Spring Tanacross, 2013

(sorry the formatting is pretty messed up on this one, the blogger is acting up and I don't have the time or bandwidth to fix it)


We returned to Anchorage May 8th, after spending a few days in Maui to attend one of Cara's Cousins Wedding.

We were greeted by unusually cold weather and remnants of a late snow storm that had recently passed through. We spent about 2 weeks in and around Anchorage, taking care of personal items, visiting with friends and chipping away at the laundry list of projects I have in mind for the Donkey to make our future trips a little more comfortable.

I added a small generator and a nice 3 stage 35 amp battery charger, installed an LED voltmeter for the house battery, got a warranty replacement for the house battery that wasn't holding a charge, mounted some lights, redid some wiring, installed a louder horn, and installed a larger fuel tank for the heater. In classic Ken fashion, when replacing the house battery I hooked the dang thing up backwards and did a very small amount of welding. I sure thought those terminals were on the other side, but I guess they mark them for a reason. I didn't appear to do any significant damage to anything, although the radio stopped working at that point and hasn't fixed itself yet. We've been using a small rechargeable Goal Zero speaker set and an old ipod for tunes, it works pretty good but when Cara want's to watch a movie on the big screen Ken's gonna be in trouble.

On a side note, the new battery will run my Edgestar fridge for at least 5 days now, the longest we've gone so far was 3 days and we were still at 12.3v. Much better than 11.9v after 12 hours.










About 5 days into our trip it snowed in Anchorage. Mid May. May is supposed to be sunny and warm. The year I leave Hawaii it sets records for the latest snowfall and lowest temps. Cara is hating it, she's freezing.

Our 2 weeks in Anchorage dissapear at a startling rate, before we know what's happening (which seems to happen with amazing regularity) Memorial day weekend is upon us and it's time for the next stage of the trip, Tanacross.






For those that don't know, Tanacross is a small Alaskan Native village on the Yukon river, about 12 miles by highway northeast of Tok, Alaska. Yes, the town is called Tok. Pronounced Toke. But my story is not about Tok (not pronounced tock), nor is it about Tanacross. My story is about the Alaska Sports Car Club and the auto racing weekend they put together that is held at the Tanacross airfield, about a mile East of the village of Tanacross. I started going somewhere around ten years ago, about 2003. Since then, I only missed 1 Tanacross (the race, not the village) fall of 2012 because I was living in Hawaii. I'm sure the event was a catastrophic failure due to my absence, and this assumption has been supported by an unfortunate lack of stories about drunk people stumbling around. But wait, this isn't a story about me, this is Tanacross.

Vegas Baby!!

I initially planned on clumping all the post Mexico stuff into one entry, but it kinda got carried away. Guess I did a few more things along the boring trans-american drive than I realized. We had a condo rented in LV, so theres not much Donkey content in this post.

We get into town, check in, do some grocery shopping, and head down to the strip. Spencer (my 14 year old) is with us, so we're mainly just walking around checking out all the ridiculousnous.  We retire early into big comfy beds with bathrooms and showers nearby. Watch a little TV and try to plan out our week in sin city.

I want to go see Hoover Dam, Cara wants to go see a show. I've also been fantasizing about driving some fast cars, Cara and I make a deal that whatever I spend on driving said cars she gets to spend 50% on whatever she wants. I've been getting myself worked up about driving a Maclaren, so I agree. We want to go hit Freemont street, we were told everything cheaper and better up there (old vegas). Partway through our second day in LV, my wife has a confesion to make, and she can barely contain herself. She's vetoing my trip to Hoover Dam (WHAT?!) for a day. Well, what are we gonna do instead? Oh, we have to go to the airport. And pick someone up. Wha?? Where is this coming from? We talked about trying to meet some friends in Vegas, but noones schedule worked out.

Evidently, behind my back, my wife had contacted my cousin (my favorite relative) and he bought a ticket that day and was arriving the next day. She tried to hide it from me, wanted to do some surprise candid camera appearance. Unfortunately, his ittenary didn't work with our planned schedule so she had to spill the beans. And she knew he was a geek and history buff like me and would enjoy the hoover dam.

We all enjoyed the 'Damn' tour, enjoyed checking out alot of what vegas has to offer, and my cousin wound up winning enough at craps (that I taught him, after teaching myself the day before) to buy himself a Nexus tablet he'd been wondering if he'd like.

Also, it was freakin' COLD in Vegas!!  Well into the 20's several nights, barely above freezing some days. We were poorly equipped for the cold, this was supposed to be an awesome mexican vacation! The water feature in our pool had ice glaciating on it. We still hit the hottub a couple nights, icicles be damned!

