We are retired. Let's get that established right away. That makes us Senior Citizens, which is an euphemism for old. We live in Florida, where the old people live. But every spring we leave the Sunshine State for several months and wander around the country in some sort of camping vehicle. Then in September, or maybe October, we drift back home to Florida.

We have been to seasides, mountains, and deserts, but never to Alaska. Many of the folks in our neighborhood have been to Alaska. They returned with wild enthusiasm and photos pouring out of albums.
“There are cabbages as big as basketballs in Alaska,” they told us. “The mountains turn pink at twilight,” they said. “It's daylight all night; the salmon are huge and the halibut are even bigger, and you can see moose and bears in the wild.”

“What? You've never been to Alaska? You've Got To Go! Look here, look at my shots of Portage Glacier, and see that moose? It wasn't twenty feet from the car! You've got to go to Alaska!”

So we had to go to Alaska. We decided to drive to Alaska from Florida to sightsee the back roads of America along the way, and we'd take all summer to do it. When we told people that we were going to drive cross-country to Alaska, they all wanted postcards. I added it all up. I would have to take out a loan to buy and send all those postcards-not to mention all the scenery I'd miss while writing them. So I came up with a cheaper and faster alternative. I would email “postcards” as we traveled along to everyone at once.

This is a collection of those “postcards,” a log of the journey sent to sixty-two friends and relatives by email whenever I got something written and could hook up my laptop to a phone line.

At the time that we made the trip decision, we already owned a camper conversion van, essentially just a bed and porta-potti on wheels. We thought it would probably be nice to have a larger vehicle where we could cook and eat inside in case of snowstorms or grizzly bears - but nothing fancy, mind you, just something small and easy to manage.

Enter Little Moby, the smallest trailer we could find that had the essentials of heat, air conditioning, cook stove, refrigerator, hot water heater, microwave, running water, and toilet. Little Moby is thirteen feet long and looks quite a bit like a chopped-off end of a larger trailer.

We had never owned a travel trailer before. We'd had many van campers and motor homes, but never a trailer. We were a little nervous about hooking it up, trailer brakes technology, and backing it up. Bob had never backed anything bigger than a utility trailer full of hay before. He was wary of backing up a thing that was taller than the van. I was real nervous about Bob's trailer backing skills. I have no trailer backing skills.

We got Little Moby off the sales lot, through the gate, and down the highway the twenty miles to home without mishap. Bob did the driving. I did the worrying. We pulled up in front of our driveway. Bob put the van in reverse and began backing the trailer into the driveway. Little Moby didn't go onto the lawn or into the flowerbeds. It really looked like it was going up the driveway -until the splintering crash.

The trailer jumped and swayed. I yelped. Bob was paralyzed.

We both looked in our mirrors. Couldn't see anything. Bob gently pulled forward. Again he backed up. The trailer bumped and rumbled, but went into the driveway. We got out.

He had jackknifed the trailer on the first run. The towbar was bent. The sway bar was broken off. We looked at the damage. We looked at each other. We grinned. We couldn't even get the trailer into the driveway, much less to Alaska!

The next day Little Moby trundled up Route 27 and went back to the dealer's garage. They pounded the towbar back into shape. They fixed the sway bar and told us never to back it up with the sway bar on. Aha! Lesson number one on trailer living; don't back at an angle with the sway bar on. Remember this. It is important.

Little Moby came back into the driveway smoothly, and we began packing for the Big Trip. Bob complained about the weight of the mountain of canned food I was cramming into the van and Little Moby.

“We're going into the wilderness, fellow! I've heard food is wicked expensive up there when you can find it. We can always live on kippered herring and beans if we get stranded.”

I am a Survivor!

Finally we were packed and ready. We emptied the frig and freezer into the trailer refrigerator, locked the doors, and drove out of our Florida residential park.

Goodbye until fall; we're on the road!

Getting Started

While we did parade out of the park waving at friends as we left this morning, we weren't immediately on the open road. We made a stop after only seven miles for breakfast at a local restaurant, The Lighthouse. From there we stopped at Wal-Mart and a Kmart for various small items. Then-we were on our way!

