This & That Along The Way

Here is a bit of Trivia

Alaska is the state that is the farthest north, farthest west and farthest east of the
International dateline of any state in the USA

Become an Alaskan fulltime and…

If you are willing to move to Alaska fulltime you will reap huge rewards. You will pay no state sales tax. You will pay no state income tax. In fact the state of Alaska paid its fulltime residents $3,200 in 2008 from its excess oil revenue. That is up from $1,200 the prior year. It will cost you $50 to register your car your property tax will be maybe 10% of your California property tax. Any Alaskan can become a subsistence fisherman and net fish up to 500 salmon per year for your own use. There are real benefits! I can not understand why Californians, especially, aren’t flocking to Alaska to live. Oh yes…”Fulltime” they really want you here 12 months a year at last the first year & they have very strict rules after that.

Flowers Everywhere

No matter where we have gone on this adventure in Canada & in Alaska, there have been flowers. Northerners love flowers! Baskets, they love hanging baskets and planter boxes or unconventional containers like tires, boots, car parts, hats or better yet mining equipment parts and old furniture. They do not do pots of flowers with saucers, oh no. Locally available materials are used. It does not matter if we are in a resort or driving down Main Street in Haines or even in a fish camp on the Kenai Peninsula, we would find an absolutely terrible looking abandon building in any town would have well maintained fresh summer flowers planted out front. It is quite beautiful with the long days it takes very little time to have overflowing bouquets of color all over the place.

Getting along with little Lindsey

From the very beginning of this trip our traveling companion Bill Moorhead has been trying to make friends with our dog Lindsey. It is the funniest thing to watch. If he would not try so darn hard it probably would not be a big deal but as everyone in our family knows Lindsey is a snob, a real princess. It took her 2 years to warm up to Billy and why do the kid’s call her “Princess Q-Tip” anyway? Well it has not worked for Bill M. It is driving him nuts because as he keeps saying “All animals love me!” Keep trying Bill. It is so fun to watch you grovel!


2009 is a VERRY GOOD YEAR for Alaskan Weather

As we traveled from the far north in Fairbanks to the city of Anchorage and down south in Haines, all comments agreed. This year, 2009 was the best summer in 3 or 4 years to come north. The weather for several summers has been cold, gloomy & rainy a shopkeeper in Anchorage told us that she saw only 4 days of sunshine last year.


One night from hell

We have had on going problems with mosquitoes during the trip. I mean it is summer and there is water everywhere so of course there are mosquitoes but this one night in Teslin was the night from hell. We could not figure out where they were coming from. We were up until 1am killing them with a dust buster & a fly swatter. We slept until 4am with the sheet over our heads we were awakened by that familiar buzzing in our ears. So we were up and at it again. We must have waked at least a couple hundred. Several of the morning fellows left bloody splats behind as we continued our effort that morning. Even Lindsey had a couple of bites on her tummy! They don’t bother me as much as Billy, but I ended up with just on my face, he gets big welts, poor guy. We think they may be getting in somehow through our bedroom slide, so we plan on sleeping with that slide in to test the difference. YUK!!!

Oil Tankers – Interesting facts we gleaned.

We learned a lot about oil and oil tankers while we were in Valdez. The Exxon Valdez oil spill was about 10 years ago and I was getting real tired of hearing about it until we visited the Alaskan Sealife Center in Seward. The Sealife Center is an aquarium that was built partly with the 900 million dollars paid by Exxon to preserve & rehabilitate wildlife in the area. The oil rescue & cleanup effort was centered out of Seward. What we learned was that, of the dozen or 2 species that were severely impacted by the oil spill, several have not returned to their pre-spill numbers and some are facing extinction.

The changes in tankers since Exxon Valdez has been dramatic. Today all tankers have escorts into Prince William Sound to Valdez. There is a new class of tanker called the Alaska class that holds only 1,000,000 gallons of crude unlike today’s mega tankers that are ¼ mile long that routinely carry several million gallons, and are not allowed into most ports. Today’s new tankers large & small have more safeguards. As of this year all tankers have to be double hulled to prevent spills. The old single hulls will soon be a thing of the past. There are strict restrictions on ballast water. Who new that they filled the tankers with sea water to keep them from being so buoyant as to tip over? They used to just fill the empty oil bay with sea water. No way! Not any more. The new tankers must maintain separate tanks for oil and for Ballast water. We humans are becoming so responsible. It’s about time! All that oily water must just have been dumped back in the ocean. It had to be several hundred maybe thousands of gallons of oil escaping every time they emptied a ¼ mile long tanker.

Alaskan locals work 24/7 in summer

Repeated mantras as locals are talking among themselves all over the state is that they work 24/7 in the summer tourist season and that there is not a lot to do in the winter unless you work running a show plow or in one of the very few white collar jobs. Artists create in the winter & sell in the summer.

Tourism is off 25% and business is not great so say the vendors.

Business owners in several places along our trail alluded to the fact that tourism was off. A few times the number 25% was used. We tended to try to talk to the locals and find out about them and how the make a living. I spoke to the Vietnamese nail salon owner (a man) who was trying to make it in a shopping mall in Fairbanks where Godshouk’s had just closed. The fishing charter industry in Seward and also along the Kenai Peninsula down to Homer, we were told is off 25% from last year. Folks we met that were from the various cruise ships also told us that there were fewer cruises. As we traveled inland to the huge Wrangell – St. Elias National Park the same was true of tour operators & bus drivers in McCarthy were all crying the blues.