Leaving Alaska

This week we were without internet or phone service most of the time. This update is posted late because we spent so much time driving and just didn't have the time or the means to publish it.

Sunday- It was raining again, but we went out looking for bears anyway over by the stream we had seen them at before. With the low tide, the amount of fish in the area was even more staggering than we had seen the previous time. There were dead fish and seagulls feasting on them in the mud flats exposed by the low tide. Out in the water there were fish fins sticking up out where the fish were waiting for the tide to come in so they could more easily navigate into the stream.

Seagulls eating the unsuccessful salmon. They eat the eyes first, sometimes while the fish are still alive. 

Pink salmon stacking up on their way upstream.

In one area by a fish hatchery, the salmon were all lined up very thick by some rocks and we could easily get down right by them. They pink salmon return here by the millions and the silver salmon by the hundreds of thousands each year. With just his bare hands John caught a few that were stuck in the pools of water between some rocks and set them free; maybe 15 or so. Who knows, it could result in hundreds more salmon coming back to spawn over the next three years or so.

Grabbing a pink salmon with my bare hands (John)

This salmon was actually pretty small compared to some of the others (John).

John with one of the pink salmon  which are also called Humpy salmon because the males develop a big hump on their back as they return to spawn. The structure behind John is there to keep the fish out of the power plant and direct them over to the hatchery on the left.

We drove down to the city dock, where John and I went fishing and caught two small Irish Lords and a starfish. It was cold and rainy, but the otters and marmot near the dock didn't seem to mind.

The smallest fish I have ever hooked through the mouth (John).

Dad caught this star fish with his line, not the hook (John).

The RV park in Valdez with some of the big hills in the background. The white streak is a big waterfall. The clouds and fog rolling through the mountains around us made it really pretty

(Shelli- Monday- We reluctantly pulled away from Valdez. Why is it we REALLY have to return? I guess we REALLY don’t.......The weather was very dramatic looking with fog and rain all over the mountains and recent rains made the waterfalls really dramatic. There are so many big waterfalls along this road. The drive from Valdez is really very beautiful; maybe one of the best drives we have been on. Wanting to get quite a bit of driving out of the way so the really bad stretch the next day wouldn't be so long, we made it to Border City RV Park near the Canadian border by dinner time. We checked the RV for damage after a bird couldn't decide which way to go and smacked into the front of the RV. Michael and John played out by the river with Maui in the high grasses. Maui loved it, but he got filthy and kids lost their shoes after wrestling and throwing each others shoes into the grass. Luckily, Michael found them after looking around for a while, but John had an allergic reaction to something in the grasses or to the tiny gnats that were all over the place. He had welts ALL over him! The mosquitoes were bad in the area too. We could tell we were near Canada.)

Bye, bye birdie (John)

Maui loved playing but got so dirty!

Maui found a comfy resting spot while Micheal played on his new phone. (Shelli)

Maui actually slept like this for quite a while as we drove across Canada. (Shelli)

Tuesday- We pulled away from the Border RV park and sadly made the trip back into Canada. The moment we did, we had sickening memories of the bad road experiences. The frost heave bumps shook us up and down again. As before, some were marked and some were not. It's very hard to tell if a bump will be bad or not, and staying very slow means extra hours and hours of driving. Going fast means shattering your teeth. Trying to go faster when the patches of road are decent and slowing for the bad bumps is very hard to do well. It really is a maddening thing. We drove and drove and drove. I thought to myself, "I'm surprised we didn't break anything on the way in through this road, and I'll be amazed if we don't break anything on the way out".

Made it to Whitehorse Canada and stopped for the night. I don't get amazed easily, and so, I wasn't  amazed when I walked around to the van and discovered we had, in fact, broken the tow bar on the bumpy road. The permanent mounting bar on the van was sticking up at an angle and there was a small crack visible on one side. I could see there was rust in the top part of the crack, but there was progress that was obviously new. The bar had been bent slightly in California when a woman backed into it, and that probably had started a small crack that couldn't withstand the Canadian frost heave minefield.

