Needless to say, we slept-in this morning after a late night last night. Dave was “under the weather” and did not want to do much of anything, but it was such a beautiful day, sunny with no clouds in the sky, and I wanted to be outside. We had planned on doing the hike up to Lower Dewey Lake, which is a short but steep hike. Instead after lunch we drove downtown and treated ourselves to ice cream cones and drove to the harbor to eat them. Then we headed up the Dyea Road to the scenic overlook of Skagway and then to Smuggler’s Cove. While Dave “rested his eyes” in the car, I took some nice nature pictures along the beach. Usually there are seals and eagles around, but I did not see any today ... read more

Yesterday’s sun and warmth has been replaced today with a cold rain. We decided that we would drive over to Dyea (pronounced Die E). The ride to Dyea is on a twisting gravel road which is very well maintained and very scenic. Dyea was and actually still is the starting point for the Chilkoot Trail which took the stampeders to the Yukon Gold Rush. There are famous photos of the Chilkoot Trail, which shows hundreds of men, tied together, climbing a very steep mountain with heavy packs on their backs. Because men were showing up in Dawson City with no supplies, there was a famine there. The Canadian Government decided that each prospector needed a ton of supplies before they could enter Canada. The men needed to lug that ton of supplies up this mountain in ... read more

Haines Junction has a monument which has all of the animals you will find in the region on it. There is also a Quonset Hut which is a church. As a typical tourist a took a few pictures as we were out for our morning walk. Leaving Haines Junction, we are headed for Whitehorse. As we traveled along the Alaska Highway today, a coyote was grazing on the side of the highway and was very curious of me as I snapped a few pictures. In Whitehorse, we were able to get the van serviced, for the second time in 3 weeks. We have put on another 4,000 miles since we last passed through here. The service man tried to charge me $63 for an oil change. I told him I was in 3 weeks earlier and ... read more

Happy Days are here again - The skies above are clear again. What a great and glorious day. The sun is shining, it’s in the 70’s and we have no place to go and nothing to do. Woo-Hoo! We slept-in, did laundry, walked the bike trail for a couple of miles, Dave started reading a book and I caught up on emails and blogs. In the afternoon, we visited the visitor’s center and some shops and then we went to Fast Eddy’s and had coffee and dessert. Dave had the great Forest Pie with berries, apple and rhubarb with vanilla ice cream on top and I had the Chocolate Rockslide, a brownie with the ice cream and chocolate syrup all over it. Boy were we bad and boy was it good! Stopping at the local NAPA ... read more

Leaving Palmer, hopefully for the last time, we once again headed east on the Glenn Highway. This road has become very familiar to us this week. The clouds hung low all morning and we had no views at all of this beautiful area and would never have known of it’s beauty, had we not passed through here before and gotten to see the incredible views. Kennicott Mine, McCarthy and the Wrangell/St. Elias National Park and Preserve are on the menu today. We are doing a lot of back-tracking, as the road to this area is back down toward Valdez. The gray morning turned into blue skies and sunshine in the afternoon. What a lovely day it turned out to be. We took the Edgerton Highway, a paved road, toward Chitina (pronounced Chit-na) and had great views ... read more