As you drive south on Highway 99 in central California Yosemite National Park is about 50 miles to the east just before you pass through Fresno.  Yosemite has entrances on both the west side of the park and on the south side.  Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks are about 50 miles to the east after you pass through Fresno.  We wanted to visit all three of these and Joan suggested that we camp north of Fresno, take the car to the west entrance to Yosemite, and then camp again south of Fresno and do the car trip to Sequoia and Kings Canyon.  It was my idea to set up camp only once south of Fresno, and visit all three parks from there.  I explained to Joan that this would save us the hassle of tearing down camp and setting up again, and by using the south entrance to Yosemite it would add only 15 to 20 minutes more to our trip into the park.  Because I’m really the boss of the family, plus the fact that Joan has great faith in my planning abilities we camped south of Fresno.

On the day of the trip to Yosemite we got a bright and early start, and we were expecting a ride to the park entrance of 50-60 minutes.  The park is huge and we thought it would take us all day to explore most of it by car.  Since we were going to be gone all day, and we were not expecting to do a lot of hiking we took our dog, Daisy, along with us.  Everything was fine until we got to within about 5 miles of the park entrance.  There the Highway Patrol had a road block set up due to a forest fire at the park edge.  They did not expect the road to open anytime soon, and directed us to go back a couple of miles and take an alternate route.  I expected that this would be a short detour to get us around the fire and back onto the south road into the park.  But as it turned out the detour was a road that took us all the way to western entrance to the park where Joan orginally wanted to enter.  Furthermore, it extended our trip from our planned maximum of one hour to almost three hours.  By the time we got there much of our day was shot.  And it turned out that the Highway Patrol was right because the south entrance road did not open again all day.  We ended up spending only about two hours exploring the park followed by another three hour drive back to the motorhome.

In spite of our troubles getting to and from Yosemite, and our shorter than expected stay, it was well worth visiting.  This was my third trip to the park and Joan’s second.  Unfortunately, we have never been there when the waterfalls are at their peak.  This happens in the spring or early summer and we have always been there in late summer or fall.  However, even without the added beauty of the very high waterfalls the scenery in the park is spectacular.  My favorite view is of the granite dome known as Half Dome.  It’s easy to see how they arrived at the name.

 

In the shadow of Half Dome are two other granite domes.  I’m sure they also have their own names, but I have not been able to determine what they are called.  So since this is MY blog and MY pictures I decided that I could name them MYSELF.  I tried to come up with some clever way to work in some reference to the female anatomy, but could not do so.  Therefore, I am just going to call these Sharon Domes in honor of my buxom friend in Kansas.

Sequioa and Kings Canyon National Parks are adjacent to each other, and therefore can be explored by car in a single day which is the way we did it.  Joan and I had been to both parks before, but never seem to tire of enjoying the majesty of the giant trees.  If you have never been to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains you have never seen Sequoia trees.  This is the only place in the whole wide world that they grow.  They are usually found at between 5,000 and 7,000 feet in elevation.  They are so big because they grow very fast and live a long life.  In fact the General Sherman tree is estimated to be 2,200 years old and it is still growing.  Every year this tree grows enough new wood to produce a 60 foot tall tree of usual size.  In general Sequoias can get to over 300 feet tall, live 3,200 years, and attain a 40 foot diameter at the base.  This longevity is made possible by chemicals in the wood and bark providing resistance to insects and fungus.  Further the thick bark (up to 31 inches thick) protects thenm from most fire.  Most of them die by actually toppling over since they have a fairly shallow root system.

 

Not only do the Sequoias live a long time, but they also last a long time if toppled over.  Just beside this fallen tree that Joan is looking into I saw a placque with a photo of some people posing in front of this same downed tree that was taken in 1900.  And even though the photo was 114 years old the tree looked almost exactly as it looks today.

 

 

Joan and I both been to Kings Canyon previously, but had only visited it because it was next to Sequoia.  Most people have heard of the Sequoias and want to see them, so they visit Sequoia and ignore Kings Canyon.   But this time we took the time to actually drive down into the canyon.  As a result Joan has a new favorite national park.  This canyon is every bit as beautiful as the scenery in Yosemite and the actual canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon.  And what most people fail to realize when pondering a visit to the area is that they can also actually see very impressive Sequoia trees in Kings Canyon.  In fact two of the above photos of the Sequoias were taken in Kings Canyon, and I thought the more impressive groves of trees were in Kings Canyon.  The photo below of the actual canyon simply does not do it any justice.

