It's the end of the road for Derek and Marcella

     We are in Alaska.  We crossed the border at 2 PM and the time immediately changed to 1 PM…Alaska Time.  We're now 4 hours behind NY.  I have to say that we feel a real sense of adventure at getting here.  We've driven just over 4000 miles in 15 days and it's been everything we had hoped for.  We're happy.

     As it turned out, the left fork was the right fork!  We came to ride on the Alaska Highway, that's what we really wanted to do and so our decision not to take the detour was pretty much an emotional one.  It turned out to be okay.  The first hundred miles out of White Horse were just fine.  The next two hundred were not so great.  Evidently permafrost causes terrible problems for road builders.  The road base thaws the permafrost, causing the flat pavement to reshape into big waves, forming a whoopsie-doo road.  If you go too fast, not only does your stomach stay up in the air while the car comes down, but your car will bottom out with not-so-nice consequences, like a fractured oil pan.  So we drove a bit slower.  Driving too fast also leads to other problems.  The overturned pickup truck in the photo had recently done its tumbling routine by the time we arrived; the tell-tale marks were there on the pavement.  There were some long sections, miles long, which had been dug up and were not yet repaved.  The second photo shows the dust storm that a vehicle makes when it goes over a gravel road.  You have to hang back from the car in front of you until the dust clears or you will never see either the road or oncoming traffic.  And, you'd better shut your windows or you'll find out where the saying "eat my dust" comes from. 

     The scenery is just incredible.  Snow covered mountains on both sides of us were constant companions all day long.  Every quarter mile is a brand new post card.  Unbelievable is the only word that comes to mind…I'm out of superlatives.  In between whoopsie-doos and dust clouds we saw a moose, a pair of swans, a bald eagle and herds of Dall sheep high up on the sides of steep mountains.  The lakes are still partly ice covered and yet the air temperature was in the low seventies for most of the day.  The ice won't stay much longer.  I wish I could describe the blue color of the lakes.  I guess you've got to be here.

     We're in the tiny town of Tok tonight (how's that for alliteration, eh?), and tomorrow we'll get off the Alaska highway for the first time in 1313 miles and head south on Rt 2 to Valdez.  Valdez is the terminus of the oil pipe line and not far from the site of the horrible 10 million gallon oil spill which occurred on Good Friday in 1989.  We plan to take a ship out into Prince William Sound to check out a glacier or two and see if we can watch some whales…and maybe some puffins.  We'd better dress warm.