May 18 2008

In as much as there were two services planned for Barbara, one in Spokane and one in Juneau I was faced with the decision of whether or not to go to Juneau for the second service. I was very satisfied with the first service in terms of the closure it provided. I decided that even though people may like to see me in Juneau no one really needed me there for emotional support. I am not sure I really am that much emotional support anyway. So with that decided I was left without any moral high ground to justify the time and expense of a trip to Alaska. After working a while to justify something in my mind about life ending and trying to live it while I am alive I finally just gave up and decided along with Lexie that we should go to Alaska because it would be a lot of fun and we could. I have heard that the way the human mind works is that it will make a decision and then use thought to rationalize the decision it has made. Even though it seems backwards it does seem to be the way things happen some time. Even though it feels to me as though everything was thought through I will admit that it is quite likely the thinking happened after the decision.

Our original route plan had actually included Alaska but Alaska had been cut as a practical measure when we learned that we were going to add an August birthday to the family. Now under the new circumstances since we were in Spokane earlier than we had anticipated being we determined we had plenty of time to get to Juneau, spend some quality time there and be back in Idaho well before contractions got 3-4 minutes apart and at least one minute in duration.

I found some amusement as we talked to the family about our decision to go to Alaska and found them deeply concerned by it. It seems that even though we did our best to explain it people did not fully grasp our intent in our new life style. We concluded that the family had accepted that we wanted to spend our time traveling but had not accepted that we intended to go anywhere. To be truthful if we were not expecting a baby in August I would love to be heading north from Juneau instead of south when we leave. Lack of more money is the only thing keeping us in North America. Not that there is a shortage of things to do in North America we just have big appetites. I don't fully understand my fixation with ice. I am not particularly fond of snow. In fact I rejoice in my new found ability to avoid snow. However I think that if I had a ticket for a go anywhere I wanted for vacation it would be to Antarctica. The pictures I have seen of Antarctica absolutely move my soul. I think it would be wonderful to see the unique wild life, look for meteorites, climb giant ice walls, and experience the vast remoteness of the place.

The largest tactical hurdle to resolve in getting ready for a trip to Alaska was that we had not managed to get the kids passports ordered. Lexie had brought the kids birth certificates and social security cards. The problem was that Natalyn's had some how managed to get lost. With a little bit of online research we were pleased to learn we could order an expedited copy of the birth certificate to be sent to Mariann's house. Another problem of similar nature was that we had not picked up our mail from our Rexburg UPS mail box since leaving Pocatello in February. This problem proved to also have an equally elegant solution in that we were able use a phone call to get mail forwarded by two day ground. The timing worked out that both the mail and the birth certificate would be in our possession before the end of the week leaving us at least a week span in which to make the trip to Juneau.

Tuesday was a waiting day in as much we did not have documents we needed to get in and out of Canada. (As an insert I would have noted the out as being more important before arriving in Canada however now that I am here I am not sure how important the out is. With that said based on my lack of love for snow I am sure that come winter time I would find the out part very important.) We used the wait day to have a day of school and a day of work. I found it very difficult to focus on work. With the events of the previous week I had taken the week off and had my mind full of very different things. When I was finally able to push through it and make some progress I found the progress very satisfying and exciting.

I was delighted when both the mail and the birth certificate came together on Wednesday morning. Lexie was out shopping for some pre-trip supplies when the mail came. By the time we got everything together it was almost 5 o'clock PM. Somewhere in the blur of preparation and planning we picked up a couple of hitch hikers, my 12 year old niece Kylie (technically she's a second cousin but I think of her as a niece, we lived in the same house for about 5 months when she was two) and a bunny rabbit for my cousin Kathy living in Juneau. Kathy raises rabbits for food and needed a new buck to add some depth to what had become a shallow gene pool in her herd.

Getting the rabbit proved to be a bit tricky in that our departure date moved forward a couple of days with the early arrival of the documents. Mariann made a quick trip out to a friend's house to pick up the best she could find, a Rex cross doe. In as much as Kathy had asked for a "not Rex" buck we knew we were missing the specification but figured that it was better than nothing because a new buck could be bred through the doe. With a quick double check of Craig's list as we were leaving Mariann discovered that by making her search term "bunny" instead of "rabbit" she was able to find a person selling baby New Zealand just east of Spokane, very much a fit of what Kathy had been asking for, "a little rabbit with big potential".

In as much as determining the gender of a baby rabbit as well as I would suppose Mariann doesn't need a lot of reason to go visit another person's farm it was determined that Mariann would escort us to the rabbits and determine which of the litter was a buck. As rabbits are known to do, but not exactly in the way they are known to do it, by the time we left Pines (just east of Spokane) the one bunny we were to transport to Alaska had multiplied to four.