 

From the Fresno area we finally turned eastward and eventually entered the Mojave Desert.  Call me crazy (Joan does all the time!) but I just love the desert.  Most people say it is too brown, too dry, too hot, etc, but I always enjoy my time there. However, I will admit that I always have enjoyed it from the air conditioned comfort of my vehicle with plenty of drinks handy.  Driving east with an overnight stay in Needles, California and then on to Williams, Arizona really made me feel as though it signaled the beginning of the end of our journey.  However, just a few miles north of Williams is this little hole in the ground that we wanted to revisit.  Most people know it as the Grand Canyon.  I think this is our fourth trip to Grand Canyon National Park and it never fails to awe.  Probably lots of you have been to Grand Canyon, and you have your own memories of it, but I will include a couple of photos anyway.  Unfortunately because of the wildfires in California it was not the clearest of days when we were there.

 

As we drive in the motorhome we both get caught up in our own thoughts along the way.  A lot of my thinking as I drive involves what I am going to say in this blog about what I am seeing at the moment.  At the beginning of our drive on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon I saw an elk crossing warning sign.  And I had the following all worked out in my mind to write in this blog:  “We have now driven the motorhome over 10,000 miles on this trip and we have driven the car at least 1,000 miles more.  In that 11,000 miles we have seen dozens if not hundreds of warning signs for elk crossings.  But we have not yet seen a single elk.  Its not that we have never seen elk before.  A few years ago we stayed overnight in Estes Park, Colorado and the elk were so thick in town that they were a real nuisance.  All of the residents had their trees and shrubs protected with chicken wire, and the bugling was so loud at night that we could not sleep.  But on this trip we have been in elk country for months and Grand Canyon is probably the very last likely spot that we could actually encounter an elk before we get back home in Florida.”  Okay, that’s what I was going to write, but now I’m not.  And here’s the reason.

Just as we were leaving the national park we spotted this puny little guy (or girl) beside the road.  No rack, it wouldn’t even look up at us for a photo op, and it ruined my opportunity to whine about not seeing any elk.

From Williams and the Grand Canyon we moved just a few miles south to Camp Verde, Arizona, and spent two days visiting our friend Edna.  She informed me that she is not actually 150 years old as I wrote in the previous post, but just had her 88th birthday.  While in Camp Verde we also visited the Montezuma’s Castle National Monument and Tuzigoot National Monument (all of the weird names for places don’t come from Washington State).  These are both ancient Indian ruins and the castle is especially well preserved and was built right into the side of a cliff.

 

 

At Tuzigoot I could not resist buying myself a new hat to go with my newly longer and bushier beard.  I like my new look for places with names such as Deadwood or Tombstone. Or even El Paso.  It probably is not the best look for the beach, but we’ll see.

 

 From Camp Verde we moved on to Tucson, Arizona which is where I am writing this from.  Tucson is one of my favorite little cities.  I mentioned earlier how much I like the desert and Tucson lies right in the Sonoran Desert.  We are spending eight nights in Tucson and getting a few minor repairs done on little problems that have cropped up after living in the motorhome for four months.  Just outside of the city we have visited the eastern and western sections of Saguaro National Park.  It’s not the best time of year to catch the cactus in bloom, but the variety of cacti all in one place make it interesting and there are a few that are presently in bloom such as the Barrel Cactus.

You never know what kind of cactus you might spot in the area.  For instance just outside of the visitor center for the park I spotted this perfect example of the non-prickly common fire plug cactus.  Note the unusual coloring of this example though.

 

I’m especially fond of the Saguaro.  They do not live as long as the Sequoias, but still the mature Saguaro can be 250 years old.  And in the national park here they are everywhere.

 

 

If you have ever wondered why a few of the Saguaro have a downturned arm such as the one in the above photo, it is my understanding that this means that at some point in their long lives they have been exposed to a freeze.  Since I’ve always been here in the summer I don’t think of it being cold and freezing in Tucson, but I guess it does happen.  

