Draco Malfoy is Dead

John carries the captured Draco Malfoy out of the hen house while Cassy recoils from the bird's evil eye.
I bring you great news. Draco Malfoy, the rooster ruling the hen house at grand-daughter Trisha's place in Kent, Connecticut, is dead.

Malfoy (named after one of the evil characters in the Harry Potter series of books) was a bit of a wicked bastard. He pecked me at the back of my knees when I went into the hen house to pick up the daily dozen eggs. He chased Trisha and terrorized her to the point she was unwilling to do the daily chores in the hen house. But his days were numbered when a farmer up the road said he was planning to slaughter 100 chickens and would be happy to include Malfoy in the batch.

Our son in law, John, entered the hen house at dusk on Sunday. He had learned the art of grabbing and controlling the rooster: you lay him on his back and he immediately quietens. He slid him into a borrowed cage and Malfoy, when released, set up an awesome squawk while jabbing his beak through the cage. But it was too late. Now Malfoy's hours were numbered.

The farmer asked Lynn if she wanted the dressed rooster back for dinner. She wasn't that keen. But when the farmer said it would cost $5 either way, she decided she'd bring home the carcass. We ate Malfoy but found him to be a skinny bird... no breast meat to speak of, and dark meat that was almost black. But he tasted pretty good.

2010 Journey

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So, How Much Did It Cost?

Our rig, parked in the repair facility in Mobile, Alabama.

A number of our blog friends (mostly those who have an RV) have asked me to share details about the cost of our trip. Even though we have not finished the entire journey (we have about 1,350 miles to go before we return to our roost in Palmetto, Florida, for our winter stay) we thought it might be of interest to you to see the breakdown.

We have pretty exact costs because, first, we budgeted what we expected to spend and, second, we track every expense with Quicken on the computer.

This accounting does not detail costs of eating since we would eat no matter where we are. We do delineate the costs associated with campgrounds for overnight or longer stays.

Repairs were hard to budget - but we guessed we would face fairly extensive costs because we have a 12-year-old rig. I had actually budgeted $2,500, so we blew that budget because our repairs were a bit more extensive.

Travel, by the way, includes loading our rig and car and ourselves aboard the Alaskan ferry system. It also includes costs associated with repairs when we had to leave our rig overnight and take a motel room. It also includes costs of travel to Mayne Island, off Vancouver, when we visited our friends from Namibia.

The cost per mile is the simple calculation of dividing the total expenses by the number of miles driven. I did not attempt to calculate the miles per gallon because it is impractical. When we dry camp we run the generator and that uses gasoline from the fuel tank. So any calculation of mileage would be incorrect because that unknown amount of fuel cannot be deducted from the amount used to drive the rig. I might mention that, in addition to the cost of the gas for the rig, we also bought $330 worth of gas for the car. And we drove 2,500 miles in that car, separate from all the towing miles which, happily, do not register on the odometer. Only the tires and the dings on the front of the car show the real wear and tear on the car.

Journey to Alaska Costs
Gas $4,741.04
Overnight $2,594.94
Repairs $4,829.94
Propane $166.86
Tolls $37.25
Travel $2,735.78
Other $41.67
Total $15,147.48

Miles Traveled 12,413
Cost per Mile $1.22

On the Home Stretch

There is nothing quite so pleasurable as stopping and resting after a voyage of many months. And so we are. We have been languishing in Vermont with daughter Stephanie and her family. We're parked in their side yard and at last have found a mechanic who was able to diagnose and order the parts to repair the emergency brake system on our RV.

The miracle, to me, is that I have been able to nurse this rig across the whole of north America, from Haines, Alaska, to here in Colchester, Vermont. It has meant many stops and much scrunching under the rig, pouring transmission fluid into the emergency brake reservoir. This allows the dying pump to activate and release the emergency brake when I put the rig into gear. Without that fluid, the pump would be unable to disengage the brake. Now the parts are ordered and will be installed next Wednesday. Then we'll head south to daughter Lynn's house in Kent, Connecticut.

While we've lingered in Vermont, we have celebrated birthdays of our grand kids, as well as Stephanie's mother-in-law and ourselves. I took our grandson, Graham, to see comedian Bill Cosby at the state fair last Sunday. Graham is a huge fan of the reruns of the Cosby Show. The comedian now is 73 and, as Graham noted, “he's pretty fat.” I enjoyed the show much more than did he because Cosby's 90-minute live show is nothing like his old TV show.

Graham Bertoni (right)
He is a master or the pain of growing up – at least, what growing up was like 60 years back when parental brutality was more the accepted norm. This is so far outside the understanding of an eight-year-old boy today and Graham sat with an unknowing smile on his lips while we watched Cosby's riff on parental beatings, teacher beatings, and assorted other abuses of small people. It's a different era.

