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Sumiki

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  1. Sumiki

    My grandmother

    By Sumiki,

    My grandmother died this morning at the age of 77.
     
    Words can’t even begin to describe the misery she went through in the past several years of her life. Her immense medical record was just about as long as the list of doctors who were mortified at the prospect of having to navigate the murky medical waters of a woman who, by all rights, should have been dead five times over. Between her assisted living facility, the various wards of the hospital, and rehab facilities spanning across several counties, she was a threat to sap the combined medical resources of the greater Charlotte area. 77 is not an old age, but aside from her thinning, yet stubbornly black hair, her body might as well have been 97.
     
    I don’t know, at this point, what finally did her in, but I can venture a guess that it’s something to do with the all-too-uncommon perils of someone with her comorbidities: her stage 2 kidney failure prevented her from taking the full dose of diuretics necessary to get the inevitable fluid buildup away from her heart and lungs, while her stage 3/borderline stage 4 heart failure had a hard time keeping up with the volume overload. People in her condition walk a thinner and thinner tightrope until they (or their loved ones) are forced into choosing death by kidney failure or death by heart failure.
     
    It was getting to a point where we would have been forced into making a difficult decision on her behalf. While she never suffered from any sort of neurological conditions (other than lifelong anxiety and depression), she was so tired—especially in the final months—that she could barely lift up her head, and her generally high creatinine levels (a byproduct of kidney failure) led to many a moment when the vivid imagination of her dreams got to her in her few remaining waking hours. She would have been in no condition to weigh the awful choice which was coming her way; a nursing home would have been the next step, and that process would have been an unimaginable emotional anguish for everyone involved.
     
    Her passing, while undeniably sad, is a weight lifted. Her condition would have killed a lesser person, and her life is a testament to a strength of willpower so strong that the rest of us would do well for ourselves in life if we had the tiniest fraction of hers.
     
    You often hear about deaths like this being sad, but not too sad, because they’re “expected.” As cliché as that might be, I can attest to its accuracy, having seen her on her deathbed on multiple occasions within the past several years. It was hard on those occasions because we grieved her passing and got through the emotions associated with such a loss, only for her to pull out and get through another two years.
     
    Even towards the end, she had good days, good weeks, and even good months. She found as much joy as possible in the little pleasures and comforts still available to her—watching the livestream of my graduation, hosting her bridge club for the final time—up through May. When it became clear that her body wouldn’t get back to the quality of life she once enjoyed, it shut down for good; that fight to get to the next goal, the next thing-she-was-looking-forward-to, just wasn’t there this time.
     
    If there’s anyone who taught me perseverance in the face of adversity, it’s her, and I hope that I can follow her example for the rest of my life.
  4. Sumiki
    *peers around corner nervously*
     
    Hi, y'all. It's been a hot minute. Life's been bananas, but the semester is drawing to a conclusion and though I have much left on my plate to finish before January, I fulfilled my obligations and saw The Last Jedi.
     
    Going into it, I was somewhat nervous for where the series was headed. I really enjoyed The Force Awakens, though perhaps my enthusiasm was amplified by the fact that I was seeing a Star Wars film on the big screen when I thought for years that Revenge of the Sith was the final say in the saga. With the passage of time, I realized that TFA wasn't quite the cinematic masterpiece, but it was an enjoyable addition that attempted to assure and assuage the viewing public that the franchise was safe in Disney's hands. It rectified some of the glaring holes of the prequels, yet there was definitely a sense of playing it safe.
     
    What I disliked most about TFA was exactly what everyone else disliked—the "playing it safe" bit. I also thought that the plot, in its pitting of a retrofitted Empire against a retrofitted Rebellion, was one that negated the original trilogy in good overcoming evil. If the evil just came back, with the same outfits and the same weapons ... then what was the point? I will give George Lucas the credit he deserves in making the prequels something fresh and different, not just a series of callbacks (or would they have been call-forewards?) to the OT.
     
    With Rogue One interleaved between actual episodes, I saw a different side. I really enjoyed Rogue One—more than TFA—but with it came an overwhelming sense of just how J.J. Abrams treated familiar characters in TFA. CGI!Tarkin and Darth Vader figure prominently in Rogue One, but the film doesn't feel weighted down by their presence. I wrote about the problems with creating good prequels a long time ago on Blogarithm, and I applauded Rogue One for telling the story in an exciting (and shocking!) way. We knew how it ended up, but that didn't stop it.
     
    Now onto The Last Jedi. In short: I didn't like it. Its holes were glaring. In an attempt to break itself free from being a rehashed mashup of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, we instead got a jumble of underutilized actors, unutilized plot points, and familiar faces acting well out of character, in addition to continued use of past themes from the OT as TFA had. I'll be clear: TLJ is not The Phantom Menace, but if the dialogue were worse, it might be a contender for Star Wars bottom-feeder.
     
    If you've seen the film, my more exact qualms are Spoiler-fied. And I have many issues.
     
     
  5. Sumiki

    Doctor #13

    By Sumiki,

    Every three to five years, on average, the incumbent Doctor regenerates, and because the BBC doesn't want to keep things a surprise until the actual regeneration episodes—which seem to occur exclusively on Christmases, for some heretofore unacknowledged reason—we, as fans, are left with knowing who's next in line without the benefit of seeing their Doctor's performance in an actual episode.
     
    I became a fan of the show during the Tenth Doctor's run, and I remember the absolute uproar that accompanied Matt Smith's casting announcement. The promotional pictures looked like a glib tween acting cool in front of a poster. Leaked audio sounded absolutely miserable (and it was from the equally miserable "Victory of the Daleks," the worst entry of Series 5). People voiced legitimate concerns over Smith's ability to portray a venerated character because he hadn't had any major roles before then; people simply did not know him. On top of all this, he was the youngest Doctor since Peter Davison, whose lapel celery was more memorable than his actual character traits. Smith became a great Doctor, with a phenomenal ability to display great warmth, humor, and wonder, all while being an old man in a young man's body. His performance as the Eleventh Doctor was the only redeeming feature of much of Series 7. His performance survived flanderization in a way that Tennant's never could.
     
    When Peter Capaldi was announced as the Twelfth Doctor, people actually knew him from somewhere, which mitigated the expected uproar. Here was an avowed Doctor Who fan whose casting was only a shock to those who knew him as a foul-mouthed political operative in one of his more (in)famous roles. An older Doctor after two straight younger actors was certainly a welcome change to the show's dynamic, and indeed it allowed for a more world-weary Doctor to emerge. My concerns with how the show unfolded with Capaldi as the lead has infinitely more to do with the tropes of the Steven Moffat era. Twelve is not my favorite Doctor, but has done a fine job with what he was given.
     
    I have fallen pray to the judgement of a Doctor based solely on the criterion of name, and I have learned my lesson from doing so, in part because it's vastly unfair to the actor and the show to assume the quality of a performance based on not having seen so much as a single line of dialogue. The Steven Moffat era has also taught me, in a big way, that the quality of a Doctor has much more to do with the quality of the episodes they are given. Whatever my thoughts on a new Doctor might be, I have learned to withhold all judgement until a few full episodes into their run.
     
    All of which brings us to Jodie Whittaker. The backlash has been enormous, and most comment sections are plagued with vile insults towards Whittaker being a female. Some have even wished her death before filming begins, all because she auditioned for the part and was chosen by an incoming showrunner who has a whole lot more riding on this than her. Chris Chibnall wants this whole thing to go well, and I, for one, am extraordinarily pleased with the fact that Moffat is leaving (albeit three and a half seasons too late in my book). Showrunners, in my view, should change with the Doctors they cast for the sake of fresh ideas, if the standard three seasons of service holds up for future incarnations.
     
    On the other hand, I steadfastly refuse to believe the notion that all who criticize a casting decision are doing so for reasons of deep and abiding prejudice. The concerns of those who do not want change are amplified by the concern that this is a big change—and it is! Those whose only problem stems from the belief that "the Doctor is a man" are ... well, frankly, I'm not sure they've even been watching the same show, and I don't want to be the ones to tell them that they're watching House M.D. reruns.
     
    In this onslaught of misogynistic stupidity, the few of the grammatically coherent grievances seemed to get at a deeper point of commonality: the concern that a show they care about was about to be ruined by casting choices driven by a need for diversity and inclusivity at the expense of talent, evidence of a trend whose only logical end point is in mediocrity and appeasement. Those who speak out against political correctness or the excesses of so-called social justice warriors are not a monolithically evil group. I and others may disagree with much of what they point out, but they and their ideas must not be countered with a backhanded dismissal of their grievances and subsequent jokes at their expense. Such dismissal has only led to larger divisions in discourse. Discussion, and the ability to connect with and understand and even—gasp—get along with those who do not abide by your positions—in anything, cultural or otherwise—is a lost art. There is diversity of opinion amongst those I know, and though I may not count them friends, I am enriched as a human being for imagining them complexly and understanding the background of their positions.
     
    In their grievances, evidence of an encroaching ultra-feminist agenda in media is rampant and nigh-unstoppable in an attempt to rack up social-justice brownie points at the expense of quality entertainment. Yet the entertainment industry knows only dollars; "diversity" is dangerously approaching meaningless-buzzword status if we don't seriously examine the ins and outs, the hows and whats, and the ups and downs of what that word means to those who toss it around like meatballs at a food fight. A frank conversation on what diversity is and what diversity may be expected is, I'm afraid, not something that's going to happen; realism is impossible to inject in the polarized state of online discourse.
     
    Thus, detractors of Whittaker will say that her role must be the result of a desire to placate an agenda, but said agenda has much less power over the industry than is warranted by evidence. Without any performance of the 13th Doctor in action until Christmas, hot takes must therefore rely on the comparison of Doctor Who to other media—which, as we shall see, is an endeavor fraught with falsehood.
     
    The Ghostbusters reboot is pointed to. It was a well-intentioned film starring some of the funniest women in America, but its middling performance at the box office has to do with more than a cadre of die-hard nerds who hated the leads for their gender. It didn't do great at the box office, but it wasn't a flop either; any reboot of an iconic franchise was going to have a hard time getting off the ground. Its problem was that it wasn't the original, and remakes and reboots will always have such a specter—a point of departure that continues as a point of comparison. Were there sexists who hated Ghostbusters for their own smarmy and thoroughly illegitimate reasons? Absolutely. To say otherwise is to deny the filth of comment sections the Web over, but to say that this is the only reason that there's no new Ghostbusters II is to deny the inherent complexity of the situation.
     
    Ghostbusters does not equate to Doctor Who, and it goes beyond their vastly different media. Doctor Who is the kind of cultural institution that Ghostbusters could only dream of being, with a history far longer and a canon mythology far vaster. Doctor Who prides itself on its built-in ability to stay relevant, while Dan Akyroyd exploding in a flash of light to reveal Kate McKinnon isn't something that fits or works in any stretch, although would be hilariously funny if they'd pulled it on SNL. Ghostbusters as a film felt as forced to me as, say, the Beauty and the Beast remake; in both instances, I bemoaned the lack of Hollywood originality before continuing to go about my day.
     
    James Bond is often mentioned. Those concerned over the infiltration of women into male roles are very concerned that the ultimate masculine hero in Bond has a coterie of devotees who wish to see a woman take over when Daniel Craig decides to hang up the iconic tuxedo. Such a choice would fundamentally change the nature of the Bond franchise, a phrase upon which supporters and detractors of the idea would agree, though rooted as they are in opposing motivations. To them, then, a Charlize Theron Bond is as blasphemous as a Jodie Whittaker Doctor.
     
    Again, this is an overly simplistic argument. A female Bond won't solve the history of misogyny in Bond's actions over the years; that is something that must be confronted head-on with a male lead and is something I want to have happen in the next film (likely to be Craig's last). In addition, the continuous narrative as pursued in the Craig era means that the continuity of the series—something glossed over from Connery to Brosnan—is something that's probably going to be dealt with by making "James Bond" a code word ... but then Skyfall makes no sense.
     
    But I digress. That issue is worthy of exploration if and when it comes to pass. (Until then, I'm squarely in the Idris Elba corner.)
     
    Bond is an institution in British culture of a different nature than ​Doctor Who, though they both feature a face-changing main character. But therein lies the difference; Doctor Who has the built-in mechanism to handle massive whopping changes and emerge stronger for it. No other show has that narrative longevity; not even The Simpsons deals with it because of their floating timeline. Timothy Dalton's Bond never met Roger Moore's Bond, highlighting the issues inherent with a long-running series built on the real world and the plausible situations therein (Moonraker notwithstanding). The fantastical aspects of Doctor Who afford it the ability to do anything, and the best episodes are built on that wonderment and not quite knowing what's going to happen week to week. Bond runs on formula, whereas Who dies if formulaic.
     
    The Doctor's claim to fame is the ability to solve problems with brains and not brawn, and in many cases shunning physical violence except where necessary. Masculine physicality—an aspect in Bond—plays absolutely no role for the Doctor. "Doctor" is an agender title; "James" is a male name. The franchises are insufficiently similar for comparisons to make sense.
     
    As far as the casting being against the nature of Doctor Who itself, this also is absurd. Women equal in intelligence and savvy to the Doctor have long been a staple of the show, from his granddaughter Susan to Time Ladies Romana and the Rani to his artificial daughter Jenny from "The Doctor's Daughter" to the DoctorDonna of "Journey's End" to the entire River Song arc ... well, point made.
     
    The last-ditch claim underlying this is that it is coming out of the blue; they're only caving to fans who want to see a female Doctor for the sake of there being a female Doctor, without regard or concern for series quality. This is steadfastly refuted by the casting of a great and established actress who can make the role hers; whether or not she will remains to be seen in 2018. But this particular change has been hinted at since the very beginning of Smith's run, expressly confirmed as normal Time Lord biology in "The Doctor's Wife" (probably my favorite episode of 11's run), confirmed on-screen when Missy faced off against 12, then actually literally shown as an on-screen regeneration when it wasn't actually necessary for the plot in the Series 9 finale, which was also coupled with a change of race. They'd built it up that I would have been surprised if they didn't pick a woman.
     
    It's not out of the blue because it is something that the show has hinted at and introduced in stages, precisely to alleviate the blowback and mitigate the claim that such casting is made under false pretense. Any amount of concern about the "sudden" nature of this news, or any concern whatsoever about a purported "caving to feminist ideology," is absurd on every conceivable level and then probably a few inconceivable ones there beyond. Coming through loud and clear from the writer's desks is that the Time Lords are still a bunch of wild and wacky aliens, and even then, changing genders 50/50 throughout a single lifetime is considered unusual, albeit not abnormal.
     