Another phenomenon that appeals to me about the Tucson area is the varied climate around the city.  Yesterday it was 100 degrees in the city which sits in a valley.  Just forty miles outside of town we drove up to Mount Lemmon, a popular winter skiing area.  Mount Lemmon sits at 8,000 feet elevation.  As you drive out of the city you drive through a virtual forest of Saguaro until you reach about 4,000 feet.  At that point the Saguaro disappear and are replaced by high desert plants such as Creosote bushes.  Then as you continue to climb toward 8,000 feet you enter a pine forest and you would think you are now in a northern locale.  Yesterday when we reached the summit it was 63 degrees.  As we drove back down the mountain the temperature climbed steadily, but it was no longer in the triple digits upon arrival in the valley.  It had dropped to a more reasonable 98 degrees.  Much better!!

 

From Tucson I am expecting us to pretty much make a beeline to Houston.  Joan thought we would be there for the August 6 first birthday of the twin grandbabies, Audrey and Andrew.  Obviously, we did not make that! We are getting anxious to see them.  For my Florida friends who were concerned about Audrey’s eating problems in her earlier months, be advised that she is now doing fine.  She and Andrew are both walking now.

The truth is that the State of Washington has some very spectacular scenery.  And Oregon’s not so bad either.  Today marks two weeks since we re-entered the lower 48 and we have been mostly just kicking around in those two states.  Not making much progress so far on our march back to Florida.  However, we did cross into California yesterday and are now in Hat Creek, California.  But before I get into that let me tell you about the big cat that I saw in British Columbia and forgot to mention in my previous post.

Somewhere near Jackass Mountain (love that name!) we were following another motorhome down the highway and a huge cat crossed the road in front of the other motorhome.  So it was a fleeting glimpse of the cat for me and Joan did not see it at all.  But it looked to be slightly bigger than our Border Collie, Daisy and she is sixty pounds.  My subsequent research tells me that there are only three varieties of wild cats in BC.  Bobcats, Cougars and Lynx.  This cat appeared to be black and had a long tail.  So that ruled out the Bobcat.  And from what I have been able to read only the Lynx sometimes is dark enough in color that it appears to be black.  So I’m guessing that is what I saw.

When we crossed into Washington from BC we chose Bellingham as our first base of operations.  This is a little city about fifty miles north of Seattle.  I expected it to be a sleepy little place, but was wrong.  I don’t know the exact demographics of the Seattle area, but I suspect it is a very young population.  And while we were there it seemed that everyone was headed out in their SUV’s and minivans with the “Baby on Board” signs.  Probably those soccer moms dropping the kids off, but in any event the place was just way too busy for us.  Adding to the mayhem in the area was the fact that it also was a long weekend for British Columbia.  Every campground was full and we ended up dry camping in the parking lot of a casino for the long weekend.  Dry camping means that we had no electric, water or sewer hookups.  That’s not as bad as it sounds because we have water and sewer storage on board and we can operate on generator and/or battery power for quite a while.  But three days in the parking lot was plenty for us.

We thought Bellingham would give us easy access for a car trip to North Cascades National Park.  It was about 85 miles to the east of us.  The west side of the park is very nice with some beautiful mountain vistas.  This is where we entered and probably since we had just toured all around gorgeous Alaska and driven down through spectacular BC we were not quite as taken with the park as we would otherwise have been.  But we did read that the most beautiful part of the park was another 60 miles east.  Since we had already planned on “only” a 170 mile drive we did not want to add another 120 miles to our day trip.  We chose to save that part of the park for a future trip out this way.

From Bellingham we drove down through Seattle and Tacoma and camped in another casino.  However, this one had an actual campground with full hookups for us and it gave us access to Olympic National Park.  We did this park again by car and again ran short on time and only got to see the eastern and northern sides of the park.  The road is essentially a loop around the outside of the park with periodic roads going into the park interior.  The park is on a peninsula that juts up between the Pacific Ocean and Puget Sound.  The parts we saw were fantastic and I’m betting the ocean side on the west would be just as great.  The views from Hurricane Ridge which we drove into on the north side were well worth the trip.

