Alaska 2009 - Day 1

I am going to post the words for now and the pictures later. here is what I have.. without pictures:

Day 1: leaving Sammamish

I wanted to leave my house at 7:30, but spending time with my wife was more important. I decided to make a last minute shopping stop at Safeway and get coffee with her. I claimed that I needed baby wipes. If you have never camped with baby wipes, then let me tell you about them. If you are not going to shower for a couple of days, just go out and purchase them. They keep you feeling fresh and clean. Yes you sound stupid saying that you use them, but you feel better. I am not planning on showering for several days. I am fine with that, but the people I meet may not be so cool with it, and I definitely do not want the butt itch.

So, back to the day… I spent some time with my wife getting coffee and then finishing the packing.I wish that she was coming, but I am also looking forward to exploring and bringing her up with me. I then drove to Bellevue to pick up my companion. I immediately noticed with the extra weight that my Land Cruiser (Elsie, which I will abbreviate as LC) was very top heavy. So much so, that after recovering from a turn or a bump in the road, she would sway for awhile. This scared the crap out of me. Thinking that I was just a wuss, I made my companion drive her. He exclaimed how much it worried him almost immediately. So we stopped in Everett, at his brothers and proceeded to lighten the load on the roof rack. We checked the full size spare and it was in great condition. I then made the executive call to remove the two full size mounted spare tires from the roof. We left them, hopefully this is not a mistake. Then I removed a bunch of my wrenches in favor of sockets. Then I moved the 5 gallons of water to the inside. This worked and the sway almost disappeared… almost, well good enough to go. It no longer scared us, and off we went.

We decided that we wanted to video the experience. We mounted a HD camcorder to a monopod to the dash so that we can video towards the front, the road ahead is better than the road behind. As we drove we charged it off of the inverter. We immediately became perplexed that the camcorder was not charging, in fact the time on screen was getting less and less, even though we were charging. Deciding to deal with it later, we stopped in Bellingham to pick my companion up a pair of hiking boots. As we pulled into REI, my right blinker stopped working. So we stopped and I tried the hazards… they worked for a couple seconds and then stopped. I check the fuse and we have two blown fuses. Off to an auto parts store. The first store is out of 10 amp’s, so to the next store. We buy a bunch thinking we are blowing them because of the inverter. Nope! With nothing charging the blinkers blow the fuse again. We remove the dash and everything looks good. Oh well, to the border and deal with it in Canada. How? I guess we will figure that out when our arms get tired of signaling.

The border crossing was uneventful. The officer was not friendly enough to have fun with so we just drove on. We miss our turn off because we were looking for food, so we drive a half an hour before we get our bearings and then back track back to Abbotsford. Now that we are on the right track we decide to hit the next town and grab a quick bite. Tim Horton’s is the place… Wait is has donuts bagels and coffee, oh and some small sandwiches. We get a sandwich and wait for 15 minutes for them to finish. Scratch that place off of the list. Slow service and crappy road food.
Back to the Milepost, the best book ever for an Alaska trip. Next stop Cache Creek, many miles up the Frasier River Valley. Forested at first and then closer to Ashcroft it becomes a desert. Really hot! LC does great except for the right turn signal. No overheating, no problems at all. Sweet!

We are going to make Lac La Hache even with all of our detours. Just as we hit the Lac La Hache lake, we hit a traffic jam. A big car accident has everyone waiting for it to be cleaned up. After 20 minutes we drive by a squished VW Golf, with a gold bag leaning up against it. There has to be a hidden meaning there. Now to Lac La Hache Provincial Park for camping. We find it by brighting oncoming traffic because the signage sucks in BC. We find a spot and quickly setup camp, it is dark and 9pm.
We eat and decide to transfer the files off of the camera to a portable hard drive. To do this we hook up the inverter to a portable battery, The portable hard drive to the inverter and begins transferring through the laptop the files off of the camcorder. 15 minutes in the battery of the camcorder dies and we decide it is time for bed.. now 10:30pm, we will deal with the movement of files on the road. Off to bed, me in LC and my companion in his tent. G-night John boy.

Alaska 2009

Tomorrow morning I am leaving for three weeks to explore Alaska. I am excited, and also nervous. But I think that is what makes for a great adventure. Nervous, for me, means that something big is going to happen and that is great because a new experience is about to happen.

The plan is to head north, and then continue north and see what is in the north. I want to journal my trip and add pictures. My google photos account only allows for 1GB of storage and my China trip and my entrepreneurial drink blog pictures have used most of that space up. My Windows Live Photo storage says that I have 24.93 GB available... yes that is 24x what google gave me. I am now going to attempt to link to photos from blogger (google) to my live (microsoft) account and see if the photos will embed into my blog.... I am back after an hour of messing with it. The live account will not allow you to directly embed the photo into the blog. You can post an image link that will take the user to the live site. I can click on the image at the live site and it will take me to the full image page. Then I can use that link and resize the image. But that is a lot of work, to just display a picture in a blog. I looked into Flickr and they have a share this -> and then they give you the link to embed... that works, well enough. I get 100MB a month, or a couple hundred pictures before I have to start paying them. I guess I will start there and see where it takes me.

Here are the first two pictures from Flickr: