Travel Update 4

Our first week of hurrying across the country had several nice stops. Two of which already have their own post, Craters of the Moon and The Geographic Center. However we also stopped several other  lovely places so we wanted to do a quick travel update to include pictures we took of those places as well.

We stayed by a lake in Idaho near the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area. We didn't see any raptors but the lake was still lovely.

Further in Idaho we worked very carefully to have Andreas take a picture of the odometer as it hit 222,222.2 while Kathleen drove. We were probably more excited about that than we needed to be, but we like numbers.

Right before we left Idaho we stayed by one more beautiful lake. It was pretty but super cold. It actually started snowing softly before we left. Afterward we crossed through quite a snowstorm in Wyoming but just kept moving. 

In Wyoming we stayed in one of our rare paid campgrounds at Vedauwoo in the Medicine Bow campground. It was absolutely beautiful but a little chilly because it was up above 8,000 feet. 

 

We wrapped on the week in Kansas City, Kansas. Andreas's friend from his Masters program lives in Missouri and was coaching in a soccer tournament in Kansas City. We stopped off to watch one of his games and get lunch together. We love meeting up with people on the road. 

The Geographic Center

Given that we only had two weeks between weddings on opposite sides of country we mostly spent those two weeks driving quickly across. We partially chose our route to be direct and we partially chose our route for how funny it looked in the stickers on the back of the RV. 

We also wanted to see the geographic center of the lower 48. One of the books we read was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. One of the minor premises of the book is that roadside attractions are modern day holy places. His explanation: 

“It's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea." 

"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow. 

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”

One of the places in the book is mentioned as the exact opposite of one of those holy places. There was a contrived plan to make a roadside attraction but the magic just wasn’t there. The gods avoid it unless they are forced to be there. 

After this description, and given the face that we are into things like mathematically calculating the center, we decided we had to visit. So we planned our mid-way point to be Lebanon, Kansas and the park at the geographic center of the lower 48. We were not disappointed. 

Overall the park was just as gods forsaken as we were expecting, but still interesting. And a fitting place to make the middle of our drive across the country. 

Expense Report: September

September was another fairly expensive month. We drove a ton in Alaska, all the way back to the lower 48, and started east across the country.

Maintenance: We blew another tire, so we replaced the ones that were older. We also did a little bit of work on the house.

New Tires : $608
More "home depot" type purchases: $21
RV running total: $18,323

Fuel - We've updated our Fuel log! We drove further in September than we did in August, so naturally we used more fuel.

This month, we drove 4369 miles on 330 gallons of gas, averaging 13.2 MPG (up from last month!)

Gas: $1140

Propane: $12 - We only needed to get propane once. We're amazed at how long the propane lasts, but we haven't been doing much with it besides cook and run a fridge.

Food: $706. We didn't do a good job avoiding restaurants this month, especially in Anchorage. Groceries only account for $250 of this and are the source of most of our meals. Duck football season isn't helping.

Pets : It's hard to separate pets from groceries, since we usually pick up what we need at the same time, so I've included them with food and will do so going forward. Usually it's roughly the same as last month: $60-$70 for dog food, cat food and litter.

Entertainment: $336 - This is almost entirely our Kenai Fjord tour cruise.

Lodging: $10 - We, again, only spent one night at a site we needed to pay for, in Seward.

Ferries: $716 - Turns out putting an RV on a boat is expensive. The ferries got us from Prince Rupert to Vancouver Island and then back to Washington.

Phone and Internet: $60

Haircut for Kathleen: $18

Other Expenses: $45 - We had to buy new hiking pants at Value Village. Kathleen tore holes in the bottom of both of her pair of jeans and they were past repairing. So this was another necessary expense.

Total Travel Expenses for September: ~$3675

Craters of the Moon

As we were driving through Idaho on a highway picked for no other reason than the fact that it was not a freeway, we came across The Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. We decided that this was exactly the type of place where we like to stop. 

