Monday, July 13, 2009

07/13/09 Watson Lake, Yukon to Anchorage, AK

Got up and left by 7:00am. The idea was to highball it to Anchorage because Soup had to get to work by Wed. It looked like we might not make it considering road conditions and our travel time way out of whack. We got to Anchorage at 3:30am. Soup and I traded driving/sleeping about every four hours.

Alex was still asleep in the morning so we got him out of bed long enough to move the sides of the RV back in and ready for travel. He sleeps till 11:00am but I don't really blame him. We've been through so many time zones and all of our schedules are so off it isn't funny.

The US side of the Alcan was a lot better but still there was a lot of road constructions and gravel. They have something called Frost Heave up here. The roads shift up and down so you have these 12" dips and rises. You can only go about 45mph over these things. In fact, during one 30min stretch it made me really sick and Alex didn't feel too great. It goes on for miles and miles and it's all over the place. It sneaks up on you too. You'll think you're driving on some pretty smooth road and, usually too late, you see the dip. I think I had the 10ton RV air born more than a few times (and it's not very aerodynamic).

I was laughing about those signs in Canada warning about buffalo on the road. I thought they should have warnings about giraffes and elephants too. Guess what, we actually saw wild buffalo on the road! I saw five but they saw a whole heard while I was sleeping. We also saw many horses (wild, I think), a fox, a few coyotes (they're skinny up here), a porcupine (honest) and quite a few moose.

Driving at night finding that frost heave is really fun. It was 3:30am when we arrived, whew! What a long drive. Almost 4,000 miles from Baldwin City, KS! I'm avoiding adding up our fuel costs.

Check out the pictures:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=3j7ia4ah.4eljsl15&x=0&y=xbcp0b&localeid=en_US

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