Doing it again

We're finally on our way back to Alaska.  Got delayed a bit by a crazy lady, craigslist scam, Striker's new medical concerns, lost hiking pole, Carol leaving her wallet in a Starbucks restroom, blah, blah, blah.  We are writing this in William's Lake, BC.  Striker went stealth going across the border and we had no problems.  Just a couple of other issues.  We are now half-low riders.  What would you expect with a Mexican and a white boy?  Anyway, an air lift bag blew out in Chahalis, WA, and so the back of the car is bottomed out.  I think it is embarrassing, Carol says it looks cool and she wants me to figure out a way to make it bounce up and down.  I had one suggestion, but she wasn't interested. Striker seems unconcerned.  Anyway, they have a lifetime warranty and new bags are on their way.  Can't get them till AK though...

We hope to be in Hyder, AK, tomorrow.  We called ahead and the campground is closed due to bears.  If true, we'll probably stay a while.  We need to be in Denali on the 25th, so we can't stay too long.  Big shoutout to David and everyone else staying with this blog for year II.  We'll let you know what we see in Hyder and hopefully we'll have a few pics.

Alaska trip picture book is done

Here is your perfect excuse to get out of looking at our picture book the next time you see us.  Just say, "Yeah, I saw that already online."  We'll never know whether you did or didn't.  Anyway, just CLICK HERE if you actually want to view the book.  Funny pages are near the end.

2012 photos are done and uploaded

I finally finished editing the photos from the Yellowstone/Alaska/GNP trip and they are all uploaded into the slideshow.  The link for the slideshow is towards the bottom of this page.  Hopefully it won't take me as long to edit the video.  Once that is done, I have new software that combines everything  to make amazing DVDs/videos.  I've already used that on several projects.  Its super easy and fast.  So there is more to come ...

If you want any of the pictures, just pause the slideshow, right click on the picture, choose "save image as," etc.

Edited Pics

I went through and did some quick edits on some of my favorite pictures.  You can enlarge any photo by clicking on it:

First view of the mountain.

What happens after the ranger scares the bear off.

Old Dream Fulfilled

Many years ago when Carol and I were so very sick, we had an important discussion about what was the one thing missing from our life that would make our life better if we could somehow do it again.  We decided it was backpacking.  There was no way we could backpack in the state of health we were in.  But soon we came up with the concept of "backpacking by car."  The idea was simple: create a very easy system for camping in our Toyota Tercel.  We did that and set off on our first "backpacking" trip.  We planed to stay just one night at each campground and be out about five days.  Well, the trip was a big failure.  Our bodies couldn't handle the weather and nighttime temperatures.  We ended up going home before dawn on the first day.  Undeterred, we came up with a new concept: camping in an RV (pickup camper).  We bought the camper for $200.  It was in bad shape, but it had

8,500 Miles

Looks like we traveled a total of about 8,500 miles on this trip.  We were gone about two months and spent all but four nights in the roof top tent.  With the Yellowstone trip, we have spent about 20 percent of the year in that tent and we are still married!  That says a lot about the tent.  The folks at CVT have an excellent product.  Several people we know are considering buying one.

Got nearly a quarter million pictures and videos transferred onto my good computer today.  The files that I accidentally deleted were all recovered using a great little program that I downloaded for free.  I'll post a link later.  Now I didn't personally take all 250K photos.  Most of that was the plot camera that we had running most of the trip out the front window.  I'll post those to youtube as soon as I get

Amazing year for bears in GNP

We left GNP today due to some bogus campground and road closures. We wanted to stay because this was maybe the best bear year ever. We only saw about 10 different grizzlies, but they supplied us with day after day of great viewing opportunities. We took more photos and video than ever before and got some great shots.  I'll try to get them posted after we get back home. Staying in Kalispell