The HIGHWAY

If there was ever a day that the Alaska Highway lived up to its name, it was today!  What a disastrous mess of a road!  For all its greatness and beauty, today was just ugly.  Let me explain...

First, we left Whitehorse, YT, this morning around 8 a.m., after seeing Frantic Follies Klondike humor/can-can girls, etc. last night at the Westmark Hotel in Whitehorse.  Whitehorse is about as close to an actual city as one gets in the Yukon Territories.  We ate at a real restaurant called Klondike BBQ Ribs and Salmon.  I had the halibut fixed with brie and wild berry compote while Brad had the orange-glazed salmon.  Both were excellent.  After such as nice night, what could go wrong today?  I had to ask.

First, within minutes of leaving the city limits, we were faced with all types of road issues, which we had been expecting to some degree:  erosion, frost heaves, construction delays, all gravel with no lines, some pavement with lines, potholes, and just a general lack of "smooth" anything!  If you have a chance to look at the pictures, they don't really describe the road because every time I tried to take a picture of the road, it would come out blurry.  I guess I should have left one of those pictures in the mix to prove my point! 

 

In terms of driving the road, Brad and I typically take two-hour shifts.  He drove this morning from approximately 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.  I then drove from 10 a.m. to 12 noon.  Today, however, we couldn't find any pull-offs at 12 noon.  If it was designated as a pull-off, we weren't sure we could ever pull back on!  I drove until 12:30 p.m. when Brad finally said, "Please pull off at the next turn in.  Your fingers are permanently curled to the steering wheel, you have one foot on the gas pedal, and one foot permanently glued to the brake."  He was right.  We ate a quick lunch, and then he took over, driving until 5 p.m. Alaska time, when we finally rolled into Tok, AK, RV Park.  Hallelujah!   That's the good news!  (The bad news is we have to cover that portion of the highway when we return from Valdez, AK, and drive to Skagway, AK.  I may call our travel agent and see if there is a car ferry from Valdez to Skagway!  Otherwise, I just can't think about that now.)

Our second major issue occurred prior to getting to Tok.  Within the final two hours of Brad's second time at the wheel, I began to notice a noise.  I know what you are thinking….women always hear "noises," and it is nothing.  Yeah, right.  It wasn't "nothing."  The noise wasn't heard by Brad, however, although he kept trying to hear it.  He finally pulled off the side of the road, walked around the camper and truck, saw nothing, heard nothing, and resumed driving.  But, I kept hearing the noise and offered many suggestions over the next two hours.  Could there be a chain dragging?  No.  Could there be a problem with the tires on the camper?  No.  Could there be an embarrassing RV hose of some type (you know what I mean) dragging.  We kept seeing those along the highway.  No.  Could something be sliding around in the back of the truck?  No.  Could something be rattling in the backseat, for heaven's sakes!  It sounds like something dragging or scraping.  Hmmm.  We stopped again.  Nothing.

The noise continued through U.S. Customs (where by the way I lost two red skin potatoes to the border guard, and I just know he is eating them with pot roast tonight for supper, you know?  That ticked me off to say the least as I had just bought them the night before AND made sure I had no fruit.  Guess what?  No fruit, no vegetables without labels, no meat without labels, and no plant or plant products are now permitted at the border.  There are just two reasons I can think of for this 1)  The U.S. is extremely picky about its food when compared to Canadian customs.  Or, 2) the border guards are 35 miles from any grocery store.  Hmmmm.)  Anyway, to continue the story, we were about 35 miles from our destination of Tok, AK, and Brad finally stopped at a highway truck stop.  He had me drive the truck, and he listened for the noise while I moved the truck ahead slowly.  In my mind I am thinking that if others are watching us, they are probably thinking, "What the heck are those two doing?  How crazy are those two loonies?"  But, it was worth the embarrassment as Brad finally HEARD it!  It was in the driver's side rear truck tire, and he thought it was a stone scraping the disc brake--not good.  Hopefully, he is wrong.  (Side note:  Those of you who know Brad, know that actually the odds are in his favor for a correct diagnosis.)

So, we hopped back into our respective seats, and we screeched into Tok, AK, finally around 5 p.m.  We got to our campsite, unhooked, and opened up the camper.  OMG!!!  It looked like a hurricane had gone through our trailer while we were driving it!  The bed had slid forward at least 8 inches, not allowing a single human being to enter the bedroom.  That was not good, because someone had to get in there to replace the drawers that had come out of the sides of the bed.  Books, jewelry, alarm clocks, magazines, etc. were thrown all over the bedroom.

As I went forward to investigate with Brad right behind me, I almost stumbled onto a kitchen drawer on the floor, which had come open, dropped to the floor, and dumped kitchen utensils all over the place.  (Will someone get me out of this nightmare?  Falling is the last thing I need to do.)  I tried to put the drawer back in, but saw that the glide was bent, so I laid it aside, still trying to reach the bedroom while tip-toeing through the utensils.  As I entered the bathroom to get to the bedroom, I noticed the shower door looked funny.  I went to unlock it, and the entire door came off in my hands.  Are you kidding me?  Brad came up behind me, stepping over the kitchen drawer as well as the utensils on the floor and grabbed the shower door out of my hands.  I stepped back onto a roll of toilet paper which had come unrolled from the holder at least one-half of the way.  Someone is going to see a footprint on that roll, and I can't help it.  I walked back into the kitchen while Brad was putting the shower door back on the hinge when I noticed bubbles of all sorts in the kitchen sink.  When I mentioned this, Brad said, "I think it's just soap suds."  I said, "From two days ago?"  We are still debating this, but Brad starting looking under the trailer again and noticed water is now coming from our fresh water tank.  If there is anything I have learned while RVing, it is that water should not come out of any tank anywhere unless you want it to.  Period.  Water should not be coming from our fresh water tank….this is not a good sign.  After thinking about this for awhile, he now believes that rocks from the highway  hit the tank and cracked one of the plastic valves.  Oh, boy.  WHERE DO WE BEGIN?

Lucky for us, there was a mechanic on duty at a Chevron dealership in Tok (population 400?)  After we described in detail what we had heard for the past two hours, he said, "No problem.  I hear this story about twice every day.  You've got a rock stuck in the disc brake."   Within 30 minutes, he took care of the problem with the rock, rotated the tires, and recalibrated them.  Brad had been right.  Yippee!  One problem fixed!

And, we are slowly putting the trailer back together tonight….well, Brad is really as I'm writing this blog.  The handyman (Brad) has put new screws in the shower door, straightened out the glides for the kitchen drawer, re-wound the toilet paper (with the footprint), moved the bed back onto its frame, put the stuff in the drawers beside the bed once again, and he just told me he took the end of a pencil, some duct tape and pipe strap and made a plug for the fresh water tank.  What a guy!!  

We're ready to roll to Fairbanks tomorrow!  It's rather unfortunate as we have to continue to drive the HIGHWAY!

Jane and Brad 

PS:  Brad wants to add that our truck and camper now look like the Jeep commercial where the Jeep shakes off the mud like a dog.  We are headed to the wash tomorrow a.m.

PSS:  Brad just reminded me that between Toad River and Whitehorse, we saw the most animals ever, and those photos are in our latest link.  By the way, no animals today; however, we were concentrating on the road so much, we could have missed them!