    Through wary as always of passing premature judgement, I am fully expecting to be very excited for 2018 after the Christmas special. It's just a shame that there will be others who won't.
  6. Sumiki

    The Journey Home

    By Sumiki,

    -----There were several ways to get back to North Carolina from the Lexington area, but we had several provisions for a successful return. The fastest route by time would have taken us through the mountains of West Virginia, which we had sworn off on the way up and were not about to risk on the trip's final day. Instead, we opted for a scenic drive—by Kentucky standards, which means lots and lots of trees and mountains—through Appalachia, which saved miles but sacrificed a bit of time.
     
    -----The scenery was about what we'd expect, what with the greenery and mountains and all. We've felt like we're basically in our backyard since we got to Spokane, and when this close, we felt the extra push. As such, we got up at a whopping 6:00 and were able to leave around 8:00.
     
    -----We got gas in a small town before we got to the larger peaks of the Appalachians, and it was one of those places where McDonald's was probably in the "fine dining" category. There was effectively nothing to do on the journey until we got to Pikeville, near the border, where there were several signs about the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud. Stopping for such things is more suited for the beginnings of journeys than their ends, and so we pressed on.
     
    -----As much as we wanted to get home as early as we could, we needed lunch, and it was here than our Jimmy John's habit caught up to us. There was none in Abingdon, but according to a random Facebook page, there was one in Marion—purported birthplace of Mountain Dew—just a bit further up the road. The process of navigating to it, however, took us straight up into a hospital complex with no through traffic. My dad began laughing maniacally while I got us to Arby's instead, where we each got some roast beef sandwiches.
     
    -----The worst traffic was from Marion to Wytheville down into North Carolina via Fancy Gap. The road itself was fine, but truckers jockeying and weaving made for some hair-raising situations that evolved in front of us. Once into North Carolina, we went around Pilot Mountain and made it safely home at a little past 3:30, where we unpacked while marveling at the amount of stuff we jammed into the car.
     
    -----Total mileage on vehicle: 10,151.9 Miles
    -----Total mileage overall: Unknown (approx. 12,000?)
    -----# of States, Provinces, & Territories: 20
    -----# of Pennants Collected: 5
    -----Pairs of Chicken Socks Purchased: 1
    -----# of Breakdowns: 0
    -----# of Culver's Eaten At: Too Many
    -----Tomorrow: Costco
  7. Sumiki

    Water We Doing

    By Sumiki,

    -----Over the past several days, our hotel breakfasts have been slipping from the upward side of mediocrity down towards the barely edible. After a couple of pancakes that hardly deserved the name—and how on Earth do you mess up a pancake?—we headed out of Champaign towards the Indiana border. We picked up much traffic en route to Indianapolis, and instead of skirting around it, we went directly into its heart to Victory Field, home of the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians.
     
    -----But what was to become the enduring theme of our time in Indiana is that you can't drink the water. Something—I know not what—happened to the water supply in the entire region. A sign was posted on rest areas saying that water should be boiled for five minutes before using, and that same rest area featured a man mumbling to himself in one of the stalls.
     
    -----We entered Indianapolis on the bad side of town, and made it around heavily tilted buses to the downtown complex that includes Lucas Oil Stadium—home of the Indianapolis Colts—as well as Victory Field, which we were after. Being Saturday, they were using the stadium for the high school championship tournament, and it had a decent-sized crowd. We explained our inexplicable quest to the folks letting people in, and they allowed my dad to idle the car outside while my mom and I ran in to get a pennant.
     
    -----They had no pennant, but they were nice about it and we got a hat instead. They're between styles of pennant and as of yet have not received their new shipment, but since we've been there—finally, after three times in the immediate area—we'll allow ourselves the luxury of ordering one.
     
    -----If there is a more heinous and hideous stretch of Interstate in the country than the one between Indianapolis and Louisville, I've yet to witness it. Trucks would seemingly make a game of passing each other, nearly swiping oblivious and speeding cars off the road and nearly tipping over themselves. Not a single highway patrol car was so much as parked on the side of the road to enforce the rules and customs associated with a pleasant highway experience. On top of all this, the road surface itself was so pockmarked that I longed for the Klondike Highway for the second time in as many days.
     
    -----We exited the highway in Columbus in pursuit of our daily Jimmy John's lunch, but it was much too far off of the highway. The built-up area featured a menagerie of restaurants and gas stations, so we pulled into a Culver's only to realize that not only was it closed, but every other eating establishment was as well. In the door was pasted a sign saying that they were closed due to the water contamination. Gas was the only thing we could get before we got back on the infernal road south.
     
    -----There was a toll bridge across the Ohio River to Louisville, but the toll never materialized. Instead, the nastiness of the Indiana road was now the nastiness of the Kentucky road, and the worst offenders were those who were hauling things that they ought not to have been and/or had University of Kentucky paraphernalia on their bumpers or back windshields. There was something decidedly unpleasant about having to drive through it, but the sheer amount of traffic had cleared out significantly.
     
    -----We got off in the suburbs of Lexington for a Culver's dinner, as it is the last time we'll eat their cheese curds and burgers and pot roast sandwiches for a long while. It wasn't crammed with the screaming kids we'd come to expect, and it was not long before we were working our way through the pastoral Kentucky countryside, past horse farms and rolling pastures, to the suburb of Winchester, where our hotel's miserable exterior belies one of the most updated and fancy interiors we've been at. (They even have a small spread of hors d'oeuvres near the front desk.)
     
    -----Tomorrow: we get home.
  8. Sumiki

    The Staff Inflection

    By Sumiki,

    -----There were no clouds when we left West Des Moines, and post-mediocre waffles, we set out for downtown. The fastest route was through the city, and along the route lay the stadium of the Iowa Cubs, Chicago's Triple-A affiliate. With no game on the docket, we waltzed past the silent front desk people and straight into the team store, where there was no one there. My dad's timid "hellos" would have echoed eerily had the store been larger.
     
    -----Most of what the Iowa Cubs sell is just regular Cubs merchandise with "Iowa" in script stuffed in somewhere nearby. It's a half-cooked aesthetic and prevents the team from having its own identity. Their pennant was in this vein—though cheaper than most are—and we were checked out by a college intern who looked half-asleep, which added to the dreariness of her already pancake-flat personality. I would usually diagnose an especially rowdy party on the prior night, but she seemed the type for whom a slightly different shade of mayonnaise would provoke a faint.
     
    -----Pennant in tow, we were back on the road, and it wasn't too much longer that we got out of Des Moines. The downtown area was cute—in as far as downtown areas are concerned, as I view most cities as basically the same sort of thing anyway—but we had the rest of Iowa and most of Illinois to go. Our next stop was the college town of Iowa City, whose signage heavily implies that it used to be the state capital. Being a college town, there was no Jimmy John's shortage. I don't want to abandon forever the idea of going to local places, but sticking to an eating schedule has really helped us make tracks back across the country.
     
    -----Not far from Iowa City is West Branch, best known for being the birthplace of Herbert Hoover. History tends to make his presidency out as ineffective at best and malicious at worst and his legacy is relegated to being amongst the five or ten worst to ever hold office. He was known as the Great Humanitarian for his civilian work in bringing large-scale food relief to Europeans during World War I, putting in long days to help them through the crisis. When the Great Depression hit on his watch, he turned back to the way his family would weather the periodic recession or depression, and assumed that wealth would be infused into the economy much as he had helped in Europe. By the time things got worse, he was too unpopular—and too much of a lame duck—to get anything done.
     
    -----Hoover rehabilitated himself in the public eye until his death in 1964, mostly by temporal distance from the Depression era. He had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and possessed an optimistic ideology about the elimination of poverty. Yet his work in the public eye went well beyond the public perception of his ineptitude, even in the Depression, when he sought to bolster the financial infrastructure in subtle ways and at arm's length.
     
    -----His birthplace, which is integrated into the cute and historic West Branch, is next to his Presidential Library and Museum. We hadn't the time to visit that part of things, but we spoke for a long while with a park ranger stationed outside Hoover's reconstructed two-room boyhood home, where we picked his brain about Hoover's reasons for being ineffective despite being the "Great Humanitarian." In West Branch, they're all fans of a usually disliked figure, so I get the sense that they enjoy getting to dig into the details of his life.
     
    -----About a half-hour's drive from West Branch is the Quad Cities area, and we were after a pennant from the Quad Cities River Bandits, whose historically located stadium—literally right across the train tracks, and with a view of the Mississippi River and Illinois beyond—was ranked the best in the Minor Leagues by USA Today. Its size and amenities made me guess at least Double-A, but they were in fact Single-A. The three people with whom we shared interaction had the kinds of monotone voices that could put inanimate objects to sleep, and I realized then that they weren't bored or upset with us ... it was—unfortunately—just the way they talked.
     
    -----The ticket office guy sent us inside, where the secretary gave a call to someone else, who came down the steps and shuttled us up the elevator to the team store on the main concourse. Their hats were quite cool and we got one for that collection as well as our requisite pennant. Their store even had an enormous bobblehead of their mascot, who cheers on a team that the man who checked us out called "somewhat competitive." They even had a lounge—well, an upscale bar—on the concourse behind home plate, where motion-filled quasi-abstract paintings of River Bandits players adorned the brick walls.
     
    -----Upon returning to our car, I'm sure those involved with the process of getting us in to get our pennant were stunned—for several completely silent hours, no doubt—about the fact that three people came in with actual inflections in their voices. (Perish the thought!)
     
    -----We went over a rather rickety-looking bridge—which we were told was erected before American involvement in World War II—and went into Illinois. We ended up going through three of the Quad Cities. Illinois, though it may be about to default on its debt, still has room for expansive road construction segments all over I-74, and there were seemingly more of those infernal things than actual road—which was itself in bad shape. I've seen better Yukon roads, and I shouldn't have to say that.
     
    -----After skirting around Peoria, we got gas in the town of Carlock, which is quite a funny name for a place to get gas. It wasn't long thereafter that we reached the Champaign-Urbana area, where we got the scenic tour of about two miles through the heart of downtown. I can't figure the place out, as derelict buildings and questionable characters are perhaps only a few hundred feet from extremely affluent sections of uppity restaurants and outdoor concerts. The whole place, as far as I've seen, is a patchwork city.
     
    -----We drove through the local Culver's. We had every intention of getting out and going inside, but several large families were already in there and we could see writhing masses of children cooped up inside. What really sealed the deal against going inside was a girl who let out a blood-curdling scream at us while being driven by, apparently just for kicks. Crazed Champaigners were not the kinds of Champaigners with which we wanted to interact.
     
    -----Tomorrow: we finally get that pesky Indianapolis pennant en route to Lexington, Kentucky.
  9. Sumiki

    Music of the Storm

    By Sumiki,

    -----We left Mitchell at 10:00 and hit I-90 towards Sioux Falls. For the first time since the day we left Olympia, we spent time off of that particular road, as we merged onto I-29 southbound towards Sioux City. But before Sioux City, we got off on ND-50 towards Vermillion, home of the National Music Museum. Like many of the great museums, it's one that withstands repeated visits and elicits the same stupefied fascination each time, even if a great many of their exhibits stay identical. Their Javanese Gamelan—one of the most complete outside Indonesia—had been brought down to the main floor for a recent performance by the local ensemble, and their front desk area was altered, but other than that it remained exactly as expected (and previously described in GART4: VI – "Clarinet on the Cob").
     
    -----My one complaint about the NMM is that, while the girl at the front desk was very pleasant, their Web site—only recently refurbished from the completely inadequate husk of one that they'd had theretofore—is filled with some of the most execrable pretentiousness this side of a tattooed hipster who passes off pieces of gravel as deep artistic expression. NMM policies prohibit returning e-mails of any kind to anyone who doesn't give them at least $100 per annum. Their communications director was, I have reason to believe, the leader of a tour group of entirely out-of-control kids who, despite being of small number, more than made up for it in complete obnoxiousness and loudly voiced desires for two demonstrations of an equally loud nickelodeon-style harmonium, which they got.
     
    -----Road construction marred the South Dakota-Iowa border, and it was the very road construction that, in 2015, gave us the pesky windshield crack that eventually forced us home from southern Utah in the course of three days. They've not made a lick of progress in as far as I can tell, but we got through it unscathed all the same. (It continues to bother me, however, that North Sioux City is the southernmost point in South Dakota.)
     
    -----We came down the western side of Iowa and split off before the Omaha metropolitan area—which we could see in the distance—and then headed halfway across the state to Des Moines. It's stereotypically Iowan countryside, with farmlands of corn and occasional cattle going up and down rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Various two-story houses—not skimpy on size—were placed under the shade of small groves of trees. It's one of those drives where the most exciting thing about it are some of the signs for the minor attractions situated a county away, such as John Wayne's birthplace. (We found the occasional deer sightings much more interesting.)
     
    -----We navigated through the residential area of West Des Moines to our hotel. Upon checking in, my dad almost immediately asked the girl at the front desk how close the nearest Culver's was, and she seemed a little concerned for his Butterburger® craving until we told her of our recent whereabouts and the fact that we can't get them at home.
     
    -----It was Culver's indeed, though to get out we had the issue of construction, which necessitated ... yes, you probably guessed it—a gravel break. (And in true gravel break fashion, we had to pass someone on its 1.5 lanes.) It was pleasant to be in an establishment where there, for once, weren't any rowdy kids under the watch of ineffectual parents. Most patrons seemed to be at the drive-through, and there seemed to be quite a few of them—though we looked out beyond them into the unusual sunset colors against the storm clouds of the south. They seemed to be further south and moving due east, but we didn't want to take any chances where hail two inches in diameter may be involved—and, sure enough, they soon called for such hail in Des Moines. Fortunately for us, the rest of the patrons of this hotel had not had the bright idea of moving their respective cars to shelter under the overhang of the adjoining—and currently unoccupied—convention center.
     
    -----We flipped the TV on, and it took us a while to locate the local channels. When we did, we soon learned that hail of such diameter—baseball-sized now, they warned—was not really much of a concern to them. If anything, the anchors treated the subject with detached fascination as opposed to the programming-preempting red alerts that such weather would warrant in North Carolina. Not even a ticker on the bottomline kept us informed during the commercial breaks. We waited for the hail to come, and the worst-looking cell passed with much lightning and much wind, but not a stone of hail.
     
    -----My dad, when realigning the car underneath its protective awning, let another car park behind, who turned out to be one with an Alaskan plate. As it turns out, the man who drove it was from Fairbanks and was familiar with the barbecue at Big Daddy's. He was shocked to find out that we drove the Alaska and Top of the World Highways with no punctured tires, no dings in the paint, and no cracks in the windshield.
     