We headed north on U.S. 441, our usual path out of Florida. We can follow 441 all the way from our doorstep to and through Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. It's a narrow redline road on the map, a secondary highway that carries us past cotton fields and pecan orchards, the Okefenokee Swamp, the Suwanee River, and cracker cabins. Small, dusty villages mark our route. Their historic homes and unpainted storefronts are a portrait of the Old South. It was in the driveway of a deserted building in one of these villages that we had lunch today.

Little Ocmulgee State Park, near McRae, Georgia is always our first night's stop. It is just about seven hours from home in Florida to home in Georgia, counting time for lunch.

Tall shady trees draped with Spanish moss shade the campground at Little Ocmulgee. It is a resort park, a recreation and vacation spot for all tastes. The proshop for the golf course looks like a traditional Southern clapboard home with several gables and a wrap-around wide summer porch. Further into the park, the red brick conference center has a lounge, meeting rooms, a restaurant, and a swimming pool. Wings of motel rooms spread out from the main building. Buildings elsewhere in the park, nearer the lake, are rustic board or log, painted dark brown. One even dates from the Civilian Conservation Corps era. There are cabins to rent, a group camp with a dining room, beaches, and our home, the campground.

Today we got into Little Ocmulgee at about 4:30 p.m. We set up camp. I took a pile of magazines and a couple of books over to the book exchange in one of the campground's rustic social cabins, and brought back five pocket books. We climbed into Little Moby, turned on the air conditioning, and I warmed up the homemade vegetable bean soup I had brought from home.

On the road, I spend almost all my evenings on the computer writing email and the travel log. Bob occasionally manages to wrest the computer away from me long enough to enter expenses for the day into Quicken and read his own email. We have a glass of wine as we work or read. For this special trip I bought some flashy fat plastic wine glasses for a dollar each. They're gorgeous, almost iridescent. Mine is purple and Bob's is royal blue. A gallon of red wine rides in the “cellar” underneath the table. We do carry some amenities along with the canned fish and beans.

Darkness is falling on Little Ocmulgee. The roar of the air conditioner drowns out the tap-tap of my typing. Bob reads The Street Lawyer and munches peanuts between sips of merlot from his big blue wineglass. Life on the Road has begun.

Mackinac Island, Michigan

This is Tuesday. Last Friday Bob drove the trailer from Montague, Michigan to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan by himself. He was going to visit some of his old haunts up there over the weekend.

I, with my friends Barb and Jane, also drove up from Montague, but took a ferry to Mackinac Island between lakes Huron and Michigan. This small island is littered with the very rich, and has one of the most elegant resort hotels in the nation, The Grand Hotel. Jane, Barb, and I were on our annual pilgrimage to the island for three days, at the end of which I would meet up with Bob again, and we'd turn west towards Alaska.

Jane and Barb belong to the island historical group. I tag along. Each of us paid $100 for the privilege of attending a cocktail party in one of the historic mansions, The Wedding Cake House, followed by a semiformal dinner at the Grand Hotel. The gala is a yearly fundraiser for the Island Associates, the historical society.

We had discussed and planned our "frocks" for the event months ahead. It's summer, right? H-m-m-m. Not necessarily in Michigan. The cocktail party began at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday night. Did I mention the frigid winds? They were there.

We had ordered a taxi earlier in the day to pick us up at 4:45 p.m. at the Murray Hotel, where we always roost when on the island. At 4:30 we descended to the lobby in our summery, light frocks, bound to tough out the weather. There are no automobiles allowed on the island. The taxi we expected would be horse-drawn. We hid away in a lobby nook to escape the breezes from the constantly swinging front door of the hotel and waited. No taxi. I finally went to the desk and had them call again. Apologies. They were busy. Maybe in ten minutes. Ten minutes! The cocktail hour was from 5 to 6:30. We were losing time to rub elbows with the very rich and cultured and, most of all, to tour and snoop all around the Wedding Cake House.

