Nearing home

Nearing “home”…

As much as my youngest would like it to be called ‘Ra-jee-na’ it is called ‘Re-jie-na’ and it is one of the most beautiful towns on the plains of Canada.  Royally inspired, it has great old architecture and a bridge that would be at home in one of the most sophisticated and historic cities of Europe.  The stately homes give respite to wide-open prairies where conversations swings from, “Is that a hawk or a raven?” to “Can we start looking for a bathroom?”  Unlike the magnificent Yukon, central Canada rarely varies, seldom changes, and to my untrained eye, never surprises.

To be honest, we were getting ready to be done with the travels and were looking to get on with the relocation.  We brightened when we hit border at International Falls, Minnesota, USA, which is one of the places that they generally mentioned as the coldest in the country: along with Marquette.  Northern Minnesota increased my comfort level.  In fact, the further east I went, the more relaxed I became.  It was probably a combination of the pressure cooker the Sitka Assembly presented to me the last few months and just that sired song of the Great Lakes.  I was moving away from one and toward the other.

The lake country presented a nice combination of hardwood trees and pines and added the rolling hills of iron country.  We hit a tipping point of where we could actually drive right through and wake up in Marquette.  But that would have been a long-tough day and I was actually planning on calling into an Assembly meeting that night, starting at 9pm local time.  We decided, as we passed a Pure Michigan sign at the border to spend one more night in the tent before getting to our new home.  Iron Mountain, Michigan was not only a few hours drive from Marquette, but it also has a campground in the middle of town with full services for $10!  The only catch was that there was a weather front moving in and high winds were expected.  We staked the tent down with special care.

Starting a meeting at 9 O’clock is  challenging and knowing that there is a good chance that it will run four hours makes it even tougher.  I settled into the front seat of the Subaru as Carol settled into her sleeping bag in the tent.  The wind soon started to blow and then howl.  Mocha grew nervous inside and Carol brought her out and put her in the front seat next to me.  She was no more inspired by the conversation about the city self-funding its debt than I was.  Getting out of the car to stretch my legs, I was immediately chastised by the Mayor, because apparently the wind was raising havoc with the speaker system by in Sitka.  I was not particularly good at figuring out the mute and unmute buttons.  Eventually I had to move the car right next to the tent to block it from the gale.  After a lengthy and needlessly repetitive meeting, I moved into the tent to anchor the other half and try to get some sleep before the next day.

It was a fitful night and the walls of the tent were battered by storm.  We found large branches around the tent that had somehow managed to miss us as they were torn from the trees.  Over and over I awoke to competing questions: “What the heck were we doing?” and “What the heck is the house going to be like?”

Now it’s just putting in the miles…

Dawson Creek, Yukon Territory has some redeeming characteristics.  There are some museums, both art, historic, and geologic.  It seems to retain a small-town character.  Mostly, it has some of the great views that I described of the northern part of the Yukon.  Since we got to drive through it twice, once without keys to the car top carrier and once with, we learned a little bit more about it.  What sneaks onto the scene in Dawson Creek is the petroleum industry.  It is perched on the edge of the vast shale and sand oil fields of Canada and it appears that its economy is also on the periphery of it as well.

Not so Fort Nelson.  I could not drive through it fast enough once we were tempted to camp there.  Fort Nelson is BIG TRUCK land where testosterone and gas fumes feed the populace.  Large loud pick-ups were everywhere and most sported crude copies of male anatomy on their tow hitches if they were not actually towing four-wheelers or motorcycles.  A Ford F-150 would be considered an economy car in Fort Nelson.  There were refineries, oil trucks, logging trucks, a casino with a campground, (considered and immediately rejected) and pretty much everything that we did not see in the northern part of the province.  Unfortunately, after another long day of driving, there did not appear to be any campgrounds nearby to the south, so we had to reluctantly return to find another pet friendly hotel.  We departed quickly after a good breakfast and in short order entered the plains toward Edmonton.

There is little to break up the view as you enter the plains.  “Is that a hawk or a vulture?” was pretty much the conversation starters that we saw.  There were quite a few trains, lots of signs for golf courses, on the very green landscape.  The corn and wheat fields had been harvested so there were many Canadian geese gleaning those fields.  Many of hours of sameness. We headed to a campground we had visited some twenty years before. 