An unpleasant discovery I made shortly after acquiring the rabbits is that I am reasonably strongly allergic to rabbits. As cute as they are I can't be around them with out having my eye's water up and feeling stuffy.

We didn't make it very far Wednesday night and simply camped in the Post Falls rest area. Even though it was probably not even an entire hour away from Mariann's house the displacement was significant in as much as it officially began our trip.

Thursday morning started in the DMV office of Couer D' Alene. We needed to get Lexie's driver's license renewed and get photo ID's for all of the kids. The DMV office proved simple to find, but parking in downtown Couer D' Alene for the suburban and trailer proved elusive. Eventually we got it figured out and made it into the DMV. The kids were great to wait patiently the almost two hours it took to get through everything. They were very excited to look at their new ID cards which looked a lot like drivers licenses which I called their "back seat driver's licenses".

Getting through the Canadian border proved to be quite simple. I had visions of getting every item removed from the trailer and blood work done on the bunny rabbits, but they proved to be false worries. Getting through the border was nothing more than giving documentation and answering some simple questions which I believe were engineered to determine that we were not entering with intent of blowing up some part of Canada. The question that caught me by surprise was when the border officer asked what was waiting for me in Alaska. The answer of course was a funeral. Even though I didn't put it on the outside, the process of answering burned some emotion inside of me. It was obvious to me that I have not fully accepted that fact that Barbara is gone. I know there is a very stupid part of me thinking that she is in Alaska that needs to go there to see that she isn't.

Getting through the border was simpler than I had anticipated.

Even though I had read about it on the internet, my stomach sank when we passed our first gas station in Canada. Gas prices were a stout $1.39 per liter, that's $5.26 a gallon for those of you like me that don't think in metric.

The route we picked to go to Alaska goes through three national parks, Kootenai, Banff, and Jasper. Thursday night we were able to get through Kootenai. The drive through Kootenai was amazing for the amount of wildlife we were able to see. I have never seen as many deer. We didn't count them explicitly, but I would guess we saw something on the order of two or three hundred deer. It seemed that every corner we turned had a heard of ten deer on each side of the road. A tradition I started a long time ago is that anyone in my car that can spot a deer by the road before the driver gets a dollar. By the time we pulled into camp I owed Kylie $4.50 (the 50 cents for a tie) and Dallin 50 cents. I found the motivation of keeping the bill low great to keep my attention sharp. Had I not put full energy into spotting the deer the bill could have easily been $50-$60 or of course much worse with authentic antlers as a part of my hood ornament.

We had a great picnic at a rest stop by the road.

The parks were loaded with wild life.

We were delighted to also see big horn sheep, elk and two black bears during our drive Thursday night. Tyrell said it was better than Bear World!

As a typical consequence of early season travel, the campground that was in a perfect place to camp for the night was closed. We found we needed to drive another hour before we found a place to camp in Lake Louise. In the morning it was nice to have hot showers and use the dump at camp ground to get the appropriate tanks empty and full as they needed to be. After another gouging at the gas pump we were on our way again.

The scenery in Banff national park is simply breath taking. I am having an internal struggle deciding if the four park system in Canada hasn't displaced my beloved Yellowstone and Teton in status of favorite national park standing. I didn't see any peak which I would describe as close to better than the Grand Teton, however the volume of high quality peaks was overwhelming. David started noticing the abundance of maple leaf symbols across the national park and started pointing them out. It was fun to watch him point, smile and say leaf, leaf, leaf.

The mountains in the parks are outstanding.

Just into Jasper National Park is the Columbia ice field. I was pleased to see that our timing worked out such that we would be able to go on a glacier tour. The Brewster company has some specially made busses that can drive on the glacier, a crevasse free part of course. I was delighted with our tour driver. The tour starts with a 33%, yes you read that correctly a 33% grade. He calmly explained that if the steepness of the decent bothered us the way it did him we could simply do what he did and close our eyes! He salted the rest of his narration with jokes but that was by far my favorite.

Notice how the the family fits in front of a single bus tire.

The kids loved the snow on the glacier.

I was a bit disappointed that the glacier had so much new snow on it as to hide most of the ice features however my disappointment was offset by the kids enthusiasm to be in snow. I haven't decide whether or not to formally add Mt. Athabaska to my "must do" list but it is very, very high on my "would love to do" list. I will need to do some more reading but simply going off looking at the peak the climb itself looks pretty straight forward. The bus tour guide said it is about 8 hours up and 4 hours down, or 4 seconds down if you make a mistake.