    -----Tomorrow: across the rest of Iowa to Champaign, Illinois—unless, of course, we catch up with the slowly moving storm.
  10. Sumiki

    Summer Catches Up

    By Sumiki,

    -----Just like the past few days, it was I-90 all the way. It was the last of the Rocky Mountain foothills, as South Dakota brings with it the prospect of true plains where the speed limit of 80 almost seems low once you get used to going such a speed. We know that Wyoming can be a pleasant state, though it wasn't much so this time—but the "fajitas" weren't upsetting us.
     
    -----We were to South Dakota pretty much before we knew it, and within two hours of our 10:00 departure had made it to Rapid City, where we got our requisite Jimmy John's and prepared for the road to Mitchell. The best way to cross the plains, as far as I'm concerned, remains I-90 in South Dakota, where the road is good, the wind is steady enough to be acclimated to, and there is just enough traffic to keep the driver focused. Unlike Wyoming—a state which seems to delight in closing lanes haphazardly and with no discernible reason—South Dakota's road work is actually obviously useful and necessary.
     
    -----I don't know if it's because South Dakota's economy greatly depends on tourism—from the interminable signs for Wall Drug to the tourist traps of the Corn Palace, 1880 Town, the Borglum Story, and so on—or what, but it's always been a nice state to visit, even if its population centers are essentially on opposite sides. There's enough blankness in the middle to give you a sense of the vastness of the heartland, but still it pales when set against the true desolation of points further north.
     
    -----After so much cold weather throughout our journey, we've finally caught up to summer. It was 45º just the other day, and the high today was a whopping 88º. But 88 isn't all that bad, for it is a dry heat—and the wind, which was steady throughout, was rushing in our direction, which was better for our gas mileage than driving against the wind, as we did yesterday.
     
    -----The road simply gets gradually flatter and flatter as you move east, with only the occasional pronghorn or cattle sighting to break things up. Geologically, we saw Devil's Tower in the distance before we exited Wyoming, and saw snippets of the Badlands as we went north of them. But as we'd been there twice and already had a six-hour day—not including the loss of an hour as we went into Central Time—any revisitation would have to wait until a future trip.
     
    -----We were last in Mitchell two years ago, and it seems to have grown in that time, with a fancy new hospital complex and an even bigger Cabela's. After yesterday's fiasco, we were wary of returning to the steakhouse at which we dined two years ago. Instead, we realized that we were now back in the land of Culver's, and ate there instead. It was as good a burger as we'd come to expect and would have been even better had the restaurant not been overrun by a cadre of small and uncontrolled kids under the lackadaisical jurisdiction of a clearly incompetent mom.
     
    -----Tomorrow: we return to the National Music Museum in Vermillion before heading to Des Moines.
  11. Sumiki
    -----We've put around three thousand miles on the vehicle since its last oil change/tire rotation in Anchorage, and the intervening three thousand include the Tok Cut-Off, the Top of the World Highway, and the vicious hills and traffic in the state of Washington. We wouldn't be able to get back home without a last stop at a dealership, and luckily, one was about a mile from where we stayed in Bozeman. My dad returned about forty-five minutes after leaving and reported that somehow, the brakes were in exactly the same condition as they were in Anchorage, i.e. nearly completely intact. The tires, having been worn down through our travels, have reached their half-life, meaning that we'll be able to get home on them with no problem and tens of thousands of miles left after that.
     
    -----Interstate 90 was again our route, and it was again surprising how familiar we were with it. Rain was again our companion for the first half of the journey, east to Billings before dropping south into Wyoming, but it stopped prior to our lunch in Sheridan at the Jimmy John's at which we ate last time. The gravel breaks came back again, this time as road work diverted traffic up and over an exit. We saw some pronghorn, but little in the way of other wildlife. Transitioning from the Rockies to the plains isn't a sudden flattening-out, but rather the rolling and meandering hills which we saw much of today.
     
    -----Past Sheridan lay Buffalo, and past Buffalo lay over sixty miles of nothing. When you look on a map, there isn't a single settlement between Buffalo and Gillette. This was where 80 MPH on the roads actually made some sense—or it would have, if it weren't for the wind which gusted up to 40 MPH. The few exits were local ranch access routes where the posted speed limit was a rip-roaring 10. But it took less than an hour to make the trip and we made it to Gillette. The hotel, as we'd figured from our reservation snafu, is not well-run, but their rooms are new and clean ... even if we had to fix the clock so it'd be the right time.
     
    -----Two years ago, we stayed here in Gillette and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Compadres. We remembered great salsa, huge portions, and tasty food, and this time we only got the first two. The fajitas had gristly meat steeped in standing oil, watery refried beans, barely-cooked tortillas, and utterly tasteless everything else. It's still the #1-ranked place in all of Gillette, which means that they either had an off night or have gone way downhill. It just was, and for their quasi-effort at a flavorful meal, I shudder to think of the product of whatever's ranked second to them.
     
    -----(Side note: when we started on this journey, we fully expected our worst meals to be on the Alaska Highway for its captured audience, but as it turns out, our worst experiences by far have been our return journey, from the putridity of Haines to the "pizza" of Forks to whatever this was. There's a reason we're sticking to Jimmy John's a lot!)
     
    -----Tomorrow: a return to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.
  12. Sumiki

    Big Storm Country

    By Sumiki,

    -----From Spokane, it was all I-90 today. We crossed the state line, through the treacherously mountainous fifty-odd miles of the Idaho panhandle and then downhill on precipitous curves into Montana. We were hit with our first heat wave of the trip, as the high was 80º as we went through the mountain passes. After the Rocky Mountains conclude, it'll be some smooth sailing ... but getting through them proved more difficult than initially imagined.
     
    -----The first city of much size in Montana along the eastbound I-90 corridor is Missoula. As we retraced our route from the first trip, it was surprising what we remembered of Missoula, although what's new is a road construction section along a roundabout in town that featured—of all things—loose gravel. We never saw loose gravel before this trip and, post-Alaska Highway, it's just following us for the express purpose of taunting us. If our driveway has mysteriously turned to gravel when we get back, I'll really know something's up.
     
    -----We've had more than our fair share of heavy meals on this trip, and on the way back we have a great interest in eating light, so we had a Jimmy John's downtown. On the way back out, we got gas, and from our vantage point we caught a glimpse of a bearded man plucking away on a small bright red ukulele, and around him was a dog and a creature who appeared for all the world to be a bear. It had to have been a dog, but it looked exactly like a bear cub. Missoula's one of those weird and unusual places where you'd find stuff like that.
     
    -----As we drove along, we recalled our adventures on the same road five years prior, when we'd been hit with a thunderstorm of epic proportions and had to duck into the very Bozeman hotel from which I am writing this to check the weather, being entirely free of smartphone tyranny at the time. This time, we were armed with the foreknowledge of the route ... and the fact that there was, once again, a storm on the horizon. My mom kept us updated from her backseat post as we inched further to the storm, and spotted a sole bald eagle out the window as we did.
     
    -----Montana's roads are neither better nor worse than the roads of the states that surround it, but they effectively have no speed limit, because for most of the day, it was set at 80. Mountain roads, curves, and the occasional chipsealed section made for some hairy driving in spots. They do care about the speed limit in their unnecessarily long road construction sections, where—moments after a sign reaffirming 80—it drops to 35. What's worse is that they expect you to actually pull it off, which leads me to wonder how quickly dealership maintenance departments go through brakes. (You can't go 80 up the hills because it'd bust your engine, you can't go 80 down because you'd go straight off the cliff, and you can't go 80 around a curve because the guardrails would shred you up before you could say the words "antilock brake system.")
     
    -----The rain dropped slowly, but the temperature plummeted quickly, going down to a low of 47º. The rain came down in torrential sheets, and lightning struck the mountaintops around. On several occasions, we were certain that a enormous thunderclap was imminent due to the apparent proximity of the strike, but there was barely a sound. It was in this rain that we went through Butte and went over the last section of treacherous mountainousness: the Continental Divide. We passed over as quickly as was safe because we didn't want to get toasted by an errant bolt from the gray, but all the same, there were small rivers that appeared to be flowing over the road. Hydroplaning never happened, but appeared imminent throughout.
     
    -----Once past Butte and towards Bozeman, the temperature warmed again, reaching into the 50s, as the northbound storm broke up. Things still looked dark and dreary, so once we were safely at our hotel, we set out for dinner ... at a nearby Jimmy John's. I wouldn't be surprised if the steaks from the Rusty Moose in Spokane constitute our last heavier meal.
     
    -----My dad then next wanted to modify tomorrow night's reservation in Gillette so as to get an entirely free room instead of a heavily discounted one. In order to do so, he had to create a second reservation and then cancel the first. When he went to cancel the first one, it was ever so slightly past the cancelation deadline. Usually this isn't a problem, as we've done it before with no issues at all, but to do so, he had to call the hotel ... which is where things got real fun.
     
    -----The girl at the front desk immediately put us on hold, and then for five minutes flirted with another customer—as we could hear the whooooooole thing—and only picked up the phone when she remembered that she'd put it down. She said that, despite what the web site said, she had no authority to do cancelations, which had to be done through the main hotline. My dad got on the phone to the main hotline and was given the severest of run-arounds before getting to some guy who told him that there was no way the policy would allow a late cancelation unless we had the name of the girl in Gillette. My mom called the Gillette people on her phone, and—as my dad was conducting the other conversation from my phone, we stuck the two phones face-to-face so she could say "I give the approval for the cancelation," which was all that was necessary in the first place.
     
    -----The Jimmy John's was not satisfying, so we went to the hotel restaurant for an appetizer, which were bacon gorgonzola fries. The sole waitress had no other patrons and we had a good time asking her random questions about Montana. Dessert was huckleberry ice cream, and it was extremely good, almost like a blueberry crossed with a strawberry.
     
    -----On the way back to the room, we explained the Gillette run-around to the guy at the front desk, and he was flabbergasted that any hotel would have such unusual policies regarding cancelation, especially considering that we were still staying at the same property and effectively just altering the payment. Whoever was at the front desk in Gillette was clearly not following procedures, and heaven help her if there's the slightest of problems when we get there.
     
    -----Tomorrow: Gillette.
  13. Sumiki

    The Spokane Word

    By Sumiki,

    -----All online evidence pointed to us having a five-hour drive day ahead, which is a good amount for an average day on the return journey. From Olympia, we were to travel north to Tacoma before splitting off of I-5 and joining I-90 as it traverses the state eastbound. But there wasn't anything to really break the trip up, as five hours in the car isn't daunting so much as the thought of going that distance with no significant breaks in the action.
     
    -----Tacoma is the home of the Tacoma Rainiers, however, and amongst Triple-A affiliate teams, they are the closest in physical proximity to their Major League franchise—in this case, the Seattle Mariners. We decided that, since they had a game today and were thus open despite it being a weekend, it'd be best for us to stop in and get a pennant before getting on our way. What we did not expect is for the brutal Seattle area traffic to hit us early and often as we exited Olympia, and from there it was wall-to-wall stop-and-go as we navigated our way to the stadium. The problem was not that we went on a game day, but that we went when the game was about to start, as we'd overslept our alarms and, after breakfast, had to rearrange some of our plans due to Glacier National Park not being fully open.
     
    -----It's good to see a local crowd coming out and supporting their team, but when faced with trying to get through crowds of people on the street, it's not too pleasant. We rolled down windows to explain to security guys that we were just trying to get to the team store—which was, in all fairness, the only reason that we were waved past signs that said "LOT FULL." When we got to the stadium, my dad let my mom and I out with much more cash than was necessary and a mission to find the team store and get a pennant—or, barring that, something—at all costs. A few well-placed questions later, and we found out that the team store was on the opposite side of the entire stadium, so we bolted ... only for the National Anthem to begin playing. We stopped, but I couldn't hear it worth a lick, and when fireworks went off upon its conclusion, my heart skipped a beat. (Seriously? Warn a guy!)
     
    -----As my dad weaved around and evaded the security guys who chased him off if he so much looked at a banned parking spot, my mom and I weaved our way through the immense lines to get into the stadium and eventually—mercifully—made it to the glass doors underneath the words "team store." We pulled the handle, and though many were inside, we couldn't open it. A nice patron eventually let us into the bandbox of a store, which would have felt cramped if it had only been ourselves. But several dozen folks were inside and no one knew where the line was to check out, least of all the cashiers. They had one pennant, which we got, and we jogged back to the parking lot where my dad saw us in the nick of time. We got out of the area as fast as we could, as we didn't want to risk any wayward home runs clocking a windshield.
     
    -----Getting back to the road was a journey in and of itself, and it involved going down a series of San Franciscan slopes—nearly 45º angles, from my perspective—where stop signs and red lights were poised at the bottom. It was worse on the brakes than anything we'd experienced in the far northwest. My dad just started laughing, because what else could you do? (At least, for our trouble, we got the third pennant of the trip. Hopefully we'll never have to endure the Seattle traffic experience ever again, for it is truly brutal.)
     
    -----The road to I-90 was mostly downhill, and we passed a great many military convoys en route to the more arid regions of the state for various exercises. Even I-90 was mostly downhill, though we went through what was ostensibly a mountain pass known as Snoqualmie Pass. It was in this area that, four years ago, we did the stupid thing and got out of our cars during some rock blasting, only to have to run half a mile back up to it when the cars started moving again. We reminisced about this idiocy as we cruised by the lakeside construction area (which is still being worked on, by the way).
     
    -----Traffic was backed up to a near-standstill westbound, and though we were moving out on the eastbound direction, there were still a surprising number of people. After we traversed the Cascades, the greenery gave way to aridity and irrigated farmland, with increasingly rolling hills. Most of those on the road split off towards Yakima further south, which we found out in Ellensburg—but before reaching Ellensburg, we got off for gas and possible lunch in the town of Cle Elum. We got the gas and checked out an adjoining Subway, but some shady figures were hanging about and we decided to just get to Ellensburg, which was about a half-hour's drive away. But getting out of Cle Elum gives you only one option: westbound! It's not signed at all, and we had to turn ourselves around at the last exit back.
     
    -----Ellensburg featured a two-story Subway, whose seating and bathrooms were on the upper floor. We got six-inch subs which weren't all that great due to Subway's notoriously crumbly bread, but it was cheap and light and sustained us until Spokane. The road from thence on was less traveled and, aside from sections of grooved, potholed, and otherwise pockmarked road, it was quite pleasant under the wheels. We ended up missing our exit by several miles—how, I know not—and we were less than amused that it would happen twice on the same day ... but the first one, in our defense, was an unavoidable mishap due to the road engineer having a little too much at the bar the night before. All things being equal, we got to our hotel a little after 7:00.
     