The bar is tilted up a few degrees. It went far enough back to have the top section bang into the bumper and leave a gouge. On the lower right you can see some of the pits and missing paint caused by flying gravel along the route.

Wednesday- The kids played in the woods while I troubleshot and looked for options. After learning replacement parts wouldn't make it to any RV repair shops for at least 10 days, I decided to go ahead and pull the van longer. I went slower and stopped frequently to check the crack to see if it was advancing. The idea was to go as far as we could and then disconnect the van and have Shelli drive it behind the RV the rest of the way back into the United States when it looked too bad.

(Shelli- We have had the van for so long we started calling it Vangeezer. I am thinking “Old Faithful” is becoming a little more appropriate at this point, since we got it when John was born and we have been to almost all the states in it. We have towed it from San Diego, to Miami, up to Maine, and all the way up to Alaska. It has about 180,000 miles on the odometer, which doesn't include any of those towed miles to the four corners of the U.S.A. We finally got on the road around 2:00 pm and the road wasn’t as bad as we remembered once we got past the worst frost heave section. We had come up on the Cassiar Highway and it was bad for so long we had exceeded our tolerance level for bad roads. We thought we had a long stretch of unpaved dusty roads, to go through this day, but it must have been the part at the end of the Cassiar we were thinking about. The roads still weren't smooth, but they weren't too bad. We stopped at the  Gold Nugget RV park outside Watson Lake around 8:00 pm.)

(Shelli- Thursday - We left the Watson Lake area and headed toward Dawson Creek, BC.  We didn't get on the road until about noon. We have definitely moved into a “retired” state/routine. The reality of a ‘normal’ life with work/school schedules does not sound appealing to any of us right now.  We are living with no schedule or plans, and just end up wherever we end up at the end of the day. Conversation between the four of us has definitely increased. It is a LOOONG way across Canada.)

Driving and driving creates lots of time to think and talk. Periodically, Maui will dart up to the front of the RV, sorta like Kramer entering a room on a episode of Seinfeld, look around like there is something very important to see, and then he will just turn around and go back to lay on his little place curled up on the couch.

We are paying the price for driving in Canada. We paid $5.41 per gallon in Fort Nelson. Out in the middle of nowhere it might be expected we would have to pay more than normal, but this was price gouging because it was a pretty well developed area with some fuel tank farms and seemed to be a distribution point. Nice. 

This was in Watson Lake. The signs kept going a pretty long way from left to right and covered a very big area.

We stopped for a break and decided to check for gold. We found zircon, but no gold.

The rainbow went completely across the road and over the RV, but the right side dimmed before I could get the picture.

A nice double rainbow.

Feel the wind in my face, feel the.......bug in my mouth? I was actually trying to teach Maui how to stick his head out of the window.(John)

He learned fast.(John)

This bison picture is not zoomed in, he almost charged us.(John)

Maybe this reindeer was looking for Santa's sleigh?(John)

We have seen so many of the following animals that we almost don’t even call them out anymore (but we still do); bald eagles, otters, salmon, black bears, bison, moose and caribou. We have seen a life time of streams, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, mountains, snow, glaciers, RV’s and bad roads. Our drive through British Columbia today yielded two black bears, one grizzly, 25 bison, three dead buffalo and two reindeer. As we were ending our drive for the day in British Columbia, we both noticed the full moon and the approaching cars with their headlights on. It has been pretty much daylight so we haven’t really seen the moon, or night time car lights since June.

Friday - We made it from Fort Nelson to Grande Prairie. The tow bar crack has widened a little, but not enough to disconnect it yet. The roads continue to be a challenge with bad sections, construction, and gravel patches. The scenery is really very nice, but we wish we could just teleport to the United States. We have been very disappointed to pull in through major towns where we thought we would have nice roads and find out they can be just as bad as the middle of nowhere. Grande Prairie was very frustrating and resulted in quite a bit of tow bar weakening.

