Wrapping it up in Alaska

Eric was up early this morning and had breakfast burritos and coffee prepared before the rest of us got up. We headed out around 9am and headed east to the Matanuska Glacier. We unhitched at a rest area and drove the Jeep into the park. We were no prepared for hiking on a glacier, so the visit was a little disappointing. We didn’t get to climb out as far as we’d like because it was so slippery! I highly recommend crampons, spikes, Yaktrax, or similar to anyone who is going to visit. Even a hiking pole or 2 would be beneficial. I fell on the way back to the car, but I didn’t get hurt at all~ maybe a little bruise on my knee. It was pretty cool being up next to the massive glacier. The ice is a wonderful turquoise blue color. The ice absorbs all colors except blue. Even rivers that flow from a glacier are that beautiful shade of blue. Anyway, I guess that doesn’t sound so disappointing, but I wish we had gotten our money worth. The entry fees were $55 for the 5 of us so it would have been nice to be able to explore more. We did have to sign a huge waiver form before going out to the glacier. If you are prepared with the proper footwear, then you should have a grand time!The glacier pretty much signaled the end of our time in Alaska. We are headed east and then southeast toward home. We are back in Tok, Alaska which is about 90 miles from the border. We will be in Canada tomorrow morning. We want to put on some big miles, but we will have some rough roads and changes in elevation to deal with over the next few days so my guess is we will cover around 300-400 miles each day. We hope to get to Whitehorse tomorrow which is nearly 400 miles. Tomorrow is also the roughest stretch of highway on the trip, so we are going to try to get an early start. Eric had to so some reinforcement in the Jeep bumper this evening so we hope it holds. We saw a sign that said trading post today and wondered if they would trade 5 one way first class airline tickets to Illinois + shipment of our stuff in exchange for a big ass RV and an old jeep! LOL!

Not sure anyone reading this is on their way to Alaska soon. We have only used a few coupons our of our 2010 Great Alaskan TourSaver book. We want to sell it so we can try to break even. Since our time in Alaska was fairly short compared to many traveler, we didn’t have the flexibility it takes to get the savings out of the book. Just leave a comment and we can work out the payment and shipping! **Update: I put the TourSaver on eBay.**