    -----On the outskirts of Spokane lies an eating establishment known as the Rusty Moose. We were there on our first trip and were eager to recreate such unforgettable experiences as me fake-riding an iron moose sculpture outside, or my dad rubbing his beard on the "reserved parking" signs. They'd rearranged and redecorated slightly, but the food was just as good as we remembered. The waiting staff with whom we interacted were not there five years ago, but they enjoyed the fact that we came back five years down the road. We ordered the gorgonzola fries for an appetizer, as they were very good last time and we enjoyed recreating as much of that experience as we could.
     
    -----The portion wasn't quite as big as the vat we'd gotten five years prior, but the few tweaks they made to the recipe made it even better. The blue cheese wasn't overwhelming, but there were glorious chunks of it which I scarfed right up. Our drinks were a perfect recreation of the huckleberry lemonade we'd had last time, and—according to our server—they happened to have the right ingredients to make them. Much of the huckleberry stuff they had on their menu five years prior had been pulled due to the fact that they couldn't maintain a constant supply of them, but there was some huckleberry purée that they mixed into the lemonade and it was utterly delightful. We each had two glasses of these and felt quite special that we were able to get them again at all.
     
    -----As main courses, my dad got a big steak, while I got perfectly cooked Coulotte medallions—which, I was told, was a cut similar to a sirloin. The potatoes were fresh and garlicky while both dipping sauces were flavor-packed as well. It wasn't the biggest thing on the menu by far, but I only managed to eat about half of it and boxed the rest. My mom, on the other hand, got a huge salad with about five ounces of steak set atop. The salad was so immense that they cut up a whole tomato into slices—a bit like an orange—and put it around like a garnish, and it didn't look the least bit out of place in terms of scale. I know not how she managed to eat as much as she did, but she too had to box the rest of it up.
     
    -----There was no room for dessert, and they no longer offer their enormous—to quote my mom "absolutely insane"—mud pie, so we settled for the sweetness of what remained of our second round of huckleberry lemonade. Once outside, I sat astride the metal moose to recreate the first picture, and my dad rubbed his beard on not one, but two "reserved parking" signs, as well as a sconce in the hotel's hallway to cap it all off.
     
    -----Tomorrow: Bozeman, Montana. With Glacier National Park out of the picture—as the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road is not yet fully plowed—we've decided to cut it out of the trip.
  14. Sumiki

    Long Road to Hoh

    By Sumiki,

    -----Our early mornings have finally become routine, I suppose, as we were able to get up bright and early in Forks. They call themselves the rainiest town in America, but regardless of that statement's truthfulness, it was sunny and nearly cloudless as we headed southbound.
     
    -----Olympic National Park is massive, as it covers nearly the entirety of the peninsula. It gets multiple entrances and thus multiple visitor centers for its myriad natural wonders. We'd seen mountains and gotten top-of-the-world views on highways so named; what we were after in Olympic was something new. Something new came in the form of the Hoh Rain Forest, a remnant of one of the oldest and largest of the temperate rain forests that once spanned the western coast of the continent from southeast Alaska to California.
     
    -----The road in was in good shape, and as we rolled through towards the park boundary, the trees got bigger. The average height for a tree in the Hoh is 220 feet, and many reach over 300 by the time all is said and done. By the time we parked, we were surrounded by a fairytale jungle.
     
    -----The longest trail at the Hoh Visitor Center is one that takes overnight hikers 18 miles to the base of Mount Olympus, and it is a testament to how verdant and green everything is that it couldn't be glimpsed even in the clearings. Huge trees were everywhere, and where they'd fallen had provided fertile ground for new growth in a straight line. The forest floor was drenched in ferns, and I do mean drenched—one touch, and your whole hand would be soaking wet. The humidity kept the relatively low temperature in check; when it heated up, the bugs started to come out to play.
     
    -----It was strange, walking around on these loop trails that go into natural "clearings" where the trees aren't quite as close together. Moss, wet as could be, hung down like loose locks of hair from every available hanging surface. On one occasion, the trail even curved underneath a tree that had naturally grown in an arch.
     
    -----The Hoh Rain Forest is so named for the Hoh River, which—in the native tongue—means "swiftly flowing." That remains a very apt description, as its vibrant blue waters—icy cold, I'd imagine—rushed past, carving a path through the forest on both sides. There were a lot of cool spots on these trails, and we were able to take our time taking them in. It's the exact opposite of the sheer cragginess we'd come to expect while in Alaska.
     
    -----Wildlife was scarce, as we didn't venture into the backwoods, but there had been bear and elk sightings in the area and we were keenly aware of our surroundings. None emerged, though we saw evidence of the bear and the unmistakable footprint of the elk. We did spot a black squirrel, a redheaded woodpecker (who really slammed his beak into the tree to dislodge significant chunks of bark), and a slug who looked, at first glance, to be a homeless banana.
     
    -----Many more birds tweeted their way around the canopy, but they were too far up and too well-hidden to be seen. Coho salmon fry and tadpoles churned their way upstream in the extraordinarily clear waters of the Taft Creek that feeds the mighty Hoh. The creek had a bluish silt at its bottom, which we found fascinating. The canopy was so thick that, when it began raining as we made the return journey from these trails, we only felt a scant few drops.
     
    -----We began making our way south to the famous Ruby Beach, where craggy rocks jut up out of the waters in a makeshift cove, but by the time we arrived, I was feeling quite sick. It wasn't what I'd had in Homer—my personal feeling is that it was just too much stomach acid and not enough food—but again, concerns over dehydration led us back north to Forks. Their hospital is older but there's not much going on there, which was to our advantage. I felt better after I got some IV fluids, but I had several anomalies on my blood work and they ran some extra scans. These all turned up negative, as expected, but did slow the discharge process. (The doctor there has driven the northern roads quite a bit and was very pleased to hear that we'd driven the Top of the World Highway. To quote him: "it's a great road, but not a lot of people even know about it.")
     
    -----(By comparison, I did not really regain any sort of appetite from the Homer norovirus until we reached Dawson City four days later. This time, I was starving by the time we left Forks for the final time.)
     
    -----By the time we were fully on the road to Olympia, I felt absolutely back to normal in every way. I was thankful for this, but at the same time, it struck me as extremely weird. My dad took us on the mountain roads down to Olympia, past utter walls of trees on either side and fields of wild forsythia. It was in the state capital that it got dark on us. This was extremely unpleasant, as we'd gotten so accustomed to the midnight twilight that we forgot how enormously confusing the roads can be when darkness falls.
     
    -----We got turned around as we saw nothing but closed restaurants, and finally—when we got to our hotel—we were thankful that their in-house restaurant did not close for another thirty minutes. We looked like a mess, collectively, and we had to endure the loudness of a little-too-drunk collection of travel-baseball parents, but we got there in the nick of time.
     
    -----I felt entirely normal but still wanted the lightest thing on their menu. When our waitress told us that they'd run out of chicken, as it was apparently slammed since they opened, the option for a light sandwich went out the window and the lightest thing on the menu became a steak. I ate about half of it as well as some potatoes which probably weren't all that great but that tasted great to me. (The meat did not go to waste, as I'd lopped it in two when I started and my dad wolfed down the other half.)
     
    -----Tomorrow: east to Spokane.
  15. Sumiki

    The Twilight Zone

    By Sumiki,

    -----Mercifully, for the first time since Minot, we awoke with cell phone reception. It’s a minor miracle, and it meant that we no longer had to calculate our phone’s morning alarms from central time backwards, which was a great annoyance. Texts from Alaska’s 511 service poured through to my mom's phone, which proved a hassle as updates on the Glenn Highway popped up periodically with no obvious way to unsubscribe. (We eventually were able to do so, though not without significant hassle.)
     
    -----The Malaspina was running slightly behind schedule to Bellingham, and we watched as the captain, aided by his crew on the back deck, guided the mighty vessel backwards into the port. As the crew radioed in and hooked the Malaspina into the dock, we grabbed the last of our things and went down to the car deck to drive out, once again on dry land under our wheels. As nice as it was to be able to give the car a break, another day on the boat would have made us stir-crazy.
     
    -----Bellingham is a wetter and smaller version of San Francisco, with houses and streets carved up precipitous hills. It led to Interstate 5, and it was incredible how much of that road seemed familiar from what we traveled four years ago, when we had to detour around a recently collapsed bridge. But we did not get so far this time, as we exited into verdant farmland on Route 20 towards Whidbey Island, the largest island in the state, which snakes south into Puget Sound. It’s the Pacific Northwest, and so it constantly rains, and our route was no different, and the route went under truly enormous trees that fold into a canopy over the road.
     
    -----The communities of Whidbey Island are spread out, and Route 20 took us to Coupeville, where we got in line for the ferry to Port Townsend. As little as we thought of once again sailing the seven seas in any capacity, our only other option would have taken us through Seattle and added many, many more hours to our day. We had reservations for 2:00, as we made them without knowledge of whether the Alaska Marine Highway would be on time, but we got there at around 10:00. Nonetheless, the nonchalant fellow at the toll booth scanned our reservation anyway, and we managed to be amongst the last to squeak into the tightly packed ferry.
     
    -----The ferry was quite large, and we walked around the ship for almost all of the ostensibly 40-minute ride as the ship sailed to Port Townsend, a place known—at least, by their local tourism industry—as “the Paris of the Pacific Northwest.” I don’t know how true any of that really is, but it was a cute little place from what we could see. Looking on a map, these places look downright deserted next to the megalopolis of Seattle and its satellites, but it was really hopping.
     
    -----We pressed on along US 101, whose route draws an enormous arc around the Olympic Peninsula, so named for Olympic National Park—the very reason for our western jaunt before making the trek back east. Others might regard it as sparsely populated, but after tackling the desolation of Alaska and the Yukon, these places seem like big cities.
     
    -----Lunch was a quick stop in Port Angeles at a Jimmy John’s. From there, the road became hillier and curvier, and especially beautiful as we dipped to circle around Lake Crescent. The immensity of the ferns can’t quite be captured, and the mountains—which are covered in them—contrast starkly with the snowcapped peaks of the true northwest.
     
    -----It was not long before we made it to Forks, a small town made famous by its inclusion in the Twilight novels. Whether such fame is desirable might be a point of contention, but suffice it to say that Forks hasn’t gone crazy with it. The motel we are at does, however, include such a thing as a “Twilight room,” which vaguely disgusts me and I'm just pleased that we're not in it. At least there are no giant cardboard character cutouts. Being on solid ground for so long is as disorienting as getting on a ship for the first time; I’d become so accustomed to the gentle rocking that I’ve found myself swaying back and forth to accommodate a nonexistent tilt.
     
    -----Forks is one of those places that seems to lack an outer sense of civic pride. I’m almost certain that the only reason that the place is clean is because it constantly rains. When you look up the best place to eat in Forks, it tries to send you to a place thirty-odd miles away. Thus it was with trepidation that, after laundry, we went to eat at a local pizza place. Much like Haines, though their economy depends on tourism, they don’t seem particularly friendly as a group. Our pizza, when it arrived, was average. It was cooked all the way through, but the tomatoes tasted highly canned. As the locals poured in and the babies began to scream, we left for the next-door supermarket/hardware store for a replenishment of our water and Gatorade supplies, and we even found some of my dad's lovely favorite maple cookies, which we figured would only be found north of the border. (We got three boxes and have consumed one already.)
     
    -----Tomorrow: the Hoh Rainforest, one of the oldest in America, before making our way east to the state capital of Olympia.
  16. Sumiki

    Nap Time

    By Sumiki,

    -----We awoke at around 5:00 to a very bouncy ship. No storm was around us, but we’d entered choppier waters, unprotected by any islands to our west. We’d go up and down, squeaking on our mattresses as we went along, before things settled down a bit and we were able to continue to sleep.
     
    -----After breakfast, we came back to the cabin and continued to sleep, catching up on much-needed rest, until the afternoon, when we assembled some of our luggage for the afternoon car deck call. The car deck, which exists on the deck below the cabins, is generally closed unless the Malaspina is in port, but on days where there is no port of call, they open it on occasion. Dogs, cooped up in kennels down there, get fifteen minutes of activity about three times a day, and otherwise seem as miserable as their owners given their condition. The Alaska Marine Highway is not designed for pets and I question why any pet owner would subject their creatures to such conditions.
     
    -----An announcement came over the public address system informing all passengers of several humpback whales in the area, but by the time the interested passengers got to the observation deck towards the front of the ship, there was only driftwood and the occasional bird. The topsy-turvy ride earlier had slowed to smooth sailing as we got within the protection of Vancouver Island, of which British Columbia’s capital—Victoria—is at the southern end. We knew that the end of our oceanic journey was within reach.
     
    -----Dinner was a surprisingly good corned beef, although a bit streaked with fat in places. With an early morning, we got to bed for the final time ready for terra firma.
  17. Sumiki

    Ketch as Ketchikan

    By Sumiki,

    -----We’d reached Petersburg at 1:00 in the morning, and Wrangell at 5:00 in the morning, but I slept throughout. There is something calming about sleeping on a ship—the dull, interminable roar of the engines far away, murmuring through steel, the gentle rocking to and fro, enough to feel but not interfere, etc. My dad is a much lighter sleeper than I ever recall him being, having been awoken that morning by kids running around in the lounge area directly above our heads—as it turns out, spurred on by a distant whale. He explored the ship in the morning as my mom and I, one after the other, figured out how to get showers in an extremely narrow area, and how to dry off with towels only a hair larger than a standard hand towel. (Ill-advisedly, as it turned out.)
     
    -----11:45 was our expected arrival time in Ketchikan, the most promising port of call for those who wished to venture on terra firma. The downtown area is two miles from the port, and lo and behold, when we disembarked, various taxis were lined up! We grabbed one in order to maximize our precious time in the downtown, and our driver gave us restaurant recommendations while reminiscing about the days when Ketchikan wasn’t amongst the largest population centers in the state. The highway now runs a good ways around its island and features suburbs of mansions with wonderful views. He dropped us off at noon outside Annabelle’s, a seafood restaurant he highly recommended. My parents, who ate breakfast aboard the ship, each got the crab cake appetizer, while I got massive king crab tacos. I wouldn’t say that they were better than the halibut tacos of the Denali Park Salmon Bake, but they were certainly different and much easier to eat in a somewhat dignified way.
     
    -----The service was quite slow, so it took an while between entering and leaving, but we still had an hour to explore downtown Ketchikan. Tourists were everywhere, meandering around sidewalks and streets slowly, chatting loudly, and with no concern for the fact that yes, there were others there too. The cruise ships had docked, several end to end, right outside downtown, and they were hulks—like skyscrapers tipped over—who spewed endless numbers of people onto the already congested streets. Eagles could be seen soaring high overhead, not even having to flap their wings, as they hunted for their next fishy meal.
     