 

Driving back from Olympic NP we made a fascinating discovery.  Have you ever wondered where fence posts come from?  I mean its not like they grow on trees you know.  But right here alongside the road in  western Washington we found this fence post farm.  I never knew they grew them in salt water.

 

Joan and I have driven around on the Washington and Oregon coastline on two previous trips out here.  The Pacific Coast Highway is a beautiful drive from Seattle all the way down through California, but when heading south on that road you encounter many places where it seems you are driving right on the edge of a 300 foot cliff above the ocean.  That sometimes makes me uneasy in the car, so I had real reservations about making the drive in the motorhome.  Therefore, we decided to take a more inland route south.  This also afforded us the opportunity to visit Mount Ranier National Park one day and then Mount Saint Helens the next day.  Both are old volcanoes and are spectacular, but in totally different ways.  Mount Ranier because of the natural beauty and Mount Saint Helens because of the devastation that is still so apparent almost 35 years after it last exploded.

On the way up toward the top of Mount Ranier we stopped to do a hike to a grove of huge trees called Grove of the Patriarchs.  Mount Ranier and the other tall peaks in the area trap much of the moisture coming off of the Pacific and don’t allow it to go further east.  This makes for rain forest-like conditions in places and is evidently very beneficial for growing huge trees.  These trees that we hiked to I think are the biggest trees I have ever seen that are not Redwoods or Sequoias.  The one on the left is a Douglas Fir and the right one is a Cedar tree.  These were just two examples of several very very large trees here.

I could not have said for sure what kind of trees those were, had I not read a placque about them.  I’m sharp enough to know there is a huge variety out here of what I generally call ‘”pine trees”.  This is where it would be nice to have my friend Doug, the retired Saluki forestry professor, along on the trip to keep me straight.  I can usually pick out tamarack, hemlock and cedar.  Otherwise if it has needles where leaves would normally be I call it a pine tree.   Having said that I should add that I can also identify a Christmas tree (the balls and lights do it for me).

Speaking of hikes, Joan likes to make me stop frequently and head off on some path that she has read about.  I figured we would be doing a lot of this in Alaska.  And since the tallest peak in North America is there I thought we might be hiking at high elevations.  I bought an app for my phone to tell me the elevation so I would have an idea of how winded I might get.  Its a cool app because it gives not only the elevation, but also the latitude and longitude and the boiling point of water at that elevation.  Now that last feature is extremely useful, because I’m often overcome on these walks with the urge to gather sticks, build a fire and boil some water.  So its very convenient to know how long this will take.

For miles around Mt St Helens the devastation is just unbelievable.  Almost every mountainside facing the site of the explosion is covered with either still standing dead trees or the ground is covered with huge logs all laying facing the same direction as if swept over by some huge hand.  The shot below was taken at a distance of about fifteen miles from the mountain in the background and the biggest trees are dead.  One very large lake in the area is almost half covered with floating logs from the explosion.  All of the grey area on the water in the lake photo below is dead logs floating on the water.   It is interesting that in the areas where the dead trees are still standing the undergrowth on the ground is thriving as if nothing had ever happened.  The reason for this is that the actual explosion took place on May 1, 1980 and at that time there was still eight feet of snow on the ground.  The searing heat from the blast immediately killed the tall trees, but the snow blanket protected everything underneath.

 

From our campsite at the base of Ranier we drove east through White Pass before turning south into Oregon.  Within about fifty miles on this road we had passed from the rain forest conditions to a countryside around Yakima that very much resembled what I would expect to see in Arizona, New Mexico or West Texas.  Sage brush, tumbleweeds, etc.

Before we leave Washington I want to comment on some of the unusual names we ran across.  In the Olympic peninsula we saw the towns of Duckabush and Dosewallips.  And then there are the towns who use the same word twice–Hamma Hamma and Wis Wis.  Its as if you didn’t hear it the first time so we’ll repeat it.  And although not a town, I saw a road called Kitchen Dick Road.  I’ll not even speculate on where that came from.  Oh, and speaking of two word towns, there is Walla Walla.  There seems to be a movement among the Walla Wallans to claim that the onion was invented there.  Sweet onions are everywhere there, but I thought it was settled history that the onion was actually invented on the island of Bermuda by Thomas Edison while he was on vacation there.  He was fresh off of having invented the light bulb, thus the similarity in the shape of the onion and the light bulb.  Then I believe he sold the manufacturing rights to Henry Ford and Henry automated the process at his plant in Vidalia, Georgia. Washington is better known for its production of apples and to a lesser extent cherries.  And we all know it was just south of here that Steve Jobs invented the Apple.

