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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Driving through eastern Nebraska on Interstate 80 gave me planty of time to think. The scenery is less than spectacular unless you are into endless cornfields. It was my first time being in that part of Nebraska and its easy to see why the U of Nebraska chose the Cornhusker as their mascot. On my previous travels into the state we had entered from the western side. Our daughter, Mandy, was of college age and had transferred to the U of Wyoming to finish her engineering degree. Joan and I had just retired and moved to the farm in West Virginia and decided to go out and visit her. I made the mistake of suggesting a trip over to Sydney, Nebraska to visit the original Cabela’s store. Never turn two “outdoorsy” types like my wife and daughter loose with a credit card in a Cabela’s!!!

On this same visit with Mandy in Laramie we picked her up at her dorm on Saturday morning to go to breakfast. It was the fall of the year and while in the restaraunt Joan noticed a flier advertising flu shots. It was supposed to be a bad year for the flu so we all three decided to go get the shot. I mean what better way to spend part of your vacation! We asked the waitress for directions to the place and she sent us to a small complex of buildings that was actually located in the fairgrounds. Surprisingly for us when we drove in there was a somewhat long line of people ahead of us. But we really wanted the shot and had nothing else scheduled so we joined the line. I remember that as we stood there and chatted I noticed that many of the others in line were rather shabbily dressed. Dusty cowboy boots run down at the heel, frayed jeans, flannel shirts with maybe an elbow protruding. But I figured that these were just hardworking ranch hands who had just finished the morning chores with the horses and cows, and, like me, were interested in avoiding getting sick with the flu. Finally we reached the head of the line and the people at the table started asking us what kind of cheese we wanted, yellow American or white American, and did we prefer smooth or crunchy peanut butter. When I explained that we did not want any of that stuff, but just our flu shots they told me we were in the wrong line. This was the Department of Welfare giving away free cheese, and we wanted the Health Department next door. So we hung our heads and headed next door, embarassed but at least the line was a lot shorter.

Eastern South Dakota was much like eastern Nebraska, but western South Dakota offers much in the way of unique and spectacular scenery as does western North Dakota. In South Dakota we visited Badlands National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument and Mt Rushmore National Monument. We also visited the Minuteman Missle National Monument which tells a great story of the Cold War period. While not a national park or national monument the Crazy Horse monument is a private endeavor that has turned down federal funding on several occasions to remain independent. Custer State Park near Custer, SD is certainly worth a visit. While there we saw not only the natural beauty of the terrain, but wild buffalo, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and praire dogs all in their natural habitat.

After leaving South Dakota our plan was to go into northeastern Wyoming to see Devil’s Tower National Monument. However, that did not work out, and we ended up on the road to North Dakota. Our objective there was to visit both the North and South units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and we accomplished that today. Just like Custer State Park in South Dakota, both units of Theodore Roosevelt NP are full of buffalo.

Finally, the trip up through Nebraska, South Dakota and into North Dakota was a minor irritation due to the highways. For reasons I would never understand the engineers have evidently decided to put an expansion joint in the road every 50 to 75 feet. This was essentially true on all of the roads in the three states except the interstate highways. The pavement on each side of the joint tends to settle, leaving a bump at each joint. Driving either the WildaBeast or the car on these roads makes for a bumpy ride. Wilda is full of stuff like pots and pans that rattle at each bump. I believe that when Teddy Roosevelt first came to this area he must have followed the same route that we have followed on these roads. My theory is that this is the reason that he and his gang were referred to as the Rough Riders.

Now its on to Montana and a long haul all the way across the Big Sky state to reach Glacier National Park before we finally head into Canada.

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After several days of delays in Houston waiting first for the refrigerator to be fixed and then for me to recover from a stomach bug that my daughter graciously shared with me we headed north.  But one final delay near Houston was required and that was to get the Lovebugs washed off of poor Wilda.  I had never heard of lovebugs until I moved to Florida, so for you other northerners I’ll try to explain.  Lovebugs remind me of lightning bugs or fireflies but without the light.  During the act of reproduction (or so I’m told) they get stuck together like dogs, but still manage to fly around that way.  My theory is that they prefer to have sex at an elevation of roughly three to twelve feet in the air and always over a major highway.  A couple of times each year swarms of them will be airborne and it is amazing how many of them can accumulate on a 900 mile drive at 65 miles per hour on that roughly 9 X 12′ rectangle that is Wilda’s front end.  And even the uncoupled few that get hit always seem to have a satisfied smile on their faces.  But I digress—back to the journey.

