Catching Up...
We rolled north, out of Seattle, in the typical pouring rain, and made the easy run up to the Blaine border crossing, into British Columbia, CDA. Oozed into Vancouver, dodging traffic,
admiring the wealth and beautiful 'burbs, and made it to the nice Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, right across from waterfront/downtown Canada Place and the cruise boat docks.
(Thanks to JCL for excellent local tips/info! )

We had 21 days to 'get to the boat', time-wise, when we left the Mtn Joint in NC, and we spent those days wandering around the southwest and left coast, as you have seen.

Jumped on the Diamond Princess the next afternoon, and sailed away from Vancouver, northward up the Inland Passage toward Ketchikan, AK. Not a cruise fan, but we were invited by V's father and step-mother, (the same people we did the Antarctica cruise with, a couple years ago), and the cruise was going to add 2+ weeks to our 'RoadTrip'.
And, since Alaska was the only state I had never been to, we sucked it up, joined nearly 4,000 other customers on this 1,000 ft long ship, and chugged north, through the Salish Sea, up the Georgia Strait, toward Ketchikan, Alaska, and then into the rain, and more rain, and more...

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This is truly living.

Amazing write-up and pictures sir... sincere thanks for showing. Incentive to get work done, and move onto the playtime part of life faster.

p.s. That picture of the long bridge is a $#&% tease!

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Previously owned: '03 4.6iS Dinan Supercharged

Continuing north from Vancouver...first stop is Ketchikan, AK. Raining, foggy, but we take a 'wildlife viewing' boat ride: we see a couple whales, some crows (lol!), a bald eagle, a deer, a couple of black bear, and what could be any tree lined lake boat ride in the northern latitudes in US/CDA.

The masses pour off the boat several times a day for any of the myriad of 'shore tours', most of which are inane, imo, and all very pricey.

Mildly underwhelmed, already. Our little cabin does have a balcony, which prevents cabin fever...I cannot imagine being in an inside/no view room.

Boat food is boat food, though it is good to hang with V's father & step-mother. We get lost on the boat a few times per day, as many of the 15+ levels do not 'connect' in horizontal fashion.

We steam up to Juneau, the capital, and it's another soaking day. We wander around downtown Juneau, which like every town in AK, is full of jewelry shops, t shirt joints, dirty bars and tchotchke joints. Juneau, by the bye, is the only US state capital that is accessible only by water or air.

About 30k people live there, most of the adults are employed by the state gov't, (what a surprise!), and the locals told me it rains, or snows, 250+ days a year. Can't wait to move there...

We steam out of Juneau and approach the famous town of Skagway, where at 4 AM, I am up and out on the deck taking a few pics of freakin Mtns, with the sun actually 'out', as it rises. Finally, some scenery!

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WE want more, we want more, we want more!!!!!!! The peasants are getting restless.

Absolutely fantastic mate!!!

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-2006 E53 (X5 4.4) Titanium Silver, fully optioned (sports package, premium package, navigation, ride height adjustment, panorama moon roof, rear climate package). Aero kit installed plus set of staggered 20s with Diamaris tyres.

Heres the M5board "similar" trip. Pretty cool stuff!


11,000 mile Summer Road Trip (beware: 90 photos!) - The Unofficial BMW M5 Messageboard (m5board.com)

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BMWCCA

Steamed into Skagway, Alaska population ~900...looks like a 'cowboy' town, with a few t shirt and gift shops added, but I don't think it's changed much in 100+ years. I did find a NewYawkTimes and WSJ at the Skaguay Newsstand...

Skagway is famous/infamous, as the embarkation point for the thousands of men that tried to make the hundreds of miles walk/climb/float to the Klondike Dawson River Gold Rush of ~1897. Most never made it more than a few miles up the Chilkoot Trail...many never made it back, alive. A few years later it was all over. Reads like the Mkt in any decade of late.

V & I had a car rental reserved in 'downtown' Skagway, and we got off the damn boat at 7:00, walked into town and the car joint, (lil' shack in pics), and motored north on famous Rt 2, out of Alaska, towards Fraser BC, and into the Yukon Territory, Canada. We had a ~2006 PT Cruiser with a couple hundred thousand miles on it, a spider web windshield, crap brakes, etc. But, it ran like a top.

She drove most of the day, and we saw some remarkable scenery in the high taiga 'forest' of stunted trees, permafrost, glacier lakes, etc., of the Yukon. We ate late lunch on the way back in Caribou Crossing, where caribou/reindeer still migrate by the hundreds of thousands twice a year. We saw maybe 5 other cars all day, being a few hundred miles north of 'anywhere'...

We rolled back to town and lucked out getting a helicopter tour & landing to the famous John Muir Glacier. (Our previous several days heli tours had all been cancelled due to rain & wind.) Those set of On the Glacier Pics next...
It's hell putting up pics with .4, as in point 4 Mbps, upload speed.
Thanks for looking!
BR, TheRoadGeezers

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Wow. I mean wow. Talk about making someone realize what they're missing out on. Those pics out west are nothing short of breathtaking. I swear sometimes I think I live on the wrong coast.. But hey, I can always drive to Cali .

It's incredibly refreshing to see a couple who still see beauty and awe in what is an amazing place we live. Sometimes it seems people are incessantly bitching about the US and it's politics. This is a genuine reminder that life and your surroundings are only what you make of them.

I must say I'm very empressed with the Vette's numbers and reliablity as well. The 350 has always been a bullet-proof power plant, but I'm amazed that a pushrod mill can still get close to 30mpg's while loping along the highway. I will say Chevy has always done something right in my eyes by keeping it simple and staying with what's proven. Maybe BMW should try that approach?...

Excellent, expertly written and documented post good sir. I'll probably lose sleep over this tonight

-Ben

We drive south back to Skagway, from Yukon Territory, dump the car, (refilling for $4.47/gal, the highest gas price we saw on the trip), and walk as fast as we can back to the harbor: Temsco Heli rides. We had had 3 previous float plane/heli rides cancelled on previous days due to the crummy weather.

We put on boots, life vests and hop on the choppers...the take offs and landings are choreographed and it is like a scene out of Apocalypse Now, as we fly in file over the harbor, the mountains, the passes, past Homer, AK and a 30 min ride to the Meade Glacier. A team of student glaciologist majors is on the glacier to give talks, walkabouts, and keep us from slipping into the house sized crevasses.

The Meade Glacier is one of the largest in 'southern' Alaska, and is simply breathtaking and hard to describe, when one is 'on it', walking around...
its size is impossible to put in a photo. It is typically dirty, full of stones that range from sand to house size, ribboned like a marble cake, noisy, and cold.

When we had almost giving up on 'Alaska', after several soaking rainy days and our fill of t shirt joints and roll your eye 'tours', the long day of driving to the Yukon and back, and the glacier trip, were fabulous!
Thanks for looking!

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And, a few last from the glacier...
the overshoe boots they gave us had tungsten tips in the soles, and one literally could not slide with them on. We all took them off to try the glacier surface, and though it looks dirty and debris ridden, and granular, it is almost as slippery as indoor hockey rink ice, about the end of the first period, due to the constant flow of melt water throughout the glacier structure, esp in the summer months.

The size and scale, and weird colors and shapes, are impossible to convey in photos. Like being on another planet.

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