There was a nice visitor center, complete with a movie, about the volcanic origins of the park. The park is over 600 square miles and is a remnant of volcanic activity between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago. The landscape reminded us a lot of the lava fields on highway 242 from Eugene to Sisters except that it was overall much flatter. 

They had several interesting examples of different lava formations. The first one that we looked at was the cinder cone. There are several big examples of these along the cascades. They are formed when lava sprays out in little droplets which cool and harden in the air to make small lava rocks. These little rocks often get carried in the wind a short distance from where they were expelled from the earth and then pile up to make a hill. It was still very very windy on the top of that hill. 

This image is not slanted

Near the cinder cone was the splatter cone. The splatter cone was the hole from which the lava making the cinder cone emerged. As the volcanic activity starts to slow down and there is less force pushing the lava out it starts to come out in big globs rather than the minute spray. Here the lava stays near the hole it came out of, congealing in globs on the sides. 

  

The park also has lava caves but we didn’t get a chance to explore those. Some of them are relatively accessible but you need to get a permit. Others are supposed to be very cool but require major spelunking skills that we don’t have. 

Overall, a pretty cool and unexpected stopover on our journey east.

Skagway

We decided to take a slight detour down to Skagway because there was so much history around the town. There is a National Historic Park that has lots of information about the gold rush, which is the entire reason that Skagway is a town. One of the cheapest ways to make it to Dawson City to try to get a claim was to take a boat into Skagway and then try to forge your way over the white pass.

One of the most interesting facts about the gold rush is that it only lasted one season in Skagway. By the time anyone made it up to Dawson City all of the claims were gone, so not only did no one strike it rich off gold, very few even got the chance to look. Everyone who managed to get rich in the gold rush did so off of money spent by other people there to look. There were lots of hotels, restaurants, brothels and scams. 

While the history was very interesting we were struck by how much tourist traffic they get! The summer population is double the winter population, and while they have one of the highest unemployment rates in Alaska in the winter, they have one of the lowest in the summer.  Skagway's population is estimated to be 1,148 yet they see as many as 8,000 cruise passengers in a single day. While were there, which was not even the peak of tourist season, there were three huge cruises.

The area is also naturally quite stunning. The quick decent from large peaks down to sea levels is spectacular. Overall, it was worth the single day jaunt down to see the town.

Touch of Insanity

We were staying in Yukon for our first night, the day after blowing out our first tire. Whitehorse didn’t have any open tire shops on a Sunday and camping around there was expensive. So we left and found a spot a good distance out of town near a small stream called Marshall Creek. While we were eating breakfast, we were greeted by an older gentleman and his grandson who was visiting on school vacation. His name was John - big John. He lived right down the road to the right. Turns out he has a son in Eugene and saw our Oregon plates and Ducks tire cover. He said we should swing by when we were on our way out of Alaska in a few weeks time. He’d make us some coffee, he said.

Three weeks later, that’s all we had to go on. All I could remember, anyways. We contemplated going through Dawson City, a route that would have made visiting Big John impossible, but I really wanted to take this man up on his offer. By the time we got back to the creek on that Monday, it was already 4:30. A bit late for coffee. As we got closer, we got really nervous, especially Kathleen, who wasn’t actually there for the invite.

Not remembering the directions exactly was tough. We took the first right after we crossed the stream onto a gravel road . After a few hundred meters, we decided this wasn’t leading us where we wanted to go. We took the next right onto a parallel street that seemed to be the old highway. We took that until it was clear that it had been left for nature to reclaim. There was a lady walking down it, so we asked her if she knew John. “No John, just a Fey”. Turns out she was just staying in a B and B on that road, about where we turned around.

0 for 2 and I was beginning to lose hope. I kept telling myself that there was something about an aquatic animal named street. A few kilometers further and we drove by it! Otter Falls Cutoff. It had a gas station, a store and a restaurant. At this point, Kathleen was so unconvinced by my memory that we talked ourselves out of stopping and drove a bit further. When no road was obvious to the right, I eventually decided I want to turn around and take the gravel road that clearly hadn’t looked right.