The Vermillion campground had always held a special place in my memory: a kind of oasis in the plains.  It was pretty OK.  Off the highway and through a town, its most remarkable component was another well-dressed Canadian officer of the law; I’ll call him Ranger Richard (Ree-Shard) complete with a fast car, bubble gum machine red and blue lights, and a 70s porn mustache.  He sat in the check in office and observed our entrance to the park without incident.  But the 80+ year old lady, sporting the ‘RevWho’ license plates, with the cat on a leash in the rear windown went the wrong way on a road in the nearly empty campground he appeared behind her with lights flashing!  Upon setting her straight, he spun gravels chasing another vehicle out of the campground for another serious offense.

The 80+ year old woman was in fact, the Rev who her plate referred to.  She was moving cross country with her cat and her pup-tent.  Mocha, the chocolate lab, eyed the cat with more than curiosity.  Later she would insist I take her out in the middle of the night to investigate something, a camping cat perhaps?  Though cold we wandered around to try to get her to calm down.  Upon switching off my flashlight, I was struck by a sky lit by as many stars as I have seen in decades.  What the Great Plains lack by day, their 180 degree view of the night sky more than makes up for it.  A skyway if you will, of white split the darkness, the Milky Way, flanked by constellations as fully formed as I’d ever seen.  There were so many stars that it was difficult to pick out the groupings as I had learned them.  This is another reason that it was time move.  I am literally thrilled by the night sky and though the northern lights occasionally would show up in Sitka, there were not enough nights where I could be entertained by the stars.  Surprisingly, Sitka, on an island on the edge of the Pacific Ocean has a good portion of ambient light that can ruin a good heavenly gaze.  But here at the Vermillion campground, it was on display at the highest level.  Getting chilled, I let Mocha gaze off into the dark one last time before dragging her back into the tent.  I slept in, not even hearing Carol get up with the dogs.

Time to move...but what about the dogs?

It's time to move... but what about the dogs?

We are dog people.  Carol is a cat person, too, but due to allergy considerations of some of our beloved friends, once we lost our cat of eighteen years, "Bucky", we never replaced him.  So we have had a string of great dogs that out of necessity, have had to be good at traveling.  Unfortunately, the smallest of our dogs, Maggie, (curly black hair like former Tiger star Magglio Ordonez) is old and diabetic.  How do you travel with a dog whose eating and insulin shot schedule dominate how we plan our day?

The first leg was the real problem as we had to travel by ferry either north or south in order to hook up with a road system to drive to Marquette.  Carol advocated for a northern route to Haines, which was fine with me as we had not taken the Alaska Highway in many years.  It took me a while to figure out that her decision was based on Maggie having the shortest period of time locked in the car on a ferry.  The 'fast ferry' would get us to Juneau in about five hours and the short run up Lynn Canal to Haines would take about four and half.  Both of these were deemed doable for Maggie.

Originally I envisioned shipping our worldly possessions via barge to Haines and off-loading onto a 20 foot UHaul.  We would then put the Subaru on a trailer and make our way to Marquette camping and occasionally hoteling along the way.  It was that, about $5000 all told, or $15,000 to have someone else move us.  Truth be told, neither sounded so great, but for $10,000 savings, I'm in.

We were let in on another option, however:  UPack pods!  For about $3200 per 8X8X8 foot cube was made available for us to pack (UPack, get it?) and then they would ship it to your destination where we could unpack it.  Cool!  Easier drive, a little more cost.  Fair trade.  The catch?  The closest they could ship was Green Bay, WI, about three hours away from Marquette.  We got two pods and filled them to the brim with totes of stuff, our bed, artwork, a couch, bikes and various and sundry other things.  They were to be picked up on August 31.  They needed to be packed by the 24th.  Two blow up beds were substituted for every other piece of furniture in our house.  We would sleep on them for the next month.