    -----Throngs of humanity aside, Ketchikan is a cute little town. Everything’s basically lined up on one road, and the further you go away from the harbor, the less crowded things get. There are a lot of shops, especially high-end ones; I was shocked by the sheer number of jewelry stores around the area. They definitely know the specific subset of tourists they attract.
     
    -----It was overcast, as it seemingly always is in the Alaskan Panhandle, but it wasn’t raining as we walked past the rows of shops, lush greenery, and totem poles, for which Ketchikan is highly regarded. My dad got a mighty chuckle out of several signs too bawdy for BZPower.
     
    -----With time to spare returning to the main street, where our taxi driver was scheduled to pick us up at 2:00, we ducked into several stores in an eventually successful pursuit of a Christmas ornament as well as a very fancy establishment that dealt in fine artistic imports from Russia, including large hand-painted wooden dolls that went for $6,000. Each item was intricately carved and colorfully painted, and it was a treat to be able to see them. (They even had Matryoshka dolls of professional sports teams that went five players deep.) One younger fellow who worked there followed us around the store and I’m inclined to think that he was keeping an eye on us given our wild beards.
     
    -----Ketchikan’s revitalization as a hub of tourist activity is a relatively recent phenomenon, as we got an impromptu history of the region from our cab driver, who hails from nearby Prince of Wales Island and who has been in Ketchikan since January 1989. The pulp mill that had dominated the economy for years finally shuttered its doors, and in 1997, it was thought that Ketchikan had no future. But they invested in one, and they got it, as the endless cruise ship tourists attest.
     
    -----Upon our return to the Malaspina, we went to the observation deck as we shoved off for international waters. To comply with the law, announcements came over the public address system calling for medically trained professionals to volunteer in the case of an emergency, as well as a general “what-to-do-if-something-should-befall-the-ship” talk. Somewhat disconcerting in the moment, but overall par for the course. The only wildlife we saw were birds, of which there were plenty of eagles. Others thought they caught sight of porpoises, but these unfailingly turned up to be either mirages of the surf or simply driftwood.
     
    -----It was once again nap time aboard the Malaspina, and my dad and I slept soundly as my mom—generally speaking, the preeminent taker of naps—stayed awake, taking pictures of lighthouses and potential critters, but while asleep, we missed very little. As the route between Ketchikan and Bellingham passes by Prince Rupert, British Columbia, my dad sleepily asked if we’d “seen the Tim Hortons sign yet” so we could “say goodbye to maple donuts.” We told him that we’d not yet caught sight of that community, and we passed it while snoozing.
     
    -----At close to 8:30, we decided that it was a good idea to go get something to eat. There is a yin and a yang to going to the galley late—on the one hand, they’re usually out of at least something by that point, but what’s left is usually given in enormous proportions. We’ve gotten to know the cooks, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Dom DeLuise, and he’s one of these big fellows who likes to exaggerate and poke fun at a lot of stuff and generally doesn’t take things too seriously … so when he said that he’d go two-for-one on the Hawaiian chicken burger special, I assumed that he was joking.
     
    -----He was not joking. Fortunately, the burgers—though served on truly immense buns—weren’t actually all that big, and my mom helped me dispatch them. My dad had cereal without milk, and—strange as it is to say—he seemed quite pleased with his dry crunching.
  18. Sumiki

    Russian to Action

    By Sumiki,

    -----We awoke hungry, and breakfast ended at 10:30. Our cabin and the entrance to the galley were pretty much on totally opposite ends of the ship, and it was thus to our advantage that the Malaspina is not a particularly long vessel.
     
    -----I remain nonplussed with the state of affairs when it comes to the operations of passenger services. Our breakfast was plentiful and tasted good … when we got it. There are too many options and the line takes forever to get through. But they piled the breakfast foods high and we came out as satisfied as we came in hungry. (Subsequent meals were timed so as to avoid this.)
     
    -----Our route, which had stopped in Juneau in the middle of the night—something I expected to at least jostle me awake, but one which I slept through—took us through narrows towards Sitka, one of the oldest settlements in Alaska, which served as the capital for the Russian operations before the Alaskan purchase. The Marine Highway was kicked out by the cruise ships to a dock a good seven miles out of down, and we were amongst the handful of Malaspina passengers to disembark in anticipation of somehow seeing the town.
     
    -----Sitka’s approach towards tourism, unfortunately, skirted something akin to what we’d witnessed in Haines in that they’ve always had it and take a lackadaisical approach to it with the idea that it’s always going to be there. The people at the ferry terminal had absolutely no clue what they were talking about, but knew a vague something about a bus that would be cheaper than a cab, and so we and another family got on the bus—once the bus found us, because while the bus stop exists, the sign certainly doesn’t. The bus driver mumbled his way through confusing answers to eminently straightforward questions, but we learned one extremely important thing: if we got off the bus, we’d have to take our chances on one of the cabs we’d been promised were everywhere but which turned out to be essentially nonexistent.
     
    -----The bus seemed to only care for the ferry terminal as an afterthought, as it served more to shuttle locals around town. The locals are friendlier to tourists than in Haines, perhaps because—as inefficient as their transportation options are—they do understand something about tourism as an industry. This is not to say that the six dollars we paid for the bus was wasted, as the time we had in Sitka was not extremely long for any sort of cab ride or tour. We got a view of the spread-out town with stops at grocery stores and downtown strips alike, and we caught glimpses of the famous Russian church architecture in the place they used to all “New Archangel.”
     
    -----The bus arrives back to the ferry terminal every thirteen minutes past the hour, and as we needed to get back on board at 2:00, our only choice was to stay on the bus as it completed its loop and traveled back to the terminal. We did so, and after some more ambling around, got back on the ship around 1:30. The car deck is the only way to get on and off, and while many cars were on board when we got on in Haines, only a fraction remained.
     
    -----Going out of Sitka took us back through the same narrows, and we admired the scenery from our window for a while. We ate lunch, where I satiated my inexplicable craving for chocolate milk, and thereafter napped. We saw some sea otters and a few pods of porpoises in the respite from the rain, but the rain came down again, as it always does. Dinner—if you can call it that—was simply some drinks from the galley and a few bites of a mediocre cheesecake amidst the bounding waves.
  19. Sumiki

    Setting Sail

    By Sumiki,

    -----Our Alaska Marine Highway ferry was scheduled to leave the dock at 5:00, and we wanted to be there early enough for its departure. But the vessels of the Highway are juggled early and often, and upon our confirmation, we learned that departure was actually 7:00. But it was better to be early than late, so we left Whitehorse—this time, for the final time—around 8:40 in the morning.
     
    -----The hour and a half of driving between Whitehorse and the next sign of human activity in Haines Junction was one which we’d already covered on the day we first entered Alaska, and it was a good chunk of the reason behind wanting to leave so early. A 14-kilometer section of badly damaged road and some of the worst loose gravel sections of the Alaska Highway were once again expertly navigated, though somewhat mitigated by the fact that they were doing some road work on the front half of things. When we stopped, the lady holding the stop/slow sign—replete in pink hard hat and yoga pants, with her lazy dog napping in the shade of a nearby car—approached each and every vehicle in line and cheerfully told all of us how long it’d be and how great it was that they had two pilot cars running. Truth be told, someone so friendly is in the wrong line of work.
     
    -----The cloudiness and the raininess that dominated our journey up the Alaska Highway had passed, leaving clear skies and views of the snowcapped peaks as we motored on to Haines Junction. We got gas in Haines Junction, at the same place as we did before, with the words of our secondary Arctic Circle tour guide ringing in our heads: “on the road to Haines, always get gas when you see it.”
     
    -----True to form, the first sign that greets you on the Haines Highway is one that warns of no services for the next 200 kilometers, and as far as lonely drives are concern, it’s practically a paved Top of the World. The route took us south through what remained of the Yukon, swerving into verdant valleys with mountaintops all around. It was well-paved, with only a few chipsealed sections to eradicate our complacency and serve as reminders of exactly how good it was to have legitimate pavement under our wheels once more.
     
    -----Few vehicles were coming from Haines, and even fewer were going in our direction, and as we passed into British Columbia, the scenery began to morph. As rain began to drizzle and snow encompassed the mountains, the landscape—now a rolling plateau—had frozen lakes and rivers just now feeling the thaw, and in every direction the snow lay in a patchwork of embankments “like spilled milk,” as my mom put it. As we reached the summit, we encountered a man who had gotten out of his truck who waved us down to ask if we had a spare gasoline tank. We told him that we didn’t, but that the RVs we passed earlier might be of help. What we soon learned is that, if he gave his vehicle a good push, he’d probably be able to coast the rest of the way.
     
    -----What comes up must come down, and coming down meant going through customs. They give travelers a good warning, but it’s not always wise to slow down to a stop while on a steep grade. The Canadian customs office was just around the turn, and we stopped at it only so my dad could get out and tell one of the officers about the guy out of gas at the top. A quarter of a mile down the road, we reached U.S. customs, where the guy there took one look at our passports, asked the mere basic questions in a monotone, and sent us on our way.
     
    -----Haines is regarded for the immense number of bald eagles that either live there year-round or make it home seasonally, and the “Welcome to Alaska” sign called the area “The Valley of the Eagles.” The road descended—gradually, now—alongside the Chilkat River. On either side, mountains shot straight up. We’re not at the right time of year for the tens of thousands of eagles, but we did see a handful of them soaring above our heads as we came into town.
     
    -----Haines, as it turns out, is a rather sleepy little place. Like many places in the Alaskan southeast, it receives quite a bit of rain, and I don’t think it’s quite stopped drizzling since we exited Canada for the final time. The Marine Highway used to be nearer to the town centers for each of its ports of call, but recent decades of increasing cruise ship activity necessitated shuffling the workaday Marine Highway to the side in favor of the massive vessels that pump money into the economy. In Haines, the port is about three miles from the center of town, so we ended up going into town for some lunch.
     
    -----The place we ended up going to, nestled near the harbor at the end of the road, was one that I had reservations about upon first sighting it. There was something fishy, and I don’t mean what was in the fryer. Though lunchtime, there was only one other car parked outside, and they had a phenomenal view. The interior was clean—though old and slanted somewhat—but smelled like some kind of diluted cleaning fluid.
     
    -----We went in because we’d already parked and my dad badly needed something to eat beyond what we had in the car, and we ended up all splitting an appetizer sampler platter where the shrimp was the only halfway decent thing. It was one of those places that gets by solely on the backs of deep-frying everything they serve into utter submission, and upon unwary travelers like us—and on the one day we didn’t do our research, at that! The calamari came in flat sticks, the chicken wings were more sad than anything else, and the mozzarella sticks tasted like they were straight out of an Italian nightmare, as most of the cheese had disintegrated in the frying process and the result were mostly empty husks of solidified frying material.
     
    -----As it turned out, we would find out later that it is considered to be, by far, the worst restaurant in Haines. But we didn’t contract any illnesses and it was enough of a caloric intake to get us around. Our next stop was the visitor center, where the lady who was supposed to be knowledgable knew absolutely nothing. But Haines is a small place, so after about a minute of driving we arrived in historic Fort Seward, where old Army headquarters have been updated and refurbished to serve as a hotel and some lodgings. The fort was one of the military posts in Alaska and policed the gold rushes into the area.
     
    -----With several hours to spend, we meandered our way through Haines again and towards the Marine Highway terminal, where we went in to confirm our reservations. When we’d booked last winter, they’d not only had us boarding at an earlier time, but on an entirely different ship. Later, this was changed with the same route, only changing ships in Ketchikan. Now, we’re entirely on the different ship, as the one in our original reservation is still being prepared for the season. All of this led to some disorganization, so we thought it best to make sure we were still good to go and to generally scout the place out.
     
    -----The terminal is well-organized and the employees inside the deserted lobby confirmed that we were still good to go at 7:00, as the latest info says. We saw our ship already docked, with the waters it was in—constituting a truly massive fjord—absolutely pristine and absolutely stunning. What wasn’t a mountain was a rainforest, and what wasn’t either were the waters of the fjord.
     
    -----With several hours still to go and absolutely nothing else to do, we washed the car and then found the Haines Borough Public Library, which was—in one of these recent years—voted one of the best small libraries in the United States. It’s got a quaint interior and free—but slow—Wi-Fi.
     
    -----After leaving the Haines Library, we wandered around Haines and got to a place called Mountain Market for a bite of proper dinner before boarding the MV Malaspina. Though ranked highly amongst the Haines restaurants, we soon discovered that a) it’s more of a coffee bar and dessert place whose sandwiches are an afterthought at best, b) it’s half grocery store anyway, and c) those who ran the place were infinitely more interested in speaking to old locals than to give half a glance to any newcomers. Our sandwiches were as bland as they were hard to bite through. The peanut butter chocolate brownie was the only remotely exciting thing there, and though it began life on our taste buds as if it were chocolate fudge with peanut butter cookie dough atop, by the time we finished with it, it was positively repulsive.
     
    -----We went all the way to one end of Haines and then all the way to the other, and the more we saw, the less we thought. Other towns nestled in the Inside Passage are more keen to advertise their wares, but Haines is just sort of … there. There’s just not much to it, and those who lived there don’t seem to have any sense of civic pride. After we got gas for the final time before driving onto the Malaspina, my dad said that “the food isn’t something I’d feed to a praying mantis.”
     
    -----We arrived at the port at 6:30, and we rearranged the car in the misty rain as those around us filled into the loading lanes. The Malaspina was supposed to leave at 7:00, but was nowhere in sight by 7:15, so after my dad entertained us with his patent-pending moose impression before my mom and I went inside the terminal and inquired about the status. As we did so, the Malaspina came into view, cruising in from Skagway before coming to a stop in the dock.
     
    -----We waited for a long while as the vast innards of the vehicle bay spurted out RV after RV after camper van after RV, and finally, several attendants came around who looked at the signs in our windshields telling them of our destinations and told us to wait for directions. The loading process was very quick, as the crew made up for their lost time by packing vehicles in to several inches of each other in spots.
     
    -----It took two trips to get our stuff from the back of the ship to the front of the ship, for as it happened, we were bequeathed one of the very front cabins on board. It was snug, to be sure, but roomier than I expected. It was clean, with a bolted-down table on one end and four chairs aside, with two sets of bunk beds. I took one of the top ones to satisfy a long desire to sleep in a top bunk. Our windows, though equipped with a sign reminding us to close them at night so as not to interfere with the night vision, afforded a wonderful view of whatever happened to be to our front right.
     