From Washington we crossed over the Columbia River and headed down through the center of Oregon eventually landing near Crater Lake National Park.  Crater Lake is a little out of the way, but very much worth the trip.  It is the deepest lake in the USA at over 1,900 feet deep.  No matter how tall you are that’s pretty deep.  It also holds the record for water clarity.  Joan read that normally you can see an object down over forty feet in the water, but when conditions are just right you can see down over eighty feet.  The reason that the water is so clear is that no streams or rivers drain into the lake.  All of the water in it is from either rain or snow melt.  The road that loops all the way around the rim is about 35 miles long.  We drove about 32 miles of that and then because of construction repairs the road was closed, necessitating a 32 mile trip back over what we had just traveled.  But the scenery along the drive was well worth seeing twice.  Unfortunately we had an overcast sky that day and the photo ops were not what we had hoped for.  The island in the lake is the top of a volcano and is known as Wizard Island because it supposedly resembles the top of a wizard’s hat.

 

This smaller island is further around the rim of the lake and is known as Phantom Ship.  Also note the multi-colored rock on the left side of the picture.  The blue water in the lake is not a trick of the camera, but rather really is a very vivid blue.

Also at Crater Lake are these natural features known as the Pinnacles.  They were formed from volcanic gases bubbling up through volcanic ash and cementing the ash into solid rock.  Some are hollow in the middle where the gases were.

 

What brought us to this area of Northern California is another Volcanic National Park, Lassen.  We hesitated to come to this area because it is the immediate area where the California wild fires have been raging.  But the campground operator assured us that the fires were out and the area was now green.  And that was true as long as you have a limited view of what “area” means.   To get here we drove through miles of burned out forest and then about a mile from the campground the fire area did end.  

 

 

But Lassen National Park itself was well worth the trip.  Lassen Peak last erupted in 1915 and along the road through the park you can still see mudpots and fumaroles bubbling up steam and sulphur gases much like are in evidence in Yellowstone.  The churning and bubbling does not show up real well in the photo below, but it is going on and the smell is a very strong rotten egg odor.   In my younger days of frequenting the local taverns, shooting pool with my buddies Dave, Fred and Phil, drinking beer and eating pickled eggs from a jar on the bar, I could have been described as somewhat of a fumarole myself I guess.

Because of the high elevation (8,500 feet) there is a very nice view of Lake Shasta about fifty miles distant.  Note the haze in the air though lingering from the fires.  This is not from high humidity, but rather is smoke.

 

I have an old friend, Edna Simpson.  I say OLD because Edna has to be approaching her 150th birthday by now.  But she still lives in her own home by herself, and she is still sharp as a tack and sends me lots of good jokes and stories.   After my previous blog post Edna took the time to write to me, and let me know that Les Moore (who was shot six times with a 44) is actually buried in the state of Arizona where Edna lives, not in western Kansas as I had thought.  I stand corrected, Edna! Thanks.

I am writing this from Bellingham, Washington.  The trip here from Tok, Alaska was long, but pretty much uneventful.  Actually, unless you have driven to Alaska, I don’t see how you could really have any idea of how very very far away from the rest of the USA that Alaska is.  We left Tok on Sunday and arrived in the state of Washington on Friday.  Friday was a somewhat shorter driving day than the others in which we spent eight to ten hours on the road each day.

We stopped in Clinton, British Columbia for our last night in Canada.  I hesitated to spend a night in a town called Clinton, but decided it probably was in no way related to Billary (or even the little Clinton) so we went for it.  And in the small world category it turned out that the guy running the campground grew up in Mouth of Seneca, West Virginia which is right down the road from where I grew up in Elkins, West Virginia.

In that five days of driving the only cities of any size that we encountered were Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, and  Prince George, British Columbia.  Prince George is actually named after my friend George Griffith because he is such a prince of a guy.  And the most interesting landmark that we came across was Jackass Mountain Summit, which is also named in honor of my friend George Griffith because…………………………..

