The Wrapup........

We did it; we drove to Alaska, and back. It was a fabulous trip and we enjoyed almost every minute. There were a couple of minutes, Buckshot Betty’s rooms come to mind, when we weren’t absolutely knee-deep in enjoyment….but those were the exceptions.

The trip was a long one, over 10,000 miles, and some 57 days, and expensive. Kate kept good books, and the cost ran into five figures, including gas, lodging and meals, all of which were at least 25% more than what we’d expect to pay here in the lower 48. We paid as much as $5.25 per gallon for gasoline in a couple of places, for example….but that price was still preferable to walking and pushing the car, so we paid it with a smile.

Our recently acquired Toyota Highlander performed handsomely, even though it was fully packed, including an electric refrigerator, which was the only reason we could have a meal on the road in numerous cases. We had some bad roads…………there was a stretch from  the Alaska/Yukon border south to White River, some75 miles, that was all gravel, all the time. And even when the roads were theoretically paved, there are only two seasons in the far north: Winter, and Construction. What I mean by that is that we saw lots and lots and lots of road repair, both in Alaska and in Canada. However, I have to add that in general, the roads were perfectly reasonable, not bad at all…..although there was one back road in Yellowstone National Park that was scary.

Kate had insisted that we buy the newer car (It is a 2010.) before the trip, and while I want to go on record that I believe that good old “Ol’ Gold”, our venerable 2003 Highlander with some 235 K miles on it would have made the trip without a murmur, I have to say that the bells and whistles on “Big Black” made the trip more comfortable and pleasant than it might have otherwise been.  We enjoyed the high end sound system and the navigation features-although Kate still relied heavily on her trusty Garmin navigator. I was pleased that the sound system would handle MP3 CDs. I made up 20 or 30 of them with music we liked and hundreds of old-time radio shows, so we seldom got bored with the entertainment, even when we were far enough north that the satellite radio no longer worked. That happened somewhere around Seward, Alaska while we were headed north, and it didn’t work reliably again until just before we entered Montana when traveling south again. The all-wheel drive on BB made a significant difference in the handling of the car, and the ability to hand shift into and out of the lower range gears was invaluable in dealing with some of the extraordinary grades, both up and down, encountered on the trip.

The trip was truly an once-in-a-lifetime thrill for us. I could go on at length about the scenery, the breath-taking vistas, and the thrill of a cold wind off of a glacier, the antics of a raft of sea otters feeding on sea life. Two things come to mind: One is that the air in Alaska and the Yukon Territory is so extraordinarily clear. It made things miles and miles away seem to be in high-definition. I’ve never seen anything like it, even out in the western US where the air is more clear than most places. The other thing is that there were so very few people anywhere, once you left Anchorage behind. About half of the 735,000 people in the state of Alaska live in Anchorage. That means that folks are pretty thin in the rest of the state. The Yukon Territory is even more lightly populated than Alaska. There are about 35,000 folks there, and the territory is larger than several US states combined. It’s lonesome up north, for sure.

I want to make a couple of observations about the folks up there, whether Alaskan or Canadian. The first thing is that they looked like they lived on a frontier. Most of them looked overfed and under groomed. Many looked as though they’d benefit from a long soak and a good scrub. The men were mostly very hairy, too. The women were often rather plain. If a homely woman wants to find a man, or a dozen of them, she should go north.

We were surprised at the numbers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean tourists we saw whenever we visited a well-known tourist attraction: In the center of the ice fields of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, at Lake Louise in remote Alberta Province, at Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, and at every site to see along the way.  We saw European and Australian tourists too, but the numbers of the folks from Asia was particularly impressive. I don’t know what that means, I just report it.

We didn’t see as many animals as I’d thought we’d see. We saw a bear or two in Denali National Park, an occasional moose or deer, a few eagles, lots of sea lions and seals, and water birds, but I had the idea we’d see herds of this and lots of those, and that didn’t happen. I didn’t much mind, but I think Kate was disappointed. But the dearth of animals is about the only thing about the trip that didn't meet my expectations.

To wrap it all up, I’d say it was a remarkable and memorable trip. I don’t want to do it again.

The Big Trip of 2014

Cheers

E