    -----The Malaspina has a lot of stuff on board, and even though it’s one of the original ships in the fleet and thus showing its age when it comes to the amenities, the accommodations are pleasant. After exploring, we went out onto the deck and watched, with the wind in our faces, as the Malaspina set off from Haines, and went to bed content with our activity for the day.
  20. Sumiki
    -----It was a pleasant night's sleep in Dawson City and we awoke refreshed enough to leave at 11:00 sharp. On the way out of the hotel, we talked to one of the owners, who was doing housekeeping work and was telling us of the meat he was smoking for the night's dinner. One short scenic drive about town later, and we found ourselves on Front Street, which morphed into the Klondike Highway as we exited the city. It's one of the Yukon's most memorable places, to be sure, though hard to get to as it may be.
     
    -----In the pantheon of wondrous roads the northwest has to offer, the Klondike Highway cannot rightfully take its place amongst them. It was chipsealed all the way down, with promised gravel breaks that never materialized but unpromised potholes that did. Swerving to avoid them and scanning for wildlife were perhaps the only things to do on much of the drive. In Alaska, such a route would doubtless pass through tiny communities or hermit families with trash astrewn about their claims, but the Yukon is fundamentally different in that there was just flat nothing but forest and a single line of telephone poles running for miles and miles on end.
     
    -----There are tiny communities: Stewart Crossing, where the highway known as the Silver Trail peels off and advertisements for the absurdly tiny towns of Keno and Mayo may be seen, Pelly Crossing, home to the Selkirk First Nation, and Carmacks, where the Robert Campbell Highway peels off bound for Watson Lake. These are all very much blink-and-you'll-miss-them kinds of places save for their one commonality beyond mere existence on what is otherwise a dreadfully deserted route: they all were located at the bases of some very large hills, which decreased their speed limits beyond what was feasible as you descended.
     
    -----We topped off the gas tank in Stewart Crossing and Carmacks to be on the safe side, as has been our custom; only a handful of times has the gauge fallen below half of a tank. Aside from these, we got out once more just beyond Carmacks to the Montague Roadhouse, which was one of the original stops along the overland trail along much of the same route as the modern Klondike. Nowadays, it's nothing more than a large log cabin husk, but it's well-preserved and acts as one of the last remaining relics of the old trail.
     
    -----It was two hours between Carmacks and Whitehorse, and the road surface had improved from the potentially car-busting potholes we'd threaded earlier. The scenery also improved as we went on a bit of a ridge and saw beautiful glittering lakes to our west. The last of these lakes was Lake Laberge, made famous by its "Labarge" misspelling in "The Cremation of Sam McGee." (It's not your traditional lake, either—rather, it's just a place where the Yukon river widens in both directions by several kilometers.) It completed what I've come to call our "Sam McGee Loop," as we began with the Sam McGee cabin in Whitehorse, Robert Service's cabin in Dawson City, and now the lake.
     
    -----Returning to Whitehorse made us feel at home, in an odd way, and after checking in, we went out again on a mission of errands where we were surprised to find out how well we knew how to get around. The first place we considered eating was a donair shop, but it was attached to an expansive liquor store and there were some rugged loiterers on the premises, so we went around a ways to a place called Giorgio's Cuccina, which was a blend of various Mediterranean cuisines. My parents both got the chicken souvlaki, which they enjoyed so much that they didn't even as much as offer to trade bites—as is their custom—for a sample of my excellent lamb souvlaki. Mine was tender and moist and cooked to a perfect medium, with vegetables—which included brussels sprouts and beets—that were nicely seasoned, and roasted Yukon gold potatoes spiced with oregano and probably something else, but by the time I got around to figuring it out, I'd cleaned my plate.
     
    -----Our remaining Canadian currency needed to somehow be spent, so after paying for part of the meal in Canada's wonderful semi-transparent scratch-and-sniff bills, our next stop was ... Wal-Mart. We've gone to more Wal-Marts in Canada than in much of any other time in my entire life, and we went in there primarily for those maple cookies that my dad has been raving about getting since we left Whitehorse the first time. They didn't have them, but they had chocolate chip of the same brand, which is his second-favorite. We got a few other items for the Alaska Marine Highway and then got the final gas of the day.
     
    -----Leaving the gas station led us to an intersection, and we waited at the red light for an absolutely inordinate amount of time before my mom's voice floated out of the backseat with the suggestion that my dad hop out of the car, run over to the sidewalk, hit the "push to walk" button, and then run back to the car in time for us to roll. A short while later, my dad did just that: hopping out, jogging over, slapping silly every button he could find, and then prancing back to the car just in time for the green light. We wanted to turn left at that intersection for the express purpose of finding a car wash, as the vehicle was never cleaned after going on the Top of the World and the Klondike just served to increase the filth levels. We were led to an industrial area, with oil tanks shaped like enormous golf balls, free and clear of all other human activity because it was a Sunday evening ... and not a car wash within sight.
     
    -----Now, what you must understand about this entire journey—basically since we left Carmacks—was that my dad was absolutely entranced with the concept of eating a Tim Hortons maple donut. It stuck with him since his last morsel in Fort Nelson, BC, and as we checked off things to get and do, he got increasingly bouncy. So when we got to the crucial intersection, with Tim Hortons at the bottom of the hill and our hotel at the top, I was surprised to hear him direct me to turn to go up the hill. I looked at him square in the eyes and uttered the immortal line: "don't you want your donut?" This got him so excited that he told me to turn left at every available opportunity, even though the first few left turns would not have gotten us to the Tim Hortons with any alacrity. During this, his mile-a-minute pace included a bit of quixotic illogic that went along the lines of "I was so excited thinking about the donut that I forgot about the donut."
     
    -----We did, indeed, reach the Tim Hortons, and we brought our trio of donuts back to the room. My dad did a little dance as he pranced around eating his, and a short while later, the car was indeed cleaned ... at a cleaner just adjacent to our hotel.
     
    -----Tomorrow: back to Haines Junction and on to Haines itself as we leave Canada for the final time en route to the Alaska Marine Highway. With no Internet access at sea, entries may be sporadic until we reach the contiguous 48 in Bellingham, Washington.
  21. Sumiki

    On Top of the World

    By Sumiki,

    -----Due to the lateness of the hour in getting back from dinner at Fast Eddy's and repacking the vehicle, we abandoned the idea of getting up early enough to be at the border crossing when they opened. Instead, we invested in a good night's sleep and showered in the morning to prepare for a difficult day on some of the most treacherous sections of road this side of the Arctic Circle. We knew what lay ahead and we came prepared, and so we left Tok bound for Tetlin Junction, once again rejoining the Alaska Highway, but going east instead of west.
     
    -----Tetlin Junction is the crossroads with the Taylor Highway, which had a road surface that looked like a quilt from a distance. Different layers of gravel breaks and chipseal dotted the path, but the frost heaves didn't cause full-on breaks in the pavement and the gravel breaks weren't close to the Alaska Highway nonsense. The Taylor Highway connects the town of Eagle—the home of our Arctic Circle tour guide—to the Alaska Highway. We did not go through Eagle—as it was a good sixty miles north on the Taylor past our split-off—but we did go through the town of Chicken.
     
    -----The Taylor was paved in its unusually patchwork manner for sixty miles of wild forested wilderness, but the pavement ended six miles south of Chicken, which is the only place in the world named Chicken. The road work they were doing got so bad that the pilot car flew through while I attempted to follow without going into a pit or a car-sized rut or scrape the undercarriage or hit any of the completely oblivious eighteen-wheelers who motioned as if I had room on the soft shoulder when I really didn't. We peeled off in Chicken to find it—quite unsurprisingly—nearly deserted.
     
    -----Chicken has seven people and a gigantic metal statue of a chicken made out of spare metal bits and bobs. It's not even given the vaunted status of unincorporated community; it's a census-designated place, right alongside crossroads with derelict roadhouses. Yet looking at the sprawling Chicken—after all, there's lots of room to grow in the middle of absolute nowhere—one would think that it has several dozen. There's old mining equipment, including a massive gold dredge. Each little patch of the town claims to attract viewers with an Authentic Chicken Experience, and these patches include Chicken, Downtown Chicken, Chicken Historic District, and—presumably—Fried Chicken if you squint hard enough. (Where's Colonel Sanders when you need him?)
     
    -----The dust blew up off of the Taylor Highway and the all-but-deserted parking lots of Chicken as we admired the sign, grimaced at the latrines—for there is no running water on the Taylor—and got pictures with the Enormous Chicken. While this is truly an chicken of magnificent proportions, it—incredibly—wasn't the only gigantic chicken on display. No, we were in Chicken—or was it the Chicken Historic District?—and when we went probably no less than a hundred yards to Downtown Chicken, we were met with a large wooden specimen under which my mom posed as if in imminent danger of being crushed.
     
    -----Downtown Chicken has three storefronts (gift shop, saloon, and cafe) and operates a gas station, and they're all run by the same old kooky lady who used to live there all year but now only comes and bakes her "world famous" pies during the summer months. The disparate parts of Chicken are held together by the sinew of being a tourist trap of a gold rush town that never quite died off, and I'll readily agree to the fact that it has some level of unique charm to its slanted storefronts and windswept latrines, all watched over by one great flightless metal beast of a bird who cares not for who rightfully may claim the disputed title of "Original Chicken."
     
    -----The money we'd usually set aside for lunch ended up getting spent at the highly interesting gift shop. We're still ahead of Chicken's tourist season—thank goodness we've beaten the tour buses some place—and I can see how they make their living. It was one of the more interesting gift shops I've been in, as long as you could keep your footing even on the tilted plywood. You name it, they had it: a Bigfoot pennant (which we didn't get), fake road signs (some of them quite crude), hats (your choice of roughly 75 dozen varieties), and all manner of chicken-related socks, of all things.
     
    -----We checked out and then decided to top off the tank with gas, as Chicken makes for the last stop before Dawson City, 108 miles east. Our seventy-odd miles from Tok didn't take us much fuel at all, and when my dad went in to pay for it, the cashier guy's calculator broke and he was unable to make change for a twenty without my dad having to spell it out for him. As such, we elected to ignore his advice about the road ahead, especially since he freely admitted to never driving the Chicken-Dawson route. (Sad.)
     
    -----We got back on the Taylor Highway, and it proved to be the worst and most miserable twenty-two miles to the Jack Wade junction, where the Taylor splits off towards Eagle and the famous Top of the World Highway begins. All manner of narrow twisting gravelly washboard-prone unpaved curviness made this route a treacherous one, and it was all eyes on the road for every mile. At around 25 MPH—the fastest safe speed—we were still passed by several locals. It took us about an hour to safely complete, though a respite was welcome when the highway paralleled Jack Wade creek for a spell.
     
    -----The entire region is still actively mined for gold, and we saw everything from "No Trespassing" signs to heavy machinery to roads cut up steep hillsides to some older fellows panning for gold in the creek. On the flat sections, the gravel and dirt compacts, leaving a dusty but quite smooth surface. It got worse again as we approached Jack Wade hill and the junction of the same name, but once we left the Taylor Highway and were on the Top of the World, it lived up to its name in every way—about which, more later.
     
    -----The Top of the World Highway is only officially named as such in the Yukon Territory, the United States section is officially the Boundary Spur Road. Nevertheless, we were now officially on the ridge line, and we would continue to be so for about eighty miles, through absolute wilderness. The Boundary Spur was not just paved, it was well-paved, proving to be one of the best and smoothest in the entire state, strangely enough. After about a dozen miles, we saw a complex of green-roofed houses on the next hill: the customs station.
     
    -----The route through from Tok to Dawson is open conditionally, and one of these conditions is that the border station has to be open for business. They are, for twelve hours, between 8AM-8PM Alaska time and 9-9 Pacific. It constitutes the northernmost border crossing of its kind in the world, and the only one between the US and Canada where the two groups of officers share the same building. It's so incredibly remote that quarters are provided on-site.
     
    -----We talked for a bit to the Canadian border patrol guy, who clearly needed some folks to talk to as much as we needed intel regarding the route ahead. As it turns out, while US agents serve on month-long shifts—as the I-drove-a-motorcycle-to-Prudhoe-Bay guy told us when we initially crossed into Alaska—the Canadian officers are there for the duration of the open months: May to September. There's not a lot of traffic on the road, but he told us that he never tired of the view—and how could you? He also gave us the numbers of the RCMP detachment in Dawson City as well as two wrecker companies should the worst befall us.
     
    -----Re-entering the Yukon was bittersweet, but we know that we've not seen the last of Alaska on this journey, and so we pressed on across the Top of the World—and how we seemed to soar above the mountaintops! It was initially built to supply Dawson City during World War II, and it's one of those roads that would never otherwise even be remotely considered for construction. To accelerate construction, the crews went where the trees weren't so plentiful and cut it across the ridge instead of the valley. For every minute of this remarkable drive, we were struck with vistas in every direction, from the verdant trees that went on and over the grand hills for as far as the eye could see, to the snowcapped peaks of a mountain range that stuck to our north the entire time. Occasionally, more mining claims could be seen, but these were so few that their activities—however ambitious—couldn't tarnish the beauty.
     
    -----Part of the wonder of the road is that it seemed almost natural, like a ridge in and of itself along the mountains. While seeing a distant part of the road we are to travel is a common enough occurrence to be almost old hat around these parts, the Top of the World's route truly snakes, meandering seamlessly yet aimlessly hither and thither to the point that many more miles of it could be seen than, say, the Alaska Highway at its most vast and wandering moments. Its name speaks for itself; its needs no appellation after some otherwise long-forgotten figure of Northern history.
     
    -----The road was chipsealed around twenty years ago, but the Yukon government never invested in it since—citing a lack of travelers, most likely—and so the pavement, aside from a scant few spots, has reverted back to its natural state of gravel. Yet in the pantheon of awful things that can happen on unpaved surfaces, none did on the Top of the World, and the road—though difficult in nature—was about the best that you could expect under the circumstances. Its remoteness and its difficult western terminus meant that this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime drives, and we rightfully savored everything we could.
     
    -----The final kilometers of the Top of the World took us off of the ridge as we could catch glimpses of Dawson City—or the Town of the City of Dawson, officially—as we kept going. The pavement began again moments before we had to stop as the road ended at the Yukon River. Across the river was Dawson, and the vehicles were lines up to take folks across on the George Black Ferry, which rumbled and roared across the mighty Yukon and used its flow to reorient itself to pick up and drop off passengers.
     
    -----It wasn't a great deal of time before the ferry came back our way and we were waved on. Though it is a rather large vessel, capable of accommodating heavy loads, it does not appear to be of great strength against the roaring Yukon when you're actually on the thing; on the contrary, though it's metal, it seems almost rickety. It's a surreal experience, getting dragged across the water like that, towards a hillside-nestled town that seemingly hasn't changed since the gold rush.
     