0 for 3. This was getting insane. It was pretty clear after traveling down this road a little bit that this was not the residence we were looking for. In fact, the road had markers on the side and a wind sock which made us think were were probably driving on a small aircraft landing strip. Glad we didn’t see or hear any aircraft. 

It took all my courage then to decide, I’m going to ask at the gas station. I’ll be talking to a stranger, asking about someone I’d met for 5 minutes, hoping that they might tell me where this person lived. So, I asked the clerk at the store if she knew an older, bigger man named John. Sure enough, she knew him. It was clear that he was well known around there. He lived on a small road out the back of the parking lot to the gas station. 

We followed the young lady’s directions and sure enough, as we pull into the only open spot he comes walking out to greet us. He invited us in, where he offered us coffee. We drank coffee with him and his wife. They even offered us grilled tomatoes and carrots for dinner. We talked for a few hours about Oregon, Yukon, our travels, their family and even ended up on politics by the end. We could not have been happier to have found them and spent an evening with them.

Before leaving, I asked him why he moved to the Yukon as a man in his early twenties. He said he’s not sure. A touch of insanity maybe. That seems like a fitting description for this trip and this idea to go to complete stranger’s house on an invite 3 weeks prior.

Travel Update 3

We took off to Wrangell - St.Elias National Park from Anchorage on the Glenn Highway. This highway was absolutely stunning. The drive is a little bit tough at first because it can be a little narrow and winding, but the views and lakes are absolutely worth it. 

When you get towards the end near Glennallen, the Wrangell mountains come into view for a spectacular finish to the road as well.

 

After spending some time in Wrangell - St. Elias National Park (see our park post), it was time to start thinking about heading back down to the lower 48 but we were just 80 miles from Valdez and heard that the trip was well worth it. So we took the detour. The trip was truly spectacular. The mountains were so young and jagged that you could still see the sheering of rock from when the plates pushed that piece of rock up out of the ground. There are also a whole variety of different waterfalls. 

 

Just as we were about to get into Valdez, our second tire blew. This time it was the inner tire on the back, passenger side (the previous one was the outer tire of that pair). We took the outer tire off to see the damage and we at first thought that a metal bracket had come loose and punctured the tire. On further inspection, we decided the tire went first and the metal rods took the bracket out.

 

Lucky for us, this happened right across the street from a repair shop. We managed to cross the highway on the bad tire and spent the night in front of the shop. They got us a new spare and were  convinced that the beam that is now cut off did not actually support any of the structure of the vehicle or house. There is a structural cross beam right above where it came off. This was a secondary support that may help reduce the sway of the back panel but doesn’t hold any weight. I guess we’ll see…

With the fear of the possibility of losing our remaining 2 “older” tires (the front ones were newer than the back ones), we decided to head back to Fairbanks, to the place that actually had our tires, and buy more tires. Apparently our size of tire (14R 185C) is super rare, at least this far north. This drive took us up the Richardson Highway, which again had stunning views and several stops and informational signs about the Trans-Alaska pipeline which is used to pump crude oil from Prudhoe Bay all the way to Valdez.

We spent another couple nights at our favorite Walmart and were able to catch the Duck game against Montana at Lavelle’s Taphouse, before starting on our way back. We were once again successful at finding at least one duck. This time the man working at the food cart outside the tap house was wearing a duck hat and watching the game on his tablet. It turns out his son is a senior walk-on cornerback who plays mostly on special teams. It was fun to chat with him a little. 

Duck football at Lavelle's Taphouse

September 15th is officially the day that winter tires are allowed in Alaska so we decided that it was  about time to start heading south. That and we have a wedding to attend in two weeks down in Oregon and we want to see some things on the way south. So next up, we’ll be heading back into Canada.