A large carriage with the sign "Grand Hotel Shuttle" pulled up in front. We ran out. Yes, the driver would take us to West Bluff to the cocktail party at Edgecliff, better known as The Wedding Cake House. We hiked up our long skirts and clambered in. The frigid north winds blew off the water and through the carriage. The carriage meandered around and picked up some others going to the party. Soon it was full of elegantly dressed freezing people. By the time we got to the mansion, I was shaking - not shivering, shaking!!

Jane and Barb, like horses to the barn, started off to look around the house. Not me. I headed for the bar. This Florida-type person needed warmth first and alcohol warmth would do. I elbowed through clusters of elegant people holding elegant glasses of booze and smiling at each other. I couldn't find the bar. I was almost up to snatching a glass of wine from an elegant hand when I spied wine bottles out on the porch. The hosts had expected at least moderately warm weather. The bar was on the porch. The name tags (to prove you had an invitation) were on the porch. The doors of the house were all open. There was a thermometer on the porch. It read forty-two degrees, not counting the wind chill factor.

I fought my way to the white-clothed table and asked the white-jacketed Jamaican waiter for red, dry wine. Then I asked for white, sweet wine for Barb. She had called her order to me as she and Jane headed for the stairs to check out the upstairs bedrooms. The fellow must have been into the stock. He danced around and artistically flipped bottles for me to inspect, then poured my selections with a flourish. I sucked down the first glass, got another, turned around and ran into Jane and Barb. Barb snatched her wine, and Jane elbowed her way to the table and got some for herself.

Fortified, we attacked the house in earnest. We inspected every room, chatted with the police plants who looked like guests but were really there to make sure no one stole the antique green pressed glass candlesticks, and admired the period authenticity of the decorating. Then we went back into the parlors to find the food. I made a detour to the bar and asked the same server for "cabernet, s'il vous plais." He danced around behind the table singing "cabernet, s'il vous plais," as he hunted the bottle and poured my drink with élan. That boy was definitely into the sauce, or maybe the boredom of serving elegant people inspired him.

Last year, when we had attended this fête, we didn't recognize many of the hors d'oeuvres, and ate some stuff that tasted like raw garbage. This year we knew to avoid the offerings of the white-coated servers who circulated with silver trays and hunt for something familiar. I found a cheese tray with crackers and oatcakes and signaled Barb and Jane. We (graciously) dived into the cheese and crackers. Barb and I ate up the oatcakes, and we all fended off starvation.

A discreet word was passed amongst the guests that it was time to move on down to the Grand Hotel to the dinner. The Grand Hotel was a quarter of a mile down the street, on a bluff above the surf. The three of us took a quick tour again of the house, then gathered our resolve and headed for the hotel. My memory of the walk is rather blurred. It may have been the wind or it may have been the wine. However, I arrived at the Grand Hotel sober and shaking.

The dinner was in the Terrace Room. The jazz trio in tuxes that had been decorating a parlor in Edgecliff was now on the stage of the ballroom. Over 200 people found a seat at the sea of round tables, and the festivities began. The double doors swung open, and a double line of waiters in green coats with tails, black pants and white tuxedo shirts with ties streamed in the doors holding aloft trays of the first course, which was two large marinated and skewered shrimp on a bed of julienned jicama with a citrus dressing. Wine flowed freely, and each of the five courses was presented in the same way, the swinging open of the green doors and the parade of waiters. I was impressed.

By 9:30 it was over. We left the Terrace Room and wandered about on the Carlton Varney black carpet scattered with a lush red geranium pattern, trying to extend the evening. We took pictures of each other in the lobby, perused an art exhibit in a parlor, and finally had to face the walk back to the hotel in the dark and frigid winds. It was about a mile's walk. Thanks to wine and piles of rich food, it didn't seem quite so frigid. We didn't rush, but savored the end of our special night by strolling and chatting along the way back to our hotel. It was cold. But it was our special night. Besides, we knew that there would be chocolate chip cookies on our pillows at the hotel, with little notes on them that said, "Sweet Dreams." It was a warming thought.

Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan

'Tis the day after the summer solstice. It's 9:40 p.m. and just edging toward twilight in Sault Ste. Marie in Upper Michigan. Jane and Barb went back to lower Michigan yesterday, and I sit in Little Moby writing this to you. The thermometer on the window reads fifty-four degrees outside, and there'll probably be snow by morning. It's been so cold up here even the natives are complaining. It's been sunny, lots of sunny. It makes the icicles sparkle when they are shaken by the thirty-mile-an-hour winds from the Arctic. The ambient air is not bad - a high today of sixty degrees - in the sun out of the wind from 2:00 until 2:15 p.m. It's the winds, the twenty-mile-an-hour frigid winds whipping around and through you that make eyes water and your nose run.

Today Bob and I went down to the Sault Ste. Marie locks to watch freighters from all over the world get dropped twenty-one feet from Lake Superior to Lake Huron, and vice-versa. The open viewing stands at the locks are a couple of stories high and the jet stream screams right through them. I was yanking on my puffy red winter coat on my way to a stand when a fellow dragging rope from a freighter to a bollard called to me, “We do have occasional nice days here. But this isn't one of them.”

We spent three hours on a viewing stand, huddled together for warmth, and watched the freighters lock up and down in two locks. There was an unusual amount of traffic through the locks today, and the wind provided added entertainment. Maneuvering a 1,000-foot long freighter through the lock with about three feet of clearance on either side is the work of a genius. With the wind hitting the side of a six-story superstructure at one end of the freighter, the genius is a magician. The dialogue between the freighter and the tower is broadcast into the viewing platforms, and we were part of the drama. Sometimes there were only four inches between the ship and the lock wall in the battles with the wind. It took as long as forty-five minutes for the captain and crew to ease a ship out of a lock, and we were right there with them.

Finally around 7:00 p.m. our backs and legs gave out, and we left the freighters to get through the locks on their own. The last one we followed was full of grain from Alberta, headed for Montreal. The grain-heavy Prospector of Canada went on to Montreal, and we came back to Little Moby for a cup of hot tea and a Cornish pasty.

Wawa, Ontario, Canada

It was fifty-two degrees inside Little Moby when I woke in Sault Ste. Marie this morning. It was fifty degrees outside, and sheeting rain. I was snug and toasty in my blanket bag with my puffy down sleeping bag spread over me. Bob had gone to bed in his blanket bag under a light white camping blanket. I looked over at him. He was a maroon hump under two bath towels spread over the white blanket.

I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't. So I lay there until my patience ran out, then began flopping around to wake him up. It worked, though when he saw the rain, he pulled the blanket and towels over his head. I shoved him out of bed.

By the time he showered and we ate breakfast, though, the rain stopped and the sky was brightening. After we had packed the car and redd up the camper, I walked over to the campground office in sunlight to do my email.

The shed roof above the door to the campground office extended to cover a battered chest freezer, a Coke machine, and five odd rackety chairs for a little social center. A phone line snaked out from a hole high in the office wall and draped down the side of the building to someplace behind the freezer. At strategic points the line was stuck to the wall with duct tape to keep it from wandering. It crept up from behind the freezer and its jack lay on the dented top, free to all comers. I had barely plugged the jack into my computer when a fellow sauntered up with his laptop under his arm. Good timing, Ruth.

It was nearly 11 a.m. when I finished my computer work and we finally pulled out of Chippewa Campground at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on our way to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and points west. It was cold, at one time down to forty-eight degrees, but clear sailing under cloudless skies.

Highway 17, the Trans-Canada Highway, winds along the shores of Lake Superior, where wonderful wilderness vistas open at every turn. This is home country. We have traveled this road often, and I have backpacked many miles of Algoma Country and Lake Superior Provincial Park off Highway 17 in days past - a far distant past. We are long gone from this country now, gone twenty years ago to bask in Florida sunshine. But still the siren shores of Superior call us, and every few years we come back to renew the bond.