After the glacier tour we did some hiking around Athabaska Falls. The most unique thing about this waterfall when compared to others I have been to was that the trail down the waterfall followed an old flow route through the rock. This gave us the opportunity, well exploited by the kids, to imagine we were water flowing down the rock. I took some time day dreaming about how much fun it would be to do a free rappel or pending the depth of the water in the bottom a jump off the bridge which spanned the waterfall however the kind of day dreaming one does knowing the day dream will not meet fruition in its current state. I have too much respect for a national park to break its rules in the ways I was imagining doing.

Dallin and Natalyn enjoyed watching a dog go in the water.

This photo was taken at the base of the falls.

Our goal for the night was to get to some hot springs on the northeast corner of the park. We arrived at the near by campground at 7:00PM first relieved to find it was open (this was the first day of the season the campground was open), second that we were able to get a camp site, and finally that the hot springs was open until 9:00PM which promised enough time for a quick dinner and then about an hour dip in the springs. We were disappointed in the final point in as much as after getting everyone who was going into swim suits and getting dinner finished we realized that we still had our clocks set to Pacific time and the local time was an hour later. This meant that the hour we had intended on using in the hot springs was not available anymore. As the kids registered their reactions to the news I was relieved that we were going straight to bed and not keeping them up for another hour and a half. It really is a hard thing to tell the difference between being very tired and the world falling apart. As much grief as I give the kids for getting the two confused I catch myself doing it every now and then.

Kylie has been a real treat to have along on the trip. I am convinced that if our new baby is born knowing how to cook, clean, baby sit and do laundry we won't have a moments trouble with a fifth child in the trailer. Even if the baby can't do all of those things we have figured out enough ways to free up extra room I am getting more confident things will work out well space wise. In addition to having a great chore ethic Kylie has been a lot of fun to talk with as we are on the trip. It was fun to talk with her when she was two but the conversations go farther now. Kylie is very excited to get to Alaska and I enjoy her enthusiasm as we hit milestones on the trip such as the Canadian Border, the park boundaries, and mile 0 of the Alaska Highway.

Kylie hiding out

Saturday was a day we decided to focus on simply putting on miles. Even though it wasn't really practical with our current crew I got it in my head that I wanted to get to Fort Nelson a bit over 600 miles away. It turned out we didn't do too poorly in that we made it to Buckinghorse River about 100 miles south of Fort Nelson. I imagine we could have made it all of the way but I caught myself yawning and I am a very staunch non believer in the merits of driving tired. Finding camping sites in Canada has been a little more tricky than I would have expected but not near hard enough to be considered difficult. A trick with driving until you are too tired to drive is that at the point one decides they are too tired to drive they are in fact too tired to drive and need to stop right away. We were pleased to find a nice little provincial park, (the Canadian equivalent of a state park) next to a river. I was impressed with the river ice which was breaking with the spring thaw.

We had a nice camp site next to the Bucking Horse River

A problem with our location was that we were so remote that there was not a church near by. I failed to research church locations before leaving and I did not dare experiment to find out what kind of roaming charges I would acquire trying to connect to the internet via my cell phone. I woke up at 5:00AM feeling like a boxed cat. I took a walk for about an hour but didn't calm down much. Lexie agreed to letting me pull all of the kids out of bed and make a try for church in Fort Nelson. The kids weren't very impressed with the idea but made the best of it. When we arrived in Fort Nelson I was exited to see that there was a church listed in the phone book and then disappointed to see that the address was in Whitehorse, 600 miles away! Oh well, I didn't see a way we were going to make a 10 AM meeting in Whitehorse so we decided to do our own church lessons. A benefit of being in Fort Nelson was that we were able to get full hookups for the RV and internet access. Kylie had started really missing her mom. She was happy when we were able to get a Skype account setup so she could call her mom. I was impressed with how well the Skype phone call worked. I imagine we must be on a satellite internet connection here. My reading had indicated that latency induced by satellites would cause problems with VoIP communication however that didn't really seem to be the case. I was also happy to be able to call my Mom. We learned that Naomi was in the hospital in labor. We were please later to hear that she had a healthy delivery. Baby deliveries always scare me and I am always relieved to get news that everyone made it through alive. I got a great belly laugh hearing Patrick's report that they were able to get a good night's sleep the night before the labor. Some how that didn't line up with a report of Naomi being in the hospital with false labor for the previous 24 hours. I imagine Patrick got a good night's sleep. I am really excited for both of them. They will be wonderful parents. I have great expectations of my new nephew.

Having internet access allowed us to down load conference talks which we used for church talks. We also had some quiet time in which to catch up on Journals. Kylie wrote a talk themed around happiness in the family to fulfill one of her personal progress standards. She also planned Monday's Family Home Evening. The kids did well being quiet through the talks and did get a little done in their journals. Dallin wrote about the Grand Canyon in his journal so we are guessing that the Grand Canyon has been his favorite stop to date.