Isabella, who has just turned 12, is an aspiring and talented singer. She presented three half-hour concerts at the state fair in which she sang and played her keyboard for the entertainment of the general public. Imagine the excitement when a woman approached after a performance and asked for her autograph.

Isabella

Jo has been sewing, as well as practicing her portable spinning wheel. And she knits like Madame DeFarge, creating socks in many splendored colors.

We spent a wonderful time in the middle of Michigan with two people Jo and I have come to cherish. Mary and Merve Parsons live in our RV Resort in the wintertime. But they scurry north each year and set about tilling their garden. They raise an astonishing range of crops - from potatoes to beans, to tomatoes of all varieties, to Indian corn, peaches, apples, cherries, squash, watermelon, carrots, beets. And the list goes on. Mary then cans much of this so they have a year's supply of food. Their knowledge base of this natural world is both inspiring and quite awesome. It reminds both of us of the very best of America. They embody that take-care-of-yourself ability that is sliding away with the years.

Then we passed back into Canada one more time to visit with my sister, Rose. She was widowed a couple of years back and it was heartening to see how she is reinventing herself and coping with her new world.

Our journey to Alaska will go down as one of the great adventures of our lives. It was hard work and it was physically challenging for us both. But we are so glad we persevered. We will never forget the encounters with grizzlies, bald eagles, orcas, humpback whales, wolves, caribou, moose, Dall sheep, goats, and a dozen other creatures great and small. But, as inevitably always is the case, it was the people with whom we interacted that leave the lasting memories. So many native Americans, the Russian Orthodox priest, so many settlers who have carved their spot in the wilderness, so many people who lent us a hand of friendship both on the land and aboard the ferries on our way south.

We have another 2,000 miles ahead of us before we park our rig on Florida's west coast for the winter months. So the potential is there for more adventures. But we are already thinking about 2011.

Thanks for coming along with us on this adventure. We hope you have gotten some unique glimpses into a rarely visited land.

Where the Buffalo Roam

Meet Dakota Miracle (left) and Dakota Legend, both are true albino buffalo.

We're in the bread basket of America – Bismarck, North Dakota. You drive across the prairie – traveling in an ocean of corn, wheat, and sunflowers. There's something special about a billion sunflowers lined up to the horizon, all of them facing the rising sun like little soldiers awaiting orders for the day.

We have stopped at A Prairie Breeze Campground and the temperature is 98 degrees. We long ago left the rolling hills of Montana and came on Monday to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, North Dakota. It's a small national park, with a beautiful campground ($5) and we enjoyed the experience of being surrounded by a herd of 350 adult buffalo and a similar number of calves. On the road into the park, we passed numerous prairie dog towns. These are communities, identified by humps of burrowed out dirt, where the prairie dogs spend their days worrying about being picked off by coyotes or owls, or other wild life.

They usually sit at the highest point of their individual mounds, always keeping an eye open for danger. They set up a chatter when your stop to photograph them and, if they feel threatened, they make a dive for their burrows. They're very similar to meercats.

The buffalo just browse and wander at will. President Teddy Roosevelt lived in the western part of North Dakota (known as The Badlands) back at the end of the 19th century. He was a cattleman and had two farms.

We learned his neighbor was a Marquis de Mores who considered himself a great buffalo hunter. During the winter of 1881-82 this fellow reportedly killed more than 5,000 buffalo in southeast Montana. There must be a special place in hell for this kind of wanton killer. In his memoirs, later in life, he had the decency to write he wished his “aim had not been so good.”

While lingering a moment on this wanton destruction, I learned more about the train trips to kill buffalo. Back in the 1880s, people were invited on these excursions to shoot the buffalo from the train windows. The object was to kill the buffalo for their tongues. That was all that was taken from the dead animals which were left to rot on the prairie. More than three millions buffalo were slaughtered in this way in a single year.

Jo and I attended an evening lecture and slide presentation by a park ranger who spoke about Roosevelt's dynamism and how he overcame huge odds – he was so asthmatic as a child that he could not attend school. His wife and mother died within days of each other of typhoid (mom) and a condition developed at childbirth (his wife). But his sister, after a year, connected him to an equally dynamic woman and he quickly married her and produced five more children.

He was a maverick politically and the Republican Party never did take to him. They thought, stupidly, that they should tuck him away as a vice president to McKinley. McKinley won the election, then promptly was assassinated so Teddy took over the reigns.

