Alaska bound!

After years of waiting, our house in Montana finally sold, and we are now in Alaska!

We left Montana in the wee hours of the morning on December 1st, 2011. We stopped at a hotel in Livingston for a few hours of sleep before continuing on. After spending a night in Helena while waiting for the USDA permit for our goats, we were on to the border.

It took us five hours at the border. The goats took about an hour to get checked and sealed, and the dogs (as usual) took hardly any time at all. My method with the sled dogs is to have their papers so nicely organized and displayed inside a three-ring binder as to overwhelm the vet. It worked, and he went through about ten records before giving up and handing the book back to me. Once we finally got out of there, we spent the night in Fort Macleod. 

From Fort Macleod, we made it to Innisfail. The road past Calgary was a solid sheet of ice. As we were pulling out of Fort Macleod, it started to rain hard, and by the time we got to Calgary, the temperature was around 0 (Fahrenheit). We had to go about 30 m.p.h. past Calgary, and we got to watch lots of cars slide off the road. There were probably 50 or so of them from Calgary to Innisfail. We were going to try to push on to Edmonton, but I nearly lost control on the ice once (it's never good when you can see into your dog boxes out of the driver's window), so we decided to stop short. 

For the rest of the nights, we stopped in Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, Teslin, Haines Junction, Destruction Bay, and now Tok. 

Watson Lake was fun. I had three flat tires on my trailer that day, so we just had a whole new set put on. Well, the guys at the tire shop out-of-their-minds drunk. To the point where Jon had to help them put the lug nuts on the tires because the guy couldn't figure out how to get them on. At one point he slurred something to the affect of, "Maybe I shouldn't have come into work today." 

From Haines Junction we were going to go straight to Tok, but 70 miles out of Haines Junction, the U-Haul blew a tire, and we were right near to Destruction Bay, so we stopped there, but we had to stay the night to wait for the mechanic to get back to change it. 

 

But now we're in Tok, Alaska, having crossed back into the U.S. just a few hours ago. The dogs have been cared for, and I'm off to bed. Can't wait to see what the coming weeks bring!