    -----Dawson City is not a large place, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in absolute adorability. There's not a modern building in sight; everything's wooden slats or log cabins, and the older the building, the more slanted it seems to be. We even went past an abandoned church that still seemed absolutely fine save for the fact that it looked like it'd been twisted several different directions at once. There is only one paved street in Dawson, but we were experts at this unpaved business and presently arrived at our hotel.
     
    -----The back of our vehicle is an absolute mess, as the dust and grime thrown up by the Top of the World stuck in some places and made to run—only to cake on—by the fluid of the rear wiper. The end result was that it looked like a giant had had a few too many drinks and the result was the rear end, but we still fared better than many of the other folks driving around—and we certainly outpaced the completely caked Arctic Circle van.
     
    -----Our hotel is run by several European immigrants who run things in an extremely clean way. One removes one's shoes in the foyer and carries them to a storage closet. The main level is dominated by a communal kitchen and several seating areas, with the bulk of the rooms in the winding upstairs. The rooms themselves are pristine, but everything is small; my mom sat down in the rocking chair and declared it the seat of Papa Elf. The beds don't even approach the level of my knee, and the night stands, chairs, and bathroom levels are all to that scale. The ceiling is quite high, but I'm not sure if that's an optical illusion with the dollhouse furniture or if it really is high up.
     
    -----The adjoining restaurant is highly thought of, and we all got some meat: My mom some pork and my dad and I some steaks. Their collection of steak sauces was quite broad and all of them were in-house concoctions, and I got the red wine gravy while my dad went for something mushroom-based, as he got mashed potatoes. We split a Toblerone caramel cheesecake for dessert, and it was heavenly. A lot of places serve a fluffy cheesecake, but this had a truly creamy texture.
     
    -----We re-donned our shoes and struck out on the town. Dawson is so small that it's only eight or so streets deep until you get to the base of the cliffs, and from our hotel it took almost no time to go past the colorful houses towards the Robert Service cabin. It's closed save for viewing and demonstrations, which only happen around the early afternoon, but it was still unlocked and we were free to walk up to the rickety log building. Not too far down the road lay the equally closed Jack London cabin, and London's poorer background and failure as a prospector was evident in his digs when compared to Service's.
     
    -----Our remaining excursion was dedicated to wandering quasi-aimlessly around the city, towards the Yukon River and into some of the few shops still open. At 9:00, most establishments—save those who served alcohol—were closed, a fact which dawned on us as we wandered back through the town and eventually back to our shoeless hotel. Our room, in the intervening time, had turned into a bona fide oven on account of there not being air conditioning, and so much thought has been put into proper fan placement and alignment.
     
    -----Tomorrow: southbound again, as we return to Whitehorse on the Klondike Highway.
  22. Sumiki

    Feeling Cutoff

    By Sumiki,

    -----We got to bed fairly early last night as my dad regaled us with one of his signature stories—this time, concerning one Ethel Shmütz—a human with an avocado for a head—and her penchant for vacuuming people's mushrooms. When we awoke, my parents wandered off to find some kind of breakfast at one of the establishments in the vast building, only to find tour bus people withreservations who still had wait times. They ended up going to a fantastically overpriced Starbucks and brought back some muffins.
     
    -----After packing up most of our belongings, we decided to take advantage of three free tram tickets that we'd gotten upon check-in. The ritzy Alyeska area is highly prized for its skiing and was even once considered a selling point for a potential Anchorage Olympic bid, and as such there are two air trams that go up over 2,000 feet in the span of roughly five minutes. It was like something out of a Roger Moore Bond film. (Moonraker and Live and Let Die are some of my dad's guilty pleasures.) Being avalanche season, the hiking trails and skiing opportunities were both closed off, leaving only a few overlooks and a gift shop open at the top.
     
    -----I was expecting more swinging and swaying on the ride, but the trams were large enough and stabilized by enough thick metal cables at the top to make it a significant—and much appreciated—step down the potential-vertigo ladder from the disorienting Kenai Fjords boat. As we saw the hotel get smaller and smaller, and the people outside become undetectable to the naked eye, we were pretty much there.
     
    -----The views from the ride were epic, but the top was outright spectacular. From the snowcapped terminus, we could spot hanging glaciers behind us and the entire quasi-town of Girdwood laid out in front. Ahead of the natural bowl in which Girdwood is located was the thin strip of the Seward Highway and the soon-to-be-rapidly-filling Turnagain Arm behind. Being well within the mountains was peaceful, but looking back down along the tramline really emphasized how far up we really were.
     
    -----The air trams run every fifteen minutes, and we'd planned to be up there for that period of time, but we were so taken by the scenery that we entirely skipped that one and spend a full half-hour at the top. I quite wish we'd had more time at the place, at both ends of the tramline, in order to properly explore; though somewhat uppity in attitude amongst the more affluent clientele, it's hard not to be bowled over by the beauty enough to look past it. Yet not enough snow has melted for the trails that somehow offer even greater views to be hiked, so I suppose any return trip will have to see us arrive smack-dab in the middle of tourist season. (My dad, for his part, is already talking about the next Alaska trip. So much of his concern lay in his previous horrid memories of the Alaska Highway, and now he's looking forward to driving the whole thing again.)
     
    -----The ride back was a bit scarier as we stared down at the now-tiny hotel towards which we would be descending, but we were—magically—the only ones on the tram, and so we asked the tram operator a few questions to pass the time and not make it an awkward ride. The massive wheels and gears clunked and whirled their way into action at the top, and before long, we were at the bottom. We didn't have long to check out after this, so we rushed back to the room, grabbed our bags, and whirled out the front door past fancy cars with open food containers left outside, reinforcing that being born with a silver spoon does not equate to any level common sense around bear country. We absconded before the larger wildlife caught its scent.
     
    -----There is—or at least, there seems to be—more road construction per mile on the tiny Alyeska Highway leading into Girdwood than on many other of the state's highways combined. The amount of tourist money pumped into what is a truly minuscule (by Alaskan standards) road really shows that the government puts their money where the money is. Between it and the Kenai Peninsula and there's much, much more road work—and better roads where there isn't road work—than much of the rest of the state. (About which, more later.)
     
    -----It took about as much time to get out of the few miles of the Girdwood area as it took to get from there to Anchorage proper. We marveled at the rushing inflow of Turnagain Arm at around noontime, stopping once in an eventually fruitless attempt to get a better glimpse at about ten Dall sheep perched nearly on top of the nearly straight-up peaks to the opposite side. It wasn't too long before our second attempt—this time, more well-informed—at getting to Flattop Mountain, where we'd previously encountered signs for death-defying (or death-inviting) grades. This time, we took the next road up, and though the roads were still fairly steep, it was nothing like the winding mountainousness with which we'd had to previously contend.
     
    -----There was a short trail to the overlook near Flattop Mountain, and the views were stunning. All of Anchorage was visible, with the Knik and Turnagain arms snaking around it. Despite its feeling as a metropolis, by area it's still mostly greenery. But what we really came for were the mountains, and on a clear day they did not disappoint. Far to the left, standing by itself, was Mount Iliamna, the peak well over 100 miles away that dominated the sky during our journey to Homer. The Talkeetna range loomed large, as did Mount Susitna (the one they call the Sleeping Lady). But as we scanned north, one mountain stood above its foothills and above the meek clouds: Denali. We'd not gotten a good look at it from within the park, but now it was showing its full splendor.
     
    -----We understandably took a while at the peak, attempting to get a good picture and eventually getting to talking to a couple from Rhode Island. But the road called, and we had a long way to go in order to reach Tok before the moose came out to play in full force.
     
    -----Our route meandered around the road work through Anchorage and eventually got us back to Palmer, where—on the southern outskirts—we ate at a place called the Noisy Goose Cafe. Though highly ranked within the annals of Palmer restaurants, its claim to fame probably should begin and end with its humorous signs tacked helter-skelter upon the walls. My mom and I played it safe with what turned out to be a mediocre club sandwich, while my dad's halibut was apparently so inedible that he picked at it for several minutes before wolfing down a quarter of each of the club sandwiches. It's one of those classic serve-everything diners, which makes for a place where any one thing is only going to be serviceable. That said, the fact that its overall mediocrity made it one of the worst meals is a testament to how well we've eaten overall in a land where I was promised car sleeping and beanie-weenies.
     
    -----The road out from Palmer took us through an epic and winding mountain road called the Glenn Highway, featuring such hits as: hairpin turns with 7% grades up and down, the extraordinarily large Matanuska Glacier, passing lanes where not needed and then none for twenty miles when they are, and many more. This led us all the way to the tiny town of Glennallen. I don't know who Glenn is, and I don't know who Allen is either, but it was a place to get gas, so I thank them both for whatever it is they might have done in that middle-of-nowhere accidental crossroads. After gas, we stopped in at an IGA store to get some caffeinated drinks, but a little while afterwards we found that my dad's Mountain Dew simply would not budge open, and it felt like my thumb was about to pop straight off in the exertion. Examining the problem showed that the screwtop was entirely stuck on, and it took a Swiss Army knife to eventually pry it open once we got to Tok—but by that point, it was too late to be of any use until tomorrow.
     
    -----We went north on the Richardson Highway from Glennallen until we reached the very poorly signed turn to the Tok Cutoff. It should have been a portent of things to come that, in the annals of the epic names bequeathed these few but mighty roads, one and only one was given such a poor, blunt, and entirely unsatisfactory name as "Tok Cutoff." By the first several miles in, we were asking ourselves what in the world we'd plunged into, as there were more gravel breaks than traditionally paved surface, frost heaves so heavy and so ill-patched that they created full-on road fault lines which had to be stopped at in order to proceed over safely (but never comfortably). and signs every few hundred yards that said either "road damage" or "loose gravel" with little in the way of rhyme or reason with regard to the actual conditions. The only consolations were that a) the moose weren't going to emerge until much later, b) we had no real time crunch, and c) the gravel breaks were much more well packed-down than the truly loose gravel of the Alaska Highway. There's such a vast difference that we were actually able to go pretty much the same speed on these gravel breaks without any significant difference in how they felt under the car—which is saying as much for the gravel as the chipseal used to pave the roads in these parts. A certain amount of bumpiness is to be expected, and if our tour to the Arctic Circle was any indication, the unpaved is superior to the paved and unmaintained.
     
    -----Roughly the first half of the 120-mile Tok Cutoff was in this bouncy and patchy shape, but we managed through it without any hassle as there was hardly another vehicle in sight. No one passed us going at physics-breaking speeds and only a handful of others were coming from Tok. The moose were not yet loose, and though we anticipated returning to Tok at 9:30, we rolled into Fast Eddy's Restaurant at 8:30, unpacked our bags, and split a pizza at the restaurant, intentionally ordering a medium to split in order to have leftovers available for breakfast tomorrow. Though Eddy's serves a mean breakfast, 6:00 is a little too late an opening for our epic morrow. (The medium at Fast Eddy's is a large almost anywhere else. I daren't think what their idea of a large really is.)
     
    -----At a little after 11:00, a rainbow from a southeastern raincloud was illuminated by the light of the sunset, giving the lower half of the majestic bow a nearly uniform red tint, though upon closer examination the colors could still be visible. We even repacked the vehicle, as it's the last time we'll have a chance to do so prior to our return to the contiguous 48.
     
    -----Tomorrow: the only time on this entire trip that we'll intentionally traverse unpaved roads as we go across the northernmost land border crossing in the world on the famous Top of the World Highway bound for Dawson City.
  23. Sumiki

    Don't Rock the Boat

    By Sumiki,

    -----It was get-up-and-go from our hotel to the departure point for our tour boat around Kenai Fjords National Park. We had to be there at 7:00 for boarding at 7:30 for an eventual departure at 8:00. Our tour took us through the waters around Seward, and the wildlife we saw was impeccable: a dozen-odd sea otters (one of which had napped all the way to much deeper waters), several pods of orcas who crested early and often around and under the ship, several humpback whales who displayed their tails for us as they dove deep, a score of sea lions, and a few seals. Our captain stopped for a great while during these sightings, and after a few minutes without running engines, the boat really started to rock. This wasn't much fun, but no one suffered ill effects, as getting the boat moving at its maximum speed of roughly 22 knots mitigated the impossible-to-walk-on-straight tilting.
     
    -----The coolest (pun intended) part of the journey was Holgate Glacier, whose massive ice face flows six feet per day off the Harding Icefield. While many of the glaciers have receded in recent decades due to the effects of a gradually warming climate, it doesn't diminish their awesome power. The captain rolled up perhaps a mile away, and yet the deep creaking and crackling of the glacier made it as if a scene from an alien world. Seeing what appeared to be small chunks of ice calve off and fall to the sea, only to hear an epic and thunderous thud moments later, gave a sense of scale to the place. The frigid wind sweeping off of the glacier blew in our faces, but yet we persevered in order to catch a glimpse of the next big calve.
     
    -----Because of the unusual abundance of wildlife, we got back to Seward closer to 3:00 than our expected arrival time of 2:00, but we had no other place to be than up to Girdwood—specifically, the Double Musky Inn. My dad has been talking about the Double Musky since I can remember, and from the well-worn 30-year-old cookbook at home came the recipe for shrimp étouffée, which he was obsessed with ordering since we first started planning this Alaska journey in earnest. We got to Girdwood at 4:30, a half-hour before the Double Musky opened, so we decided to check into our hotel before doubling back in the small community. (Interestingly, Girdwood isn't even a town, but rather is incorporated within Anchorage despite being nearly an hour's drive further south.)
     
    -----Enter the tour buses. We'd seen our fair share of these around Alaska, but it's past Memorial Day and into June and so there were several parked in front, blocking vehicles from entering. The lines to check in at the short-staffed front desk grew massive, and when we finally reached our room, we walked past a team of housekeepers who—at 5:00—were just now getting to third-floor rooms. It's nice in as far as accommodations are concerned, but the manner in which things are run leaves something to be desired.
     
    -----We showered for the first time in several days and were able to drive back down to the Double Musky at around 6:00. The small eclectic interior is adorned with tiny signs and tchotchkes from turn-of-the-century soda advertisements to coasters advertising German beers to—of course—all manner of cajun paraphernalia. It's tightly packed and they were running as if short-staffed due to the number of people they cram in, but hey—at least we got in ahead of influx of the tour buses.
     
    -----My dad ordered his beloved étouffée, and said that it was spicy but excellent. My mom got an appetizer of crab cakes (which were very spicy) and myself perhaps the blandest (and worst) thing on the menu in the beef tip appetizer. I'd not eaten solid food in about 48 hours save for a few granola bars on the ship, and I was loathe to introduce anything remotely spicy to my system. I ate about half of it, but mainly just enjoyed the look on my dad's face as he savored his étouffée, which he reported as being the same as my mom's recreation save for the fact that it was laced with hot sauce and thus significantly spicier. (Thank goodness for Zantac.) Dessert—of which I partook a single bite—was "cajun delight," and it was basically cream-flavored air.

