To cut a long story short, my step-daughter lives in Alaska with a 4 month old baby and two dogs and she wants to move back to California. All well and good so far, except the dogs can’t fly because of their breed – American and French Bulldogs. And even if they were allowed to fly, the small one has terrible gas and would be most unwelcome in an aircraft passenger cabin and the large one has so much anxiety,…
When this idea was first floated, I wasn’t too excited about it. It’s a long drive and I generally don’t like driving. I mean, I’ll fly from Fresno to Los Angeles because I don’t want to sit in a car for 4 hours (not to mention, the plane has bar service and that kind of thing is generally frowned upon while driving), so the thought of driving 12 hours a day through bear-infested wilderness was not at all appealing. Then…
Yup. I’m feeling really nervous about driving hundreds of miles for hours a day through bear-infested wilderness with two dogs that hardly know me. People usually plan these sorts of trips months in advance, and here I am, just agreeing to this crazy idea without any kind of planning or forethought whatsoever, other than, “I wonder how far I can drive in one day before falling asleep and being eaten by a moose”. And talking to people that have already…
The CB radio arrived today, so if nothing else, it should make for some light entertainment along the way. We’ll have to brush up on our CB etiquette and come up with some cool handles before we set off. Maybe we should watch Smokey and the Bandit to get us up to speed on the lingo too. Of course, the Bronco doesn’t have a metal roof, so I think I’m going to have to stick the magnetic antenna on the…
Well, everything seems to be on track so far… I have all the travel documentation for the dogs, all the hotel information, the route has been printed (in case the phone GPS won’t work with out a signal) and the Bronco has been serviced (oil change, fluid levels etc.) and will be waiting at the airport when we arrive. I just hope the keyless entry works, otherwise we’re not even going to make it out of the airport parking lot….
The flight to Alaska via Seattle was fairly uneventful. There was a lot of low cloud over Alaska on the way in, so I didn’t really get to see much out of the window until we had almost landed. Scott flew in from Denver and landed at almost the exact same time as I did, and we met up at baggage claim, where my checked bag full of adventure supplies showed up five minutes later. So far, so good. We…
Woke up at 6:45 after a fitful night’s sleep, because apparently the dogs don’t like to sleep on the floor. They much prefer to jump on the bed and take as much of it as they can. It’s fine though, because today is the first day of driving, so we’re both excited to get going. Really, Scott is super-excited – he’s just hiding it well… We hit the road around 7:30, drove through Blondies Espresso for a coffee and set…
These two good boys are the reasons we’re here. Tito (The Bullmoose) and Otis (the Gas Monkey).
Alarms woke us up at 7:45 for a somewhat shorter 7.5 hour drive to Jade City. We drove across the street to fill up on gas and coffee, and I asked the lady in the shop if she had any dog-poop bags, and she just looked at me like I was crazy and said, “There’s enough forest out there for them to use”. Fair enough, I guess. On the road to WhiteHorse we saw a couple of wild (brown) horses…
We woke up refreshed, and headed over to the gift shop to pick up some souvenirs, then continued our journey south towards Smithers, BC. It rained pretty much all day, which made the drive feel very foreboding and occasionally a little treacherous as we would round a corner and find no barrier to prevent a slip and plunge over the side. There’s a very good reason that this road is closed during the winter. On the plus side, it kept…