He was presented with a brown bear cub by an admirer but he asked that the cub be released. This got some press and a woman made a stuffed bear which she sent to him, asking if he would permit her to make these bears and call them “Teddy” Bears in his honor. He gave the go-ahead and that's how we now have a teddy bear culture.

We struggle with the dichotomy of Roosevelt being a great conservationist and, at the same time, a great white hunter who made numerous trips to Africa and shot elephant, rhino, cape buffalo and many other creatures. Many of these were stuffed and now are displayed in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

On our way back to the RV, we walked through the campground and passed a cluster of campers who pointed a flashlight to the ground. There was a sizable rattle snake, coiled, rattling and really angry about being disturbed. Jo and I later sat outside in the rich darkness at our site and watched the milky way, along with the space station and other assorted heavenly bodies passing overhead.

Thursday, Aug. 12
We stopped along the highway to visit the National Buffalo Museum in Jamestown, North Dakota. This is the home of the legendary white buffalo, White Cloud, born on July 10, 1996 on a private farm in Michigan, ND. She has been certified a true albino buffalo and is revered as a sacred animal by the Lakota native Americans.

White Cloud gave birth to her first calf, Princess Winona, in July 2000. It was brown; she had three more brown calves through the years. On August. 31, 2007, White Cloud gave birth to her fifth calf, an albino! This calf, a bull, was named Dakota Miracle. The herd at the museum truly became legendary on May 31, 2009, when a third white calf was born to one of the herd's brown buffalo.

Unfortunately, it was raining and blowing a gale when we stopped by the museum. We were able to enjoy the exhibits – but the sacred buffalo were hiding down in the hollows and washes. They all are allowed to roam freely so we were unable to visit with these remarkable creatures.

It was a superb opportunity, however, to learn more about the traditions of the Lakota peoples. We learned, for example about White Buffalo Calf Woman. She came to the Lakota people a very long time ago. She met with two Lakota scouts and appeared out of a white cloud on a sunny day. When she stepped out of the cloud they saw she was the most beautiful women they had ever seen.

Then one of the scouts, being foolish, had bad thoughts and spoke them. But the other said, “That is a sacred woman; throw all bad thoughts away.” When she came still closer, they saw she wore a fine white buckskin dress, that her hair was very long and that she was young and very beautiful. And she knew their thoughts and said in a voice that was like singing: “You shall go home and tell your people that I am coming and that a big tipi shall be built for me in the center of the nation.” The braves did as they were told and the people built the tipi and she came in four days.

As she came into the village, there came from her mouth a white cloud that was good to smell. Then she gave something to the chief. It was a pipe with a bison calf carved on one side – to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, with 12 eagle feathers hanging from the stem – to mean the sky and 12 moons. These were tied with grass that never breaks.

“Behold,” she said. “With this pipe, you will be bound to all your relatives. Nothing but good shall come of it. Only the hands of the good shall take care of it and the bad shall not even see it.”

The woman stayed with the people four days and nights. During this time, she showed them how to prepare the pipe.... then she showed the men how to smoke it. Thus the pipe came to our people.

The sacred woman then took her leave, saying, “Always remember how sacred the pipe is, and treat it as such. I am leaving now but I shall look back upon the people,” and she promised to return in time of need.

She walked in the direction of the setting sun, and then she stopped and rolled over four times. The first time, she got up and became a black buffalo, the second time a brown buffalo, the third time a red buffalo, and the fourth time she rolled over she became a white buffalo. This buffalo walked on further, stopped, and after bowing to each of the four directions of the universe, disappeared over the hill.

This story has been passed down by the Lakota (Sioux) Elders.

Going-to-the-Sun Road

One of the most photogenic spots on the highway. The tiny island is Wild Goose Island.

Going-to-the-Sun Road that carves its way through Glacier National Park in Montana is a bit of an engineering marvel. It also is a magical mystery ride that unfolds one vista more dramatic than the next when you travel its 50 miles.

We set out in our Honda (vehicles larger than 21 feet at not permitted on the road and you learn why very quickly). The road clings to a cliff wall, carved in the 1930s. There are rocky overhangs that jut out about 10 feet above your head. This is not a highway for the faint of heart. But those who go are rewarded well.

We wound our way up from the valley floor. At our first picture stop, however, Jo tripped on her handbag strap when she left the car. She cut her hand on the gravel quite deeply and skinned her knees as well as bruised and bled at her eyebrow. The hand wound was the deepest and dirtiest. Her handbag, however, seems to contain everything from coins to screw drivers to wet-wipes and bandages (go figure!). We got her cleaned up as well as could be done, and decided we would stop and talk to a Ranger at the Logan Pass Visitor's Center for some real first aid.

