September 20th...home

Alright, alright, alright.  We have reached our destination of Eagle River, AK.  Rolled into town around 4:30 I guess it was.  Knowing we had an easy 6 hour day ahead of us, we were able to sleep in until 8:00, take our time getting organized, and actually "enjoy" a wonderful breakfast of biscuits and gravy with reindeer sausage at a hoppin' little restaurant (in Tok) called Fast Eddy's.  It is officially recommended.

We bolted around 10:15 after filling up with gas, again.

Rather uneventful trip, no broken windows this time, but I guess the odds diminish as window counts decrease.  The roads in general were still in pretty bad shape...not so much the actual asphalt quality but rather the whoopty-doo affect caused by frost-heaves beneath the subgrade.   It would have been kind of fun if we had not been pulling a trailer...this kept us at around 45-50 mph and really worked the suspension over.  10-4, over.

Weather was fair, started out with low clouds and fog making it a bit mysterious what was actually out there, but it cleared off around noon and became just partly cloudy throughout the day.  We awoke to snow on the peaks just outside the motel and upward 3000' or so...though we could only barely see them as the fog moved through. 

Many of the peaks are now covered in snow up here.  The temperature was in the 50's all day, just about perfect really.  We caught our first glimpse of a "real" glacier today...the Matanuska Glacier field I think its called.  You could see the blue ice and its terminus down low as well as the extensive morraine field it has left behind.   Unfortunately, the road was very narrow and wound its way quickly down the canyon, so simply pulling off and snapping photos was not possible.  There was a photo pull out that we used, but the viewpoint was just not as good as it could have been...we did what we could. 

No exciting animal life today, or yesterday for that matter...except for a very large owl in the middle of the road just after the border crossing last night, a large, very red fox with a white-tipped tail yesterday evening, and a few muck-ox on a ranch this afternoon.  Pretty bummed we didn't see any bear or wolves or even more of what we did see...but, I guess I live here now, and I should have time to seek them out, I hope.

We had to break into the house today when we arrived.  The keymaster (Erin) apparently lacks the special power of clairvoyance and didn't know we would be here two days early.  She was enjoying her birthday about an hour out of town with additional plans for the evening...the nerve.  Thankfully, she left a lot of windows open and we were able to hone our breaking and entering skills.  Her husband showed up about 2 hours later with a key. 

Shopping tomorrow.  Might be good to have beds, a t.v., a washer and dryer, maybe a table and chairs to get us started. 

Guess we will just keep updating as things happen.  I need to buy more shampoo.

Oh...photos.   Gabe summe it up best today..."If you are not standing in front of it, you just don't get it".  In response to my complaint about how it is all just too big to photograph it.