The End of the Road

This grizzly met us on the road in Yukon Territory.

It's the end of the road... for the time being.

We have pulled into the heart of Florida. There are an additional 14,512 miles on our odometer at the end of our journey. Add an additional 4,417 miles we drove our car along the way. Twenty thousand miles is not a bad adventure for one year. But it really isn't about the miles.

So much of this odyssey took us to vistas and worlds we have never before discovered. Texas wildflowers along the 1,000 miles of interstate that hustled us across that vast state... winds blowing so hard we had to put down our leveling jacks to keep the rig from rocking and rolling while we were parked in New Mexico....the bizarre world of Roswell, New Mexico, where alien conspiracies seem to pop up at you around every corner.... The glory of Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah...the crispy clean and antiseptic Mormons who greeted us in Salt Lake City....the re-enactment of the joining of the east and west railroad tracks to make transcontinental travel relatively comfortable in Promontory, Utah.... the spectacular waterfalls along the Columbia River in Oregon.... the snowstorm we drove through in Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington state...the love affair with Vancouver, British Columbia... the endless miles that are British Columbia (so large it's like driving from Miami to Maine)....Yukon Territory and its iffy roads but gorgeous territorial parks.

Then we made it to Alaska, a world unto itself. The people there see the world through a quite different prism from those who live in the lower 48 states. Everything about the state is record-breaking. The mountains, the glacial rivers that are milky blue, the incomparable wildlife. We'll never forget the shivers that went up and down our spines as Denali uncovered her snow-covered peak to reveal herself to us for three and a half hours late one night. We'll treasure the plethora of bald eagles that allowed us to get up close and personal with them at Anchor Point State Park in the Kenai Peninsula. And the glaciers.... ah, the glaciers. They're receding at such an alarming rate that we were both depressed and also elated that we were able to see them in our lifetime. But we do fear for this exquisite part of our world being lost to our children and, particularly, to our grandchildren.

We wept at the awesome culmination and death of the thousands of salmon in a natal stream west of Juneau, as we watched the writhing and dying fish struggle in their final ecstasy to fulfill their hard-wired instructions that, before they die, they must make their way home to spawn and then to die. It was beyond the ability of words to capture this final act as we watched thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these fish reach their goal and drop their eggs before lying bruised and broken in the shallows of the stream, awaiting the end of their life.

The exquisite joy of watching a grizzly bear pass through our campground on the shores of the inland passage at Haines, Alaska, and then, in the dawn of the next day, to meet the same grizzly as we drove our rig to the ferry for our 1,000-miles journey south. We will treasure our encounters with the Tlingit and Athabaskan Native Americans who welcomed us on our journey south, permitting us to park in their campgrounds and sharing their cultural traditions.

The K’san Indian in British Columbia who offered us a newly caught salmon, along with the outdoors man in Slana, Alaska, who offered us a fully-cooked salmon that had been left over from the wedding of his daughter. We loved so much of the experience and these things will live on for the remaining years of our life's journey.

We've been delighted to have you come along on this journey. I have uploaded a “Best of the Journey” photo album and you are welcome to visit that. Enjoy.