Hotels are remarkably pet friendly nowadays.  For example in Juneau we stayed at a place that allowed our dogs, OK we cheated on the 35 pound dog limit, for only $225!  What a deal!  After all we did get to stay there for about 8 hours before we had to line up for our second ferry trip.  You might wonder if we had any particular emotions about getting on the ferry.  I didn't, mostly because our Sitka family and other close friends were there until the last minute when we loaded.  Truth be told, it  had been such an ordeal to get packed, it was a real relief to finally get going.

We exited the ferry at Haines and hit the road north toward Canada.  The scenery as we climbed toward Whitehorse, Yukon Territory was amazing and big, like most of the scenery in Alaska.  We followed a large river almost to the border.  The crossing was not busy and we were approached by a spiffily dressed young man with a great mustache.  Canadian border guards are generally mellow.

This guy was really by the book.  Where are we going?  What are we doing?  Moving? 

"If you are moving all the way to Michigan, where is the rest of your possessions?"  I was a little blindsided and I said something brilliant like, "Huh?"

"Your household goods?  Your furniture?  Your stuff?"

"Oh!  It's all in pods heading to Green Bay."

"I thought you were moving to Marquette?"

"Well, we are, but they wouldn't ship it there... kind of a long story:

I was pretty sure that I was about to get cavity searched, but he just took our passports, brought them back and sent us on our way.  Whew.

It was a fairly long drive to the Tahini Hot Springs campground for our first night of tenting.  It had been a few years since we had set up the world's tallest tent, but we figured it out pretty quickly.  As I went out to find us food for dinner, Carol took the dogs for a walk around the campground, running into the local spectral fox along the outskirts of the area.  She even took a cool photo,

It was a cool, but very nice night to snuggle in our bags and let the dogs get used to being in a tent.  I got up earlier as we had to get Maggie fed then wait an hour for her insulin shot.  As I emerged, I say that Mocha's food bowl was on top of the Subaru and leading up to it over the hood onto the roof were little fox foot prints.  Carol had inadvertently left the dog food on the roof and our feral fox friend had not only eaten all of the food, but had pooped in the bowl, much to Mocha's chagrin.  Apparently, it takes a while for smell o' fox to get washed from the food bowl.

Our next stop was Watson Lake or a little further.  Canada is great for having campgrounds all over the place and quite a few rest areas as well.  That is unless it is time to find a campground or Carol really needs a rest room.  But we found a very nice campground near a lake with loons flying above and calling throughout the night.  Being the Yukon Territory in September, however, we found that the temperature plunged after sunset.  Like into the low 20s.  Maggie climbed into Carol's bag and burrowed all the way down to her feet.  I awoke and walked and fed the dogs, but as we got to taking down the tent, I realized that I could not feel my fingers!  Looking at the weather, we saw that snow was going to be following us for the next few days.  Seemed like a bad idea to continue on south through the Canadian Rockies, so we opted for the plains and Edmonton.  But Canada is really big and we had to traverse more of the Yukon and British Columbia before making it to Alberta and the plains,

I have to say that the northern part of the Yukon is incredibly beautiful as the road winds through mountain ranges with forests covering them as far as the eye can see.  Occasionally I got to see my favorite view: emerging from a high mountain pass and seeing the topography spread out below.  Incredible.  As we headed for Dawson Creek, the origin of the Alaska Highway, we stopped and used the woods to pee and let the dogs exercise.  One time as Carol was emerging from the edge of the trees, a small plane appeared out of nowhere to land on the small clearing we had chosen to take a break,

At another, we stopped where a bunch of horse trailers were parked in the hopes of finding an outhouse,  We did not find one, but Maggie found some horse poop to eat.  As we rushed to get her away from it we swatted it away from her mouth.  Three hours later, after an arduous descent and deciding on driving a few hours past Dawson City, we discovered, also along the side of the road, that we no longer had the keys to the car top carried.  We searched everywhere until we realized that we saw them last when Maggie was eating horse poop, about 150-200 miles back.  We had no choice but to retrace our route.  As the sun was setting, we arrived at the same pull out we had been at six hours before and there along the side of the road were the critical set of keys.  After another 90 miles of driving we found a nice little hotel in Dawson City.  Yes, it was dog friendly.  We were still 2400 miles away from Marquette,