 

As I wrote the previous posts to this blog from Alaska I had many observations and random thoughts on the Alaska portion of the journey that I was unable to work in anywhere.  So, the following will be a kind of synopsis of those.

People have asked Joan and me how we stand spending so much time together in the relatively small area of the motorhome.    I drive and she reads/studies.  And we have lively discussions at times.  It used to be that when we were going to take a long car trip we would contact AAA to map a suggested route for us and prepare a “Triptik”, which is a summary of interesting features to be encountered along the way.  As I was driving Joan would read to me some interesting tidbit of information about whatever it may be that we were seeing along the road at that point in the trip.  For this Alaska trip we did not use AAA, but we did purchase The Milepost.  That is a book about an inch and a half thick that describes in great detail every possible thing that you will see at each mile along the road to Alaska.  It makes no difference which road you might take.  The Milepost has them all covered.  It is like the mother of all Triptiks!   And I think Joan has read it from cover to cover.  She is a wealth of information.

At some point along the way Joan explained to me why the Alaska Highway was constructed.  It was built in the early 1940’s during WWII because we were worried about the Japanese invading Alaska.  She added that we were concerned because Alaska is so close to Japan.  Prior to her saying that I had never thought of Alaska and Japan as being close to each other. But somewhere in Alaska I saw one of those signposts with distances to various places and it indicated that Tokyo was 3,500 miles away and Miami was 5,500 miles away.

I noted in a previous post how the long summer days in Alaska are conducive to growing fruits and vegetables.  The long days evidently are ideal for wildflowers as well.  The state is covered with them.  Especially two varieties, Fireweed and Cowslips.  They are everywhere.  Cowslips remind me of a flower that we had back east in PA and WV known as Queen Anne’s Lace except Cowslips are bigger.  Fireweed is a purple cylindrical shaped flower that seems to be the very first thing to grow back after a forest fire.  And we went through many vast areas that had burned.

 

 

I mentioned our lively discussions.  Joan has this exceptional way of saying certain words.  Or maybe its me that has the exceptional pronunciation.  Where I would say FIREweed she would say fireWEED.  Or we can kill some time by discussing if its “cow’s lips” or if “cow slips” is correct.  I guess this is the kind of thing you talk about after traveling around together for 45 years and you get tired of listening to Willie’s Road House on Sirius Radio.

Fairbanks was as far north as we went in Alaska, so I tend to think of that as being in the northern part of the state.  We chose to stop our northward trek there because that’s essentially as far as the paved road goes.  But in reality Fairbanks is not really that far north in Alaska.  I think the road actually goes another 800-900 miles north from there.  But Fairbanks is still up there.  It sits at about the 65th parallel or 65 degrees north.  For perspective Seattle is only at about 48 degrees north, which means that Fairbanks is over 1,200 miles farther north than Seattle.  Where I live in Ponce Inlet, Florida is only at 29 degrees north.  So Fairbanks is 2,500 miles farther north.  No wonder it was only 37 degrees Fahrenheit and raining when we got there in late June.  

So where the paved road ends going north out of Fairbanks has to be the northernmost paved road in the USA.  When we drove down to Homer, Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula Joan’s research told us that just outside of Homer we were driving on the westernmost continuous highway in North America.  There are roads that are more western out in Nome and the island portions of Alaska, but you cannot drive to them and must be ferried there so they are not continuous.

I’ve seen Cottonwood trees before in the southwest and midwest.  But I never knew why they were called Cottonwood.  Just never had thought about it.  But when we drove into Fairbanks it was cold and wet enough that I actually considered that it might snow.  And as we approaached our campground I was convinced that it was indeed snowing.  The white stuff was everywhere in the air.  But I soon learned that the female Cottonwood trees were going to seed and it did look just like a snow storm.  I guess the male trees don’t make any messes.  Unlike in our house (or so I’m frequently told!).

 

 

When we first started talking back in Florida about a trip to Alaska, Joan was hopeful that we would see the Northern Lights.  We lived in southern Ontario for two years and have been back in Ontario several times on camping trips.  And even though it is possible to see them where we were, neither of us have ever had the pleasure.  But we soon learned that in Alaska we were going to be there at the wrong time because of the long days.  So while in Anchorage Joan drug me to a movie about the northern lights.  And that was after having a 10% alcohol beer and a heavy fish and chips lunch at Humpy’s across the street from the theater.  It was a forty minute movie that was just pictures of the lights with soft music playing.  After five minutes I had had enough of that, and I was not the only one in the theatre who had to fight to stay awake.  Heads were bobbing everywhere around me.