The journey begins with you looking up in awe at the spiking rocky peaks. Eventually, however, you are driving among them and, when you reach Logan Pass, you are halfway up the mountains at 6,646 feet. This is the Continental Divide. Now you can look across the valley far below and see the glaciers that are receding so rapidly in this part of the world that climatologists say all will be gone by 2030. So get your tickets now. This stuff will not last! During the last Ice Age, of course, there were glaciers here that were 5,000 feet thick with ice. Those days will not return until man has departed this planet, however.

The Ranger at Logan's Pass checked Jo out to understand why she had collapsed. He felt better when he determined the issue was klutziness and not related to an older person having a spell of some kind. He gave her an alcohol pad, neosporin and band-aids and we were on our way.

On the other side of the pass, you descend to a hairpin curve that sucks the air right out of your lungs. One moment you are virtually kissing a cliff face of sheer rock. They next you have reversed direction and you feel as though you are hanging out on the edge of a precipice – which you are! MacDonald Lake, at the bottom of the valley provided respite. Lots of people played in the cold water aboard canoes and rubber rafts. We lunched there and decided prudence dictated that we not reverse our journey on this remarkable road. We decided to drive around the southern edge of the park and out into Blackfeet Indian country.

Many of the neat homes have one or two tepees in the back yards. This would be where the young Indian kids sleep out in the summer months.

On our way south from Alberta on Friday, we passed a little town called “Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump”. We didn't drive the 20 kilometers to the town because we were trying hard to get across the border into Montana. But a check on the Internet showed this is a UNESCO world heritage site. This is where Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over a cliff to their deaths in the days before the white man came and farmed the prairies and indiscriminately shot millions of buffalo for their hides from the window seats in trains crossing the prairie.

Bad and Good News

If you have a float plane in Ketchikan, you can park it at the municipal lot.

Some good news – and some bad news. We were in a campground in Hazelton, British Columbia, last night and a young First Nation man named Keith (of the 'Ksan people) offered us a sockeye salmon he had just pulled out of the Skeena River. She (for that was her gender) measured about 14 inches and weighed around 7-8 pounds. I initially said thanks, but no thanks. Jo then asked if he would clean it for us and he said he could do that. We agreed on a price of $10 which seems like a pretty good bargain for sockeye ($12 a pound in the local market).

Keith asked for a filet knife which we don't own. I offered him our handy-dandy Ginsu bread knife which he spurned. Jo found a Heinkel knife which was sharp enough to do the job and he cut off her head and scooped out the entrails. I handed him my $10 Canadian and told him we'd think about him when we ate the fish.
We cut it up into six thick steaks so we have three excellent meals in our future. That's the good news.

Bad News is we have developed a nasty drip-drip of brake fluid from our emergency brake system. This is one of the poor pieces of design on our rig. While we were in Alaska, we left a campground with the brake on and didn't notice the warning light for just under a mile. We stopped, re-set the brake and the light went off. But it came on every time we stopped thereafter. In Haines, Alaska, before we boarded the ferry for the first of the five legs of the journey by ferryboat, we found a mechanic who discovered the brake fluid had splashed all over the undercarriage. He topped up the reservoir and the light went out. I thought we were out of the woods. But two days later, the light stayed on when I moved the gear into drive.

Since then, I have spent a fair amount of time on my back under the rig, topping off the fluid while getting lots of it in my hair.

When we arrived in the large city of Prince George, BC, today, we visited the GM dealership and they said they'd have to order the switch that is probably broken from Vancouver and it won't come until Thursday. For that privilege, they would have to charge $99.80 for shipping. The part, they said is $89. I had already found the part on the Internet for $33 so that stuck on my craw. I told them I'll wait until I get back across the border and get the $33 part shipped to me somewhere in Montana or South Dakota. In the meantime, I'll be bathing my head in dripping fluid. Who said this was the easy life?

We thoroughly enjoyed the ferry experience – although I can't say I can recommend driving on and off the ferries at low tide. It seemed that every departure but one occurred at low-low tide. The ferry people do a wonderful job of placing blocks of wood on the ramp so you don't rip the rig apart when your rear end trails on the metal ramp. And they are very good about guiding you when you back up 50 or 60 feet into the bowels of the ferry boat (scary stuff that!).

But the traveling down the marine highway is definitely to be recommended. It was a real treat to get off at these tiny little Alaskan towns like Sitka, Wrangell and Ketchikan and explore the local aboriginal culture. Most of these towns are essentially aboriginal so it is a great way to meet the local folks in their home (and real) environment.

I even was able to help one Tlingit woman replace the flat tire on her tattered old car.