We only went 147 miles today, to Wawa, Ontario. You can't miss Wawa. A twenty-five foot high steel statue of a Canadian Goose on the TransCanada Highway marks Wawa. Wawa means “wild goose” in Ojibwa.

In the '60s and '70s we came to Canada early every spring, with Bob's brother and wife, to fish for walleye and pike in the pristine waters of Shoals or Ivanhoe Provincial Parks. We always stopped on our way at Wawa to eat good Chinese food at the Four Aces Tavern. The legacy of the thousands of Chinese laborers who worked on the railroads to open up the Canadian wilderness is a Chinese restaurant in every town. Before leaving Wawa in those days we would stock up on Molson's Golden Ale and other necessities for living in the Canadian wilds.

Bob and I are camped tonight at Wawa Resort and Campground on the Magpie River. There were moose crossing signs along the road today, and owls hoot in the surrounding tall pines tonight. Temps are predicted to go down to thirty-eight degrees. It's the crisp, clear June cold of the North. It's bloody-well freezing to us late-comer Floridians.

Schreiber, Ontario, Canada

We woke this morning at 6:30. Bob popped his stocking cap clad head out of his sleeping bag, looked at his watch, and announced the time. I sat up and checked the thermometer outside the window beside me. It was thirty-eight degrees out there, and raining. I rubbed a bigger clear spot in the condensation on the window. Last night after my shower I had laid my towel over the picnic table to dry during the night. There it was, on the picnic table, dripping rainwater. We wiggled back down into our sleeping bags.

At 8:30 Bob jumped up and started rolling up his bag. He announced that it was time to get up. I sat up and checked outside the window. It was still thirty-eight degrees out there, and still raining. The thermometer inside the camper read forty degrees. He yanked my sleeping bag off me. I was out of that bed and into my cold clothes in ten seconds flat. The uniform of the day is turtleneck shirt, wool sweater, down vest, jeans, and wool socks under hiking boots. And that's just in the camper and car. Outside a hooded raincoat and winter gloves finish the ensemble.

We turned on the little boxy ceramic heater, and the camper was soon toasty. Bob set out into the deluge to go over to the bathhouse and take a shower. More the fool him. I take my showers in the evenings when it is warmer, which is a relative term these days. Breakfast was uneventful except when the toaster set off the smoke alarm. After breakfast Bob cleared the dishes away and packed the camper for travel. He took the dripping towels over to the campground laundry and stuffed them into a dryer. I trudged out to find a place to send and receive the day's emails.

A small shed near the campground office had a Bell Telephone sign on it. I pulled open the door. Inside there were two counters, two dataport telephones, and a chair. What luxury. A chair! Too bad the place wasn't heated, too. The wind howled around the corners of the shed; the rain sheeted down the windows. I huddled in a chair and tapped - tapped with chilled fingers for a half hour or so at ten cents a minute. There was no free local AOL number in Wawa. Our cell phone didn't work; our weather radio got only static. Just the phone line linked us to the world - at ten cents a minute.

By the time I got back to Little Moby, Bob had just finished packing the leveling jacks and we were good to go. Before we could head west again on Highway 17, though, we had to stop at the campground dump station and empty our holding tanks.

The sewer opening and flush hose at the dump station were on a six-inch high concrete slab about eight feet square. I stood out in the rain to signal Bob when the camper trailer sewer was lined up with the sewer on the slab.

The tanks were emptied without incident. Everything was closed up and Bob climbed back into the car while I stood outside to make sure Little Moby didn't run up over the slab. Bob started forward. The wheel of the camper ran up against the slab. I shouted and flailed my arms. Bob backed up, and nearly ran the back corner of the body of the van into the slab. I shouted and jumped up and down and flailed my arms. There was a heated marital exchange. Bob charged out of the van to see for himself.

Little Moby was angled in such a way and so close to the slab that it had to be backed off and straightened to get past the slab and away. However, the hitch was right over the corner of the slab and the van so close to the other side of the slab that it couldn't be backed far enough to straighten up the trailer. We both stood on the slab in the rain and swore at the hitch. Then Bob got back in the car and I positioned myself again to direct the operation.