The particular bay of the truck wash that I pulled into was manned by a couple of very nice good ole Texas boys.  As they worked with the brushes and pressure sprayers, and I watched, we chatted.  They explained that they were brothers and I could certainly see the resemblance.  I also noticed that they seemed to have about three teeth between the two of them.  But Wilda came out spotless and we were ready to move on.

With the late start out of Houston we just made it to the first exit on the interstate in Oklahoma and stayed in a casino affiliated campground operated by the Chickasaw Indian Nation.  A very nice facility and they said since we had never been there before our first night was free.  I am really fond of free.  Usually in that situation we would drop a roll of quarters in the  casino slots and have dinner in the casino.  But this night we were both tired and decided to dine at “home” on my favorite health food, Spam sandwiches.

We passed through the rest of Oklahoma without incident and spent the next night near Wichita, Kansas.  During the night a southwest wind kicked up and in Kansas there’s not much besides cows and wheat-fields to stop the wind.  It continued to blow at about 35 miles per hour the next day as we drove northeast to Kansas City with even higher gusts.  Driving the WildaBeast with winds of that force hitting the side is a harrowing experience and a ton of work to keep her on the road.  We were glad it was a short ride that day to stop and see our old friends from West Virginia who now live in KC.  However, while visiting them we discovered that the refrigerator was still not working properly.  This repair entailed another delay of two more days.

This morning we finally hit the road and passed out of Kansas and into Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska in short order.  With no offense to family and friends we now feel that after being away from home for over two weeks the real Alaska journey has now begun.  No more visiting.  We are heading for the Dakotas.  Stops are planned in The Badlands, Black Hills, Mt Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and anything else we see along the way that catches our fancy.

Joan and I have always enjoyed traveling.  However, unlike many of our friends we really do prefer driving to other modes of transportation.  It gives us the freedom to follow whatever schedule we choose and to make whatever detours appeal to us as we see things that sound interesting along the way.  So, with that in mind, last year we bought a motorhome.  We have always enjoyed camping, but did it in tents often carried several miles in a backpack to achieve that “true outdoor experience”.  Many many times when we were in our 20’s, 30’s and 40’s we have made fun of the old white haired geezers driving these behemoths and questioned why they would even bother to leave home in such a contraption.  But now in our 60’s the idea of sleeping on the ground, crawling out of a sleeping bag and going outside to find someplace to pee in the middle of the night just does not hold the appeal for the old bodies any longer.  I guess we’ve gotten soft (and definitely old).

After talking endlessly it seems about driving to Alaska in the motorhome (nicknamed WildaBeast or just Wilda for short) we finally departed from Ponce Inlet on May 6.  We have nine month old twin grandchildren in Houston, Texas and wanted to get one more dose of them before really leaving for the summer long journey, so that was our first destination.  As we pulled out all of my tennis playing friends were out on the courts of our condo complex for the usual Tue/Thur/Sat mixed doubles and gave us a rousing sendoff with a group wave of their racquets.  This was the highlight of the first day and things went downhill from there.  Shortly into the drive the refrigerator started beeping and flashing a message that it was not cooling.  We moved the few items into the little auxiliary cooler and kept on trucking.  The end of the first day found us near Pensacola, Florida and tired.  It also found us in a campground where we discovered after getting all set up for the night that the electricity in the campground was not working.  We also discovered that that little cooler worked a lot better than we expected since everything inside was now frozen solid.  If you have not experienced frozen hard boiled eggs I do not recommend them.  Not really wanting to move on this late in the day we made the best of it that night with our generator power.  Days two and three were rather uneventful, except that at the end of day three upon arrival at our daughter’s family’s home in Houston our towed car battery was DOA.  Ford has since replaced that with a new one and Wilda has headed for the refrigerator repair shop.  The visit to Houston was just to be for a few days, but evidently parts for motorhome refrigerators are not so readily available as home refrigerator parts.  So, already that need for a flexible schedule has kicked in.  And while we are chomping at the bit to get back on the road, there could be worse things than spending a little extra time with the grandbabies.