” when I worked up there in the 70’s.  Now they’ve gone all metric and I’m not exactly fluent in that system, but I bet I will be soon, EH?

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