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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