Oftentimes when we travel to a new area that we like, we think of buying property there.  Maybe not for full time living, but as a second or seasonal home.  In Kennecott I got caught up in this thinking and could not resist buying a house.  It’s a bit of a fixer upper, but I used my expertly honed negotiating skills to get a fantastic price and talked them in to throwing in a really nice pick up truck.

 

I think I have previously described how bad the 60 mile long dirt road to Kennecott was.  I’m not very good about washing cars.  I had a Toyota Tundra pickup that I bought in 2002 when we were renovating our West Virginia farmhouse.  It was never washed, not even once, until 2008 when I decided to trade it.  I stopped just before the car dealership and washed off the six years of dirt.  That worked okay in WV, but even I had to break down and wash our gray car after driving it to Kennecott and back.  Amazing how dirty a car can get on 130 miles of dirt road.

 

 

The area where I am sitting now in Washington is noted for its coffee.  After all, this is where Starbucks came from and there is also something called Seattle’s Best.  But nowhere that we have been have we seen coffee shops like we saw in Alaska.  Starbucks is probably up there in the cities, but I didn’t see any.  What I did see plenty of are little Espresso and Latte shops. We drove past dozens of them every day that we moved.  Most were tiny tiny operations that looked like someone had taken a four foot by eight foot storage shed, set it up in a gravel parking lot or just beside the road, hand painted a sign and started selling coffee out of the shed.  I guess its a cheap operation to start up, so no barrier to entry into the business.  And if the business fails you have a good shed for the snow blower come winter.  Assuming that they are year-round operations my theory is that the Alaskans need to drink that stuff to stay warm and awake during that long, cold and dark winter.

In addition to an inordinate number of espresso shops Alaska also has lots of Russian Orthodox churches, most with a cemetary all around it.  And some of the cemetaries of native Athabascans influenced by the Russians frequently have what they call “spirit houses” covering the actual gravesite.  These were built by family members to house the spirit of the deceased rather than have them reside in the heavens.  The Russian influence from years past too probably explains the huge number of those little Russian dolls that fit inside each other that are found in so many gift shops throughout the state.

 

 

 

With so many snow covered mountains waterfalls are in abundance in Alaska.  At first we were snapping pictures of every little stream we saw falling down a mountain.  But later we became more discriminating.  Two of my favorites were just outside of Valdez—Bridal Veil Falls, and Horse Tail Falls.  As usual the photos do not do them justice.

 

The most unique site we came across was also just outside of Valdez.  The end of a glacier hanging on the mountain actually had a river running through it to form an ice cave.

 

 

I guess maybe I’m strange, but I do enjoy looking at old cemetaries.  Just a short walk out of downtown Skagway is an interesting cemetary housing mostly the graves of those who died in the late 1890’s trying to get up the pass through the mountains to stake a claim in the Klondike Gold Rush.  That is where I saw the grave of Lilly White.  I have no idea who old Lilly was, but I liked the name.  And the grave reminded me of one I saw somewhere in western Kansas (I think) several years ago.  The epitaph there was “Here Lies Les Moore.  Shot Six Times With a 44.  No Less, No More.”

 

My biggest regret on the trip was that I did not go out on a fishing charter for halibut.  I waited until our last city, Valdez, to look into it, and I could not find one shorter than 12 hours.  I can’t do anything for 12 hours these days.  But I almost went anyway because I was afraid if I didn’t go Joan would drag me into another museum.  Every little town has one, and Valdez actually had two.  They’re mostly all the same, and like with the black bears along the road, after 50 or so I’d seen enough arrowheads, Indian headdresses and casts of grizzly bear footprints to do me.  But Joan let me off the hook, and went to both museums by herself.

And finally, in the category of really cool names—we saw a gift shop in Homer, Alaska that was called Homer Sapiens.  We didn’t go in, so we don’t know what they were selling, but with a name like that it had to be good stuff.