    -----Tomorrow: we return to Tok, as the journey back to the Yukon begins.
  24. Sumiki

    Homer Hospitality

    By Sumiki,

    -----I awoke in Homer with a horrid stomach ache a little before 6:00 in the morning, and though I got up with the intention of somehow distracting myself, before long, my gastrointestinal tract had simply had enough. My growing and legitimate concern over potential dehydration led us to the hospital in Homer.
     
    -----The hospital was very new, very nice, and very well-staffed in their emergency room, where I was given two liters of fluid as well as some nausea medication. They ran several tests and the best diagnosis they could come up with was a 24-hour norovirus which has been going around several Alaskan communities. Nasty, yes—but over and done very soon. I already felt a bit better by the time we left the ER, but we'd checked out of our hotel and were understandably nervous about getting all the way to Seward, so we found another hotel closer to the hospital. I slept there for about four hours straight, putting a solid dent in my sleep deprivation and going a long way towards getting my guts back to normal.
     
    -----After some discussion and debate, we decided to head on to Seward. I continued to rest and nap in the backseat as much as I was able, and our 8:30 PM departure meant that there were a lot of moose. It seemed like every couple of hundred yards, my parents would say "moose," and sure enough, one of them would be standing up on the side of the road, eating some plants without a care in the world.
     
    -----The sun stayed up for a long, long time as we headed north and then east to Soldotna, where my parents got some fries from McDonalds for sustenance. The sun had not yet set at 10:30 when we pressed on through Soldotna through what remained of the Sterling Highway until its reconnection with the Seward Highway.
     
    -----The southernmost portion of the Seward Highway was simply the most gorgeous drive. The sun finally set, but the illumination from the endless twilight bathed the mountains and lakes in the most wonderful light. It was so otherworldly that I was almost—but not quite—thankful for my overly eventful morning, because otherwise we'd never be able to see such sights. If there wasn't such a threat of hitting moose, driving Alaska at night would be ten times better than the long daylight hours.
     
    -----It was past midnight when we rolled into the all-but-deserted streets of Seward and checked into our hotel for about four-and-a-half hours of solid sleep. I don't think I even rolled over, on account of the fact that I woke up with a crick in my neck.
  25. Sumiki

    Tunnel Vision

    By Sumiki,

    -----The most ambitious part of our ambitious journey was the planning of routine car servicing along the route, and amongst the first things we scheduled was an oil change and tire rotation in Anchorage. We'd gotten a quick tune-up in Whitecourt, that simply amounted to an oil change; the tires, which had been rotated before we left, needed no such care. We were able to shift our 9:00 appointment to 8:30 and got there just in time. Within an hour, they'd done a full tire rotation and oil change, and looked at the brakes. Mechanics have some way of ranking brakes, and the Whitecourt folks had put ours at a five—enough to get to Anchorage safely, but not all the way back home. As it turns out, because the Whitecourt mechanics failed to actually take any of the tires off, the Anchorage dealership got a more precise measurement of eight, which is more than enough to get back home. We thanked them and were fortunate to be able to hit the road ahead of schedule.
     
    -----Our first destination was the town of Whittier, which is attached to the road network via the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel. It's a two-and-a-half mile tunnel bored straight through the mountain, constructed for the railroad as part of the war effort in 1942. From then until 2000, it was only open to the Alaska Railroad, when they opened it to vehicle traffic. For fifteen minutes at the bottom of the hour, Whittier-bound cars go 25 MPH, avoiding the train tracks as they go, while the fifteen minutes at the top of the hour are reserved for outbound vehicles. It is the second-longest tunnel in North America and the longest such tunnel to accommodate both car and rail traffic, and let me reiterate that it's one lane. Rocks on either side jutted out, as it was never smoothed after its initial construction, and massive car-rattling fans are situated on either side. The drive in takes you past a lake filled with a flotilla of small icebergs and glaciers sliding ever so imperceptibly off of their snowcapped peaks. The wind was extraordinarily uproarious, but the skies were clear.
     
    -----On the other side of this bizarre contraption of a tunnel lay the trailhead for Portage Pass. Portage Glacier used to be visible from a visitor center situated on the other side of the tunnel, but recent years has seen its rapid shrinkage to where it may only be seen from the pass that bears its name. We took the first right turn out of the tunnel and parked in the very small lot, but luckily, we were the first ones out there. The whipping wind hadn't yet blown its last breath, and it was to such a point that opening both sides of the car created a crosswind that threatened to take our looser bags clean out to Prince William Sound.
     
    -----The path up Portage Pass is more or less perpendicular to the tunnel, and we trudged and hiked through densely forested terrain—keeping ears and eyes out for signs of bear all the while—over every surface from loose rocks to slippery ice to snow that was fast turning to slush and melting slowly into the impromptu creeks which sometimes ran on and over the trail, adding another dynamic element. The entire trail climbed 800 feet—sea level to the pass—in the course of a mile, which works out to an astounding 15% grade, all amounting to a strenuous activity for tired calves. The wind expired almost immediately as we began hiking, and the cloudless sky meant that the sun beat down upon us. As evidence of this, I have a sunglasses-shaped break in my surprisingly mild sunburn.
     
    -----All put together, it felt like one of those excruciatingly interminable affairs whose every brief level respite begat another set of steep snow banks ahead. Yet the principle of just going one step at a time paid off when the glacier and its associated lake lay before us. The beautifully clear green of the lake against the faint blue of the glacier was an incredible sight, though we were well over a mile away and looking down. All around lay further peaks and glaciers, and we sat down on some rocks on the mercifully flat summit of the pass to have a snack as we soaked in the beauty. Behind us lay the docks of Whittier and the deep blue hue of Prince William Sound beyond.
     
    -----While we were seemingly the first to the summit, we were soon followed by several couples with their dogs, which made us feel a bit better about alleviating the possibility of bears on the return journey. Sure enough, we saw none; save for the flocks of seagulls circling high above near the mountain peaks, the closest thing to wildlife that we witnessed were curious bumblebees.
     
    -----In our hiking experience, the principle of "what comes up must come down" holds in a very big way. With the rocks and snow, I was especially dreading this particular return, which accounted for an aspect of my willingness to linger at the summit. But this return surprised me; aside from the ice, which was largely avoidable, the only notable thing about our descent was my dad zipping up his parka and sliding down a snow bank when such a route was the path of least resistance.
     
    -----Upon our return to the car, we exchanged all forms of footwear, stripped our excess layers, and rode a negligible distance into the town of Whittier. As we turned a corner, marinas of epic proportion came into view, as could the town. Whittier is famous in an odd way for being the so-called "town under one roof," as most of its population lives in one building. It was with great distress that, amidst the pier shacks and boats and tinier buildings all along the area, one massive and utterly terrifying derelict came into view. This, we would soon learn, was the Buckner Building, which was the "original" Whittier building, built to house the military presence in the town. It was abandoned shortly after the 1964 earthquake, but it's all reinforced concrete, so it stayed there—and we mistook its squalid husk for the Begich Towers that actually do house most all the Whittierites. (The Buckner Building was open to urban exploration until recently, when someone with a camera and a few skis put footage of stairwell stupidity on YouTube.)
     
    -----We looped around a cul-de-sac just past Whittier's Alaska Marine Highway terminal and ate at Varly's Swiftwater Seafood Cafe. Its tiny and eclectic interior, adorned with everything from NOAA maps to old steamship dinner menus to signed hockey sticks, belied a small menu. My parents got halibut and chips, while I—bereft from my lack of a halibut sandwich in Anchorage—got one of those, which turned out to be a mistake when the puffy bun got in the way of everything else. The halibut was thick and delicious, clearly fresh, and lightly battered and fried instead of thrown into a vat higgledy-piggledy and left to dry. (Though of significant portion, these proved to be the equivalent of a snack to our metabolisms as we would later snack our way through road construction.)
     
    -----It wasn't long before we left Whittier at 3:00, a full hour before our anticipated departure time. Once back through the dark and narrow tunnel, we saw that the heat—a sweltering-by-comparison 60º—had melted the peripatetic icebergs of the lakes. We once again reached the juncture with the Seward Highway and braced ourselves for the drive to Homer.
     
    -----The Seward Highway began one of the most beautiful drives we've had all trip, rivaling the views of anything on the Alaska Highway or even the Parks. The majesty only continued as we fully entered the forested expanse of the Kenai Peninsula, as the forest ran on and on above the rolling hills, giving way only to the jagged peaks that poked at the sky. The danger was compounded not by what I've termed the "Alaskan Pass"—which was mitigated by the plethora of passing lanes—but rather from the wildlife whose presence on the roads would remain undetected if the posted speed limit was so much as approached.
     
    -----Driving along this portion of the Seward Highway—and later, the entirety of the Sterling Highway—struck me as fundamentally different from the stark and barren lands of the vast interior. Evidence of humankind went beyond the occasional trash-strewn hermit's yard into the realm of the small towns and fishing villages which dot the path. There are, for the first time since Illinois, regularly occurring gas stations. Never once today did we enter any stretch of highway in which we could feel alone, which had been a regular feature of our road trip since we swore off the Interstates in North Dakota.
     
    -----The growth along the Sterling Highway is very clearly tied into fishing and tourism. A lot of places don't open until June, when they expect the Great Tourist Descent. Take out the fishing supply stores, and the entire economy crumbles. What are advertised as small towns are small towns ... but they are not small by Alaskan standards where small is well south of the quadruple digits. They are small by Californian or Texan standards, where there are a lot more people to pack in. Some were in better shape than others, and it all came down to image; Sterling, which bequeathed the highway its name, is run-down in comparison to the squeaky-clean Soldotna.
     
    -----We stopped in Soldotna at their visitor center to stretch our legs, and we saw within their nominal museum the largest king salmon ever caught with a line and reel, whose taxidermied remains belie a behemoth of 97 pounds and 4 ounces. It could have swallowed my arm whole with room for more, and within its preserved jaw we could see row upon row of teeth in triangular patterns back towards the black void of his unclosing maw. The lady there was quite friendly, and we got the full brunt of her astonishing helpfulness as she listed off all of the unique places to eat in Soldotna when we come back through and set us up with a library's worth of reading materials and coupon books shaped like passports. In return, we told her about the place we ate in Whittier.
     
    -----As the Sterling Highway cut across the peninsula to parallel Cook Inlet at the village of Clam Gulch, we could see, far into the distance, one massive hulk of a mountain. It was too clear, too big, and in the wrong direction to be Denali, and we later learned that it was Mount Iliamna, over fifty miles away on the other side of Cook Inlet. It and its kin, though covered in glaciers and snow, are on the Ring of Fire, and it isn't uncommon for one or another to spew clouds of ash into the air. The mountains that were to come into view exhibited no such volcanism, although it was very difficult for us to imagine that they were indeed 50 miles away.
     
    -----At one point, we were able to get off at a pullout and walk a path through an open field, and the four highest peaks of this portion of the Aleutian chain could be seen set still against the blue sky. The ground dropped off at the edge, and we could see black sand on the beaches far below. A bald eagle even flew over our heads.
     
    -----Anchor Point was our next destination, as it constitutes the westernmost point on the entire North American highway system, which will be the case into perpetuity unless the legislature in Juneau decide to waste several billion on a road to Nome. If they build it, we will drive ... but for now, we're satisfied with Anchor Point. We got off on the old Sterling Highway which led us over a narrow bridge (affectionately called the "Erector Set Bridge" by locals) and to a side road that led to a series of campgrounds and RV parks. The end of the road was ... well, just the end of any road, albeit one with bountiful views of ocean and mountain beyond.
     
    -----We soon caught first glimpse of the famous Homer Spit, the 4.5-mile line of land that juts out defiantly into the water and truly marks an end of the road much more than the western terminus in Anchor Point. The Spit—and Homer itself—has undergone extensive changes in its recent history, and now boasts over 5,000 people. Its spit is the jumping-off point for a collection of boats so vast that you could probably walk from one end of the marina to the other over the open sea and never once get wet. The aesthetic of Homer is one of generic beach town, and—aside from the lack of beach-bound tourists—could pass for anywhere on the North Carolinian coast if you were somehow able to ignore the mountains that frame the area ... but why on Earth would you want to do that?
     
    -----We went all the way to the end of the spit to fully admire the view, and we arrived just in time for our 8:00 dinner reservations. Upon our arrival, we waited for several highly awkward minutes as our eventual waiter passed us multiple times before the lady who seated guests returned from her outdoor wanderings. We were just to the end of our complimentary bread, admiring the view to the mountains and glaciers across Cook Inlet on an all but uninhabited segment of the Kenai Peninsula, when our entrées arrived—and what entrées they were. My mom and I both got the Alaskan Seafood Alfredo, which was stuffed with huge chunks of salmon, halibut, and scallops. I didn't think myself a great scallop fan prior to arriving in Alaska, but the fresh ones taste so much different from the frozen. They absorbed every flavor in the sauce, which in this case was a buttery garlic. My dad got a filet of king salmon, which he savored.
     
    -----There were many dessert options, but only one stood out as uniquely scrumptious: the white chocolate key lime cheesecake. The white chocolate cheesecake was not overpowering in flavor but had the consistency and richness of pure cream cheese, while the key lime sat in a small upper layer of what appeared to be viscous gelatin. It was very rich and ranks up with the crème brûlée of Knik River as the best road trip dessert of all time.
     
    -----After dinner, we went outside and walked along the smooth rocks of the uppermost points on the Homer Spit. Anglers, armed with the proper gear and buckets of chum, waited patiently with their lines and reels in the water. Beyond, a pier hosted hundreds of squawking seagulls. But what really draws the eye in are the stark mountains just across the water, seemingly close enough to touch.
     
    -----We went back out around 10:30, as the sun was beginning to set in the opposite direction, hurling fiery pinks and oranges across the sky and illuminating the mountains anew. The fishermen were not only still present, but their numbers had grown. We split our time between taking in the sun-sparked scenery and scanning the Cook Inlet for sea otters, which turned up fruitfully; several specimens could be spotted bobbing up and down on the water and diving for their prey. We stood out there for as long as our unadapted thyroids allowed before retreating back to our over-warm room, as there is no air conditioning system to be found—only a small oscillating fan and our meager first-floor window. Tonight will certainly prove a balancing act of temperature.
     
    -----Tomorrow: the return journey begins, as we retrace our steps along the Sterling Highway and make it to Seward.
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