Saturday - We drove into Japser National Park. It was very scenic with big lakes and rocky mountains. We saw two small spotted fawns (just like Bambi), a fox darted out and ran right in front of our car, a deer leaped in front of us over the guardrail, two more sets of deer just by the road, big horn sheep, and mountain goats. We drove through Jasper and into Banff National Park where we continued to see plenty of rivers and nice blue streams. We saw a big mean looking brown bear beside a river and a big black bear eating berries on the side of the road. A police officer came by to disperse the crowd that had stopped on the road to watch the black bear. We started walking back to the RV, but a lot of people were not heading back to their cars. The policeman fired off a flare to scare the bear away so the people would leave. That would be a decent idea, but the guy shot the flare into a tree and it bounced over the crowd and across the lanes of traffic. The bear left, but I think it was laughing when it ran away.

Bighorn sheep in Jasper.

Just to the left we passed a few mountain goats.  We thought about walking back to them, but decided to throw rocks in to the river instead.

We didn't stop to take any pictures of the really blue rivers. We'll have to do it on our next trip.

I thought the angle of these mountains was really interesting.

After eating berries near the road, this brown bear crossed a creek and didn't pay any attention to the crowd that had gathered.

It's hard to tell here, but this guy just seemed to look meaner than other ones we saw.

Heading downhill in Banff.

The bear was foaming at the mouth a little from chomping on the little yellow berries.

The crowd looking at the black bear. This was just before the flare incident.

We stopped in Banff for the night. All the driving is getting old, but we are pressing on because we are ready to be back in the U.S.A. We are spending a lot of time during the drive talking about what we should do, and about when to stop the adventure and settle into a house. The pull of Alaska was very strong and we would have stayed if we were looking to live somewhere for a couple of years and then move again. However, Shelli really wants to stop in one place when we settle, and Alaska is so far from all our family we ruled out living there long term. Regardless, it was really depressing to be leaving and I kept thinking maybe we should turn around and go back. There is something very appealing about the ruggedness and simplicity of life there. I think it would be easier to focus on family and eliminate some of the modern negative hurried life distractions we have all become used to. Just because it has become normal doesn't mean it is right to live the way we do now. Almost everything that consumes our waking moments is stuff nobody did at all 60 years ago. Pressing schedules, constant stress, mindless TV, internet based time robbers like Facebook, constant interruptions from texts about nothing, long commutes to work, shuttling kids off to multiple activities everyday with almost endless seasons or multiple seasons for each sport, and maybe 40 minutes of real time together as a family each day is all stuff that developed recently. For the rest of the history of human life, it has been families working, living and learning together. I think for the most part we have lost that in developed countries, and that loss is probably why everyone seems to be so unhappy all the time.  People are probably less civil now than they have ever been.

John wrote in his journal "My teacher is my mom and my family are my friends".  That sounds pretty good. Michael and John are happy with the RV trip. They both said they want to keep going and don't want to settle down yet.

(Michael- Driving through Canada wasn't fun, but we saw tons of wildlife. The coolest thing we saw was the bison just by our RV on the side of the road. We followed alongside two of them as they walked the road. Maui growled outside of the window really, really, mean. It was the meanest we have ever heard from him, he sounded super scary. We also drove by a whole herd of them just laying on the bank on the side of the road. We also saw sheep, coyotes, and deer. Canada was like a drive through wild animal park.)

We had planned to head to Great Falls, Montana and get a new tow bar for the van, or get a tow dolly for it. Instead we decided to go towards Boise and pick up some stuff we had left there at Kelli's. The roads continued to bang up the van tow bar and we finally had to call it quits on the towing. Shelli drove the van behind us the last several hours of the day. It ended up being a 12 hour day from start to finish, but we made it back into the United States just North of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and kept driving on past Spokane, Washington before stopping for the night. That put us within 6 hours of Boise on major roads. It was nice to be on smoother roads.