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We finished our trip to Kennekott at 7 PM and began our journey. It sure did help to have sunlight until well after midnight. Our first overnight was near Tok, part of the Alcan Highway and a stretch of road that we had covered on our trip from Skagway to Fairbanks. It was 200 miles.
As you may know, the Alcan Highway was built by American armed forces in 1942 to connect Alaska to the lower 48 states. It is now 1387 miles. It goes from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Delta Junction in Alaska. It is fully paved, but under continuous construction along the way.
After waking early, we hit the road. Our next overnight stop was Liard Hot Spring. It was nearly 786 miles from Tok. We got there at about 9 PM and were able to hop into the natural hot springs. We cheated a bit and used our water bottles to sneak in a gin and tonic (alcohol is not permitted), but hydration is encouraged. We thought that hydration was more important.
The hot springs are lovely, surrounded by green furns in the middle of a bog. There were other adventuresome traveler's sharing stories in the springs. It was interesting that the campground was surrounded by an electric fence to keep out the wildlife. Because of our late arrival, we were outside the fence in "overflow" camping and shared our site with a pretty good sized moose.
Our eyes popped open at 5:30 AM and we hit the road pretty quick. Our friend the moose was still there, so I was not too happy about getting out of the camper to open the gate to exit.
We left early and there was a fog by the rivers. We quickly noticed these blobs of brown by the highway, that turned out to be bison 🦬. There was a.pretty good size herd along the highway.
Throughout the day, we saw a lot of wildlife. Moose, bears, goats, elk, Caribou, Porcupine, deer, coyote, and antelope, all from the comfort of our vehicle.
I am writing this from the comfort of my home. It is Monday evening and impossible to believe that we left Alaska 4 days ago and three time zones away and were home in 91 hours. It is crazy to think how big and yet small this world is, as demonstrated by the signs above.
To summarize, we were away for 29 days. We drove 8204 miles. We traveled by camper, ferry, airplane, bus, ebike, bike and kayak. All of our planned activities went off without a hitch.
We had one major problem.....on the way home, we stopped at an RV dealer in Minneapolis to look at an RV that I have been researching for a while (that is the closest dealership to our home). We like our RV a lot and have put on 46,000 miles in three years, but a trip like this got us thinking about a newer and slightly roomier unit (and one where we could easily bring bikes).
As one would expect, we liked it quite a bit. Fortunately, there is a 2 year wait list....but that one stop might have been a very expensive one.
Who knows?