Literally six inches this way, six inches that way, turn and turn we worked at freeing the trailer. Time passed. The forty-degree rain poured down. Finally the back end of the car cleared the slab for a three-foot run in reverse. Then slowly Bob pulled forward. The trailer straightened just enough to rub past the side of the slab without damage. Hooray! We were free - mostly. The van was on the lawn and nose-up to the porch of the campground office. Details.

Very carefully Bob backed the trailer straight back far enough to make the turn past the office and away from the dump station. I jumped in and we departed Wawa Resort and Campground. The tree-lined drive out of the campground was a muddy minefield of rain-filled potholes. At Highway 17, clouds of mist obscured the road. But nothing else was going to stop us now. Off we went into the gloom.

We drove out of the fog in eight or ten miles and the rain got lighter. I commented how, even in the rain, the small lakes and waterfalls were beautiful. After twenty miles, we could see glints of sunlight ahead.
Bob said, “Did you get the towels out of the dryer?”

“Who, me?”

“I didn't get them either.”

There was reflective silence.

“Well,” I said, “it's just two towels and two washcloths. We can replace them.”

“My underwear was with them.”

“Those $9.00-a-pair shorts?”

At twenty-five miles precisely Bob wheeled the car and trailer around on the highway, and pointed them toward Wawa Resort and Campground.

We drove back into the fog, back into the rain, and back into Wawa Resort and Campground. I leaped out of the car, ran into the laundry, grabbed the towels and underwear, and threw them in the car. At 12:36 p.m. we again drove out of Wawa Resort and Campground and onto Highway 17.

After a few miles, we found a roadside pull-off. The only amenities it offered were two full trash barrels, but it was a place to get off the highway and eat some lunch. The camper was cold. Condensation again covered the windows inside, but that didn't matter as it was still raining outside and the only view was full trash barrels. We fired up the little propane cookstove and made hot coffee, which raised the temperature a few degrees. The coffee warmed us, and we enjoyed a gourmet lunch of smoked Great Lakes whitefish, jalepeño cheese on crackers, and sliced apples.

The rest of the afternoon it rained for a while and then there was a glimpse of sun. Then it rained some more. We stopped around 6:00 p.m. at Travel Rest Trailer Park in Schreiber, Ontario, having gone 209 miles, twenty-five of them three times. At this rate we'll reach Alaska with the first heavy snowfall. The Travel Rest campground office is also the local Sears catalog store and the town drivers' license bureau. It all closes at 5:30 p.m. and if you want something after that, like a campsite, you have to go around and knock on the door of the house in back. We did that, and soon had a campsite.

Bob was getting his fanny pack out of the car when a fellow camper walked by and told him that they had driven through wet snow this afternoon just a ways west of here. We don't have snow tires. People who live in Florida don't own snow tires.

I washed out some of my clothes in the public bathroom, and they hang from a rope strung across the inside of the camper like a tenement clothesline. It's a very clean, small bathroom and shower facility-but unheated. I think a sponge bath in the camper will do very well for my little warm Florida body tonight, thank you.

Kakabeka Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada

Again we woke early to cold and rain, and again we snuggled down in our sleeping bags for a couple of hours. We forced ourselves out of bed about 9:00 a.m., and it was 10:00 before we finished breakfast. I walked up to the campground office/Sears store/license bureau to send emails we wrote last night. Other than the fact that there was no local AOL number out here in the North Country and my online time was costing me the usual ten cents a minute, it was a nice setup. I had a soft office chair, an eight-foot table, and a phone line all to myself in the room that was the drivers' license bureau's testing facility. Above all that, it was heated. I basked as I typed.

I got done with the computer work just as Bob pulled the trailer into the dump station, always the last move every morning before hitting the road. I helped him with that job, and we were off and running west down Highway 17 in the rain.

Lunch was in another one of those local pull-offs. This one didn't even have trash cans. Sodden dumped litter was scattered along the edge of the parking area. We ate quickly and left. Not ten miles down the road was a lovely picnic area with tables, mowed lawn, and restrooms. Of course. We couldn't have eaten at the tables if we had stopped there in the rain, but they would have been nicer to look at than soaked papers and dented cans.

