LOVE IT ON OUR OWN

It was such a good feeling to just get into our car and take off.  We were up and out pretty early.  We made a stop at Fred Meyer for some humous.  Holy Moly!!!  I have never been in a store like that.  The guide said its like Walmart and Costco got together and had a baby...only the baby is bigger and more stocked that the other two combined.  We had a hayday in that place.

We finally left Fairbanks, in the rain, and made the first leg of our return trip to Anchorage.  Not much happened along the way.  We didn't see any wildlife, or sasquatch, or accidents, or gun totin' army peeps.  There wasn't much traffic and we just stopped anywhere we wanted, drove down little side roads, found old dead trucks in bushes, saw some amazing living abodes, drank our thermos of milky coffee, stopped at a giant bridge for our picnic, inside the car because of the mosquitos..

At one place, Anderson, we stopped to use a portapotty that was placed on a sort of campground near Anderson.  Anderson was six miles off the main road out towards those giant massive missile detecting radar structures on an air force base, which we were definitely planning to NOT get too close to.  All there was was a few scrubby houses, a lot of bush, a million or more mosquitos and a random portapotty in a totally abandoned and empty campground.  I had needed to go for quite a while now, and I sure as heck was not going to stick my bare fanny out for mosquitos to eat, so I had Bill stop.  I ran over and went to go inside, paused a little at the door, you never know what you might find inside a never used turlett afterall.  I opened the door and it was a godawful mess.  And sitting right beside the toilet seat was a rubbing alcohol bag, in a box with some kind of huffing straw sticking out of it.  Along with a lot of other very disturbing drug paraphernalia, and things I won't mention here...I turned and skedaddled out of there as quick as possible.  Ewwwwwww!!!!  Dysfunction is a word that comes to mind way too often up here.

We drove up Stampede Road for a while, retracing C. McCanliss's footsteps.   Then we found our hotel, out in the middle of nowhere but quite near Healy I think.  We checked in and just stayed.  We were going to go into Healy and find the bus that McCanliss used.  Apparently they moved it down out of the mountains because too many people were trying to find it and getting hurt or lost.  But we will do that today on our way out of here and on to Wasilla...home of the infamous Sarah Palin (Bill is sooo excited!)  We made cup of noodles for dinner in our room, ate humous and carrots, a batch of strawberries and off to bed.  I got netflix here so I watched "Into the Wild" again.  Sooo sad.  Now its morning, almost ten and gotta go.  Another fun day of driving, this time through Denali park again and I can guarantee, as I look out the window, we will definitely NOT be seeing Mr. McKinley this time around.  TTYL