I was looking for a webcam in Fairbanks this evening and found a very interesting (to me anyway) place:
The Great Alaskan Red Squirrel Cam . I looked around a bit at different things there, including the owners blog. And I found this photo:
My Yard. If you look it up you will see it is his front yard, covered in tire tracks from some unknown vandal in the night. I was talking to my sister in Fairbanks at the time on Instant Messaging, so I sent her the url and she also looked it up. Then she asked me: “Do you remember “The Motel?” Do I remember “The Motel?” !!! Yes! I started laughing so hard my sides started to ache.
During the summer of 1990, Heidie decided to move from Fairbanks back home to Colorado Springs and, if I remember correctly, finish nursing school there. She had lived in Alaska for several years and wanted to bring several of her household items, plus her cat, down in her car. I volunteered to fly up and help her drive down the Alaska Highway. She packed her car, leaving room for me in the passenger seat and a tiny space for Prisca, the cat, in the back. We left and headed for the Canadian border.
Crossing into Canada, she needed proof that Prisca had had her shots, etc. so we had all of that readily available when we drove up to the Mounties border crossing station in Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory. However, Prisca had other ideas – she disappeared somewhere in the car, not even a whisker to be seen or a purr to be heard. We did not declare the cat because we had no idea where she was at!
That night we camped in a beautiful little campground several miles into Yukon Territory. (I wrote about a different time in that campground in another post,
Young Eagles and Geometry.) We pitched our tent, snuggled into our sleeping bags and slept the night away. The next morning, Heidie let Prisca out to ‘do her business’ and she disappeared. There were only a couple of other people there in the campground and no one had seen her. We called and called, looked here and there – no cat. Heidie finally said, well, I guess we leave her here! But I responded, let’s look one more time down this other trail. We walked for 5 or 6 minutes and were just getting ready to head back to the car when I spotted a white splash off the trail in the underbrush. I went over and there she was, squatted down in a small hole, eyes wide open and black, in what appeared to be a frozen state of terror. I picked her up and took her back to meet Heidie, we hopped in the car and took on off down the road. No more cat adventures for Prisca! She stayed right with us the rest of the way.
I don’t remember all of the trip – it was several days on the Highway altogether. Beautiful days of travel in the late summer, early fall of the Canadian north. Western Canada is beautiful (I’ve never been in the eastern part so cannot comment on it). I would love to do it again. We crossed over into the States at the Glacier National Park border crossing, drove the Highway to the Sun backwards (from the top down, instead of the bottom up), down through Kalispell, and on farther into the heart of Montana.
I love Montana – it is a beautiful state. It is especially beautiful during the day. We did not see Montana during the day, unfortunately. Sometime after dark we went through Missoula and connected to Interstate 90. This part of our trip has become lovingly known as “the highway from hell” experience.
It was getting late, but we did not stop – we thought we would drive to the next exit and find a motel or campground for the night. We drove. And drove. And drove. The highway rolled on before us, mile after mile, after mile after mile…you get the point. It never ended. Literally hour after hour we drove on and on, in the dark, missing Montana as we twisted round this corner and down that hill on the never-ending exit-less highway.
Finally, we came to an exit ramp and turned off. In the middle of nowhere. Somewhere in the wilds of Montana (we have no idea where). In the wee hours of the morning. One little motel, surrounded by a couple of acres of land, set on the side of the interstate, beckoned us with warm cozy thoughts of a real bed, a real shower, a real room to sleep in. Neither Heidie nor I remember seeing any other buildings in the area, except maybe a couple of dark houses farther down the road.
We turned into the entrance of The Motel and drove a couple hundred yards up the driveway to the Office. Everything was dark, no lights on anywhere. We drove over to the row of rooms, parked right in front of one that had an empty space (most of them had empty spaces) and turned off the motor. We looked at each other in silent exhaustion. Our eyes were bloodshot, our rear ends were numb from sitting for hours and hours, day after day. When we closed our eyes, all we could see in our minds’ eye was more black highway with white stripes flashing by. We looked again at all the dark windows and quietly decided to travel on and see if we could find another place that was actually open farther down the road.
Heidie started the car, put it in reverse and backed up. She turned the car around, put it into forward gear and started to drive back to the road we had come in on. However – we could not find the road. We couldn’t even find the driveway. “How do you get out of here?” we wondered aloud. So in total confusion and ‘lostness’ we just drove around until suddenly, with a loud thump and bump, we drove off the edge of a cement curb back onto the road – and that is when we realized that we had just spent about 3 minutes driving around on their lawn, trying to find the driveway. I
thought it all looked too nicely manicured… She jerked the wheel to the right and stepped on the gas, kicking up gravel as we spun around. By this time we were both laughing so hard we could hardly see. All I could think of was what those poor motel owners were going to think the next morning when they looked out their window and found tire tracks wandering around their lawn and dropping off the curb in the middle of their front yard. I hope we did no permanent damage (she did swerve a couple of times so as not to run through a flower bed or two…)
Needless to say, we were now wide awake and found our way back to the Interstate. Not too far down the highway we came to another quiet, dark exit, but we looked at each other and said – “No! Let’s find another,
bigger place – we are already awake!” On and on, down the road, for several more miles we drove. Finally a billboard for KOA! We pulled off at the marked exit and drove over to the KOA Kampground. No one was awake there, either, so we pulled into an empty tent spot, quickly set up the tent, threw in our sleeping bags, and went to sleep. First thing in the morning, after trips to the restroom, Heidie went in search of the manager so we could pay for our spot. He was very surprised. He had no idea we had come in during the night. In fact, if we had just packed up and left, he would have been none the wiser.
That day we drove down through Yellowstone National Park – the first time I had seen it since the devastating fires a couple years before. What a shock, even though we knew there had been severe destruction. That night we actually made it all the way into Utah and Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. Again, it was quite late when we drove in, found a campsite and set up our tent. This time it was so warm that we left the rain shield off the top of the tent – we were in the desert after all! Bad mistake. Well, not so bad, actually. We were just rudely awakened the next morning by rain falling on our faces, turned to a fine spray as it fell through the thin layer of synthetic material stretched between us and the wild blue yonder. Very quickly we got up, rolled our sleeping bags and stashed them away in the car. And the rain stopped. We cooked some breakfast and headed out – driving through Aspen later in the day and over Independence Pass, making it home to Woodland Park late that night.
I’ve thought about “the highway from hell” and The Motel many times since then. And every time I do think of it, I laugh so hard it hurts.
Maybe you had to be there….
Oh I love my life!
It would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980.
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