We stopped at the tourist center in Thunder Bay to ask directions to a supermarket and to pick up an Ontario map. The rain let up long enough for us to get groceries at an A&P and windshield washer fluid at a Canadian Tire store, both right on Highway 17 at the west end of town. In fact, it only sprinkled on and off for the rest of the day.

Campgrounds are few and far between in this part of the world, and it was already 4:30 p.m. There were a couple of commercial campgrounds on the way into Thunder Bay, but we had passed them all on our quest for groceries. Twelve miles ahead lay Kakabeka Provincial Park, which did have a few campsites with electrical hookups. At least we wouldn't have to read by lantern light. Been there, done that. Don't want to do it any more than we have to.

It took us two runs around the winding narrow tracks of the campground in Kakabeka to find 75, our assigned site, a little clearing scraped out of massed dripping trees in sea of dense undergrowth as tall as we were. It was gray, gloomy, and dank there in the brush. We pulled into 75, got out of the van, and hunted for the electrical hookup. By seeing them at other campsites, we knew we were looking for a yellow post. But we couldn't find a yellow post at site 75.

This is true wilderness. There are no other campers within a half-mile or so. It's just us and the mosquitoes. We trudged around the neighboring forest scrapes, and from a site near to 75 I thought I saw a flash of yellow in the forest. Back at 75, I thrashed through wet brush to a tiny clearing. There it was, a yellow post with two electrical outlet boxes screwed onto it.

It was forty feet from the campsite if it was a foot, which made it fifty feet from the compartment on the camper where our electrical cord lay coiled like an orange snake. I yelled for Bob. He shoved his way into the clearing and studied the pole. Weirdest setup we ever saw. No one hauls around fifty feet of electrical cord.

We pushed our way back out of the woods and looked around. Site 78, kitty-corner from 75, had a yellow pole at the edge of the campsite. We got back in the van and dragged Little Moby back to the entrance gate of the park. Bob went in to change the site and soon came out with new paperwork- for site 77.

“77! You were supposed to get 78!”

He refused to go back and change the site again. I would have done it, but he had control of the steering wheel and was headed for home. We drove into 78 and toyed with the idea of taking that site anyway. There were few people in the campground, after all. We sat there for a while with the car running, then got out and wandered around. Should we just move in to 78? Bob walked over to site 77. He came back.

“I can reach that first post from 77.”

“You can?”

We climbed back into the van. He backed the rig out of 78 and pulled into 77. We were home for tonight. It is the same yellow post in the brush, but it's much nearer to 77, near enough for our electrical cord to reach. We have electricity. That's good.

Getting Started

Michigan
Mackinac Island
Sault Ste. Marie

Canada
Wawa
Schreiber
Kakabeka P P

Alaska
Cantwell
Denali
Kenai
Soldotna

International Falls, MN

North Dakota
Icelandic State Park
Willston

Malta, MT

Alberta, Canada
Fort McLeod
Wetaskiwin
Valley View

Alaska
Kenai
Soldotna
Homer
Seward

British Columbia, Canada
Dawson Creek
FortNelson
Muncho Lake

Yukon Territory, Canada
Watson Lake
Whitehorse

Alaska
Seward
Palmer
Tok

Yukon Territory, Canada
Whitehorse

Alaska
Haines
Skagway

Yukon Territory, Canada
KluaneLake

Alaska
Tok
Valdez

Yukon Territory, Canada
Whitehorse
(and Skagway, AK)

British Columbia, Canada
WatsonLake
FortNelson
Dawson Creek

Alberta, Canada
Whitecourt

Havre, Montana

North Dakota
Williston
Medora

Valdez, Alaska

Medora, North Dakota

Wyoming
Spearfish
Devil's Tower NM

Rt. 20 across Nebraska

Des Moines, Iowa

Branson, Missouri

Jackson, Mississippi

Tallahassee, Florida

Home!