I don't seem to have too many pictures from Vegas....  but everyone knows what Vegas looks like.

Wall art

A little fist bump

<<  These Guys >>

Elegant Lunch the Wifey made me.

The Wifey, she likes Blue.

 

The Bellagio and us.

 As for the cars, the Maclaren was off-site, so I drove a Ferrari and a Porsche, My cousin didn't fit the Ferrari so he wound up in a Ferrari Scuderia and another Porsche. We also found a car museum, I'll probably put the car pics in a seperate post sometime.


After leaving Vegas, our trip was pretty uneventful, we trekked over to Barstow then turned north, following 99 to Sacramento then I5 through Redding on into Oregon and on into Washington. We met some of Cara's friends and spent the night with them near Centralia, WA. Then Up to Seattle. We camped out at Gary's place our last night then caught a flight home to Hawaii.


That was January 23rd, I've been back in Hawaii working since then. I finally got motivated enough to catch up with these blog posts because tonight, we will be getting on a plane and flying to Alaska, where the Donkey has wandered on ahead to meet up with us.

I may keep blogging, I may not. We will have a good time, regardless.


Cheers, Aloha, Ciao, whatever!

Wrapping it up....

For the most part, marathon driving across the united states on interstates is pretty uneventfull and boring, so I'll keep it brief. We made if from Pharr to Pheonix in 3 days. About 1200 miles. We did manage to get some toursting in in West Texas, at the Sonoma Caverns. Pretty interesting.

Natural erosion of the limestone...  cool!

We met up with some of my family in Phoenix for New Years, had a good couple days hanging out, did a little work on the Donkey. At this point we picked up an extra passenger, my 14 year old son. He earned the knickname 'the thing that sleeps in the van' before too long because thats pretty much all he did.

Mexico is Falling Apart!!

It is amazing the number of buildings that are falling apart in Mexico due to neglect and disuse. They're everywhere, even in seemingly nice areas that have large shiney new resorts, if you look around a bit you'll find the falling apart grey concrete structure with broken out windows, missing doors and exposed rebar and wiring. Some look like the construction was only partly finished but the are using the building anyways, while some look like they were merly started and abandoned, and yet others were completed but have been reduced to derelict status after years of scavenging and neglect. We saw several that were still being used, either for shops or being lived in.

Since I'm talking about building in Mexico, this is probably as good a place as any to mention the copious use of concrete. It's amazing, the things that are made out of concrete. Yes, of course, buildings are. Pretty much all of them unless they're old enough to be stone and mortar, which is a kind of concrete anyways. Sidewalks and some streets, thats obvious. Benches. Handrailings. Fenceposts. Telephone poles. Picnic Tables, diving platforms, pool slides, stools, they even made the dang poolside umbrellas out of concrete!










I'll definitely agree that they're pretty creative in the application of concrete.

We Keep Going, What can stop us??

It's Christmasy time, theres people singing
and playing music all over the place.












These people are so excited about they were being Christmasy in the middle of the road.






 


We encounter many miles of orange stands. The streets are walled with oranges, and occasionally littered with people that want to take your money and give you oranges. In a scope that as an American don't quite understand. There are numerous trash piles in this part of the country that are massive orange heaps because they can't efficiently dispose of the oranges they can't sell. They were unbelievably cheap, Cara tried to buy 4 oranges for ten pesos (less than a dollar) and they gave here change AND 6 more oranges!





There are also non-orange trash piles.
This one was plastic bottles.







We crossed the US border at the town of Pharr on the day after Christmas, if I recall correctly. Getting out of Mexico was simple, after we figured out the vehicle permit and passport business. Getting into the US, however, took a little more time. We spent 3 or 4 hours in gridlock traffic, moving about 10 feet a minute.
Eventually we made it to the checkpoint, endured a frighteningly quick and simple search, and were finally on our way. We camped out in an RV park about 25 miles north of the border. It was the coldest weather we'd been in so far!

After the end, or so we thought...

Whether it was due to lack of internet or lack of ambition, I pretty much dropped the ball on this blog at the end of the rally. Now I'm home in Hawaii, but I'm gonna try to piece together the rest of our trip...




We had other commitments that required us to haul butt northward, and skip most of the Mexican relaxation that our co-participants were looking forward to.






Anyways, after  looking at the map and calculating (over Margaritas) for a day, we realized the relaxing portion of our trip (after the rally) would actually be the marathon portion. We had to get from Bacalar MX to Pheonix AZ USA in under 7 days. It might seem insignificant to you, but your probably not driving a 4wd VW van. We've learned to respect the fact that 300 miles is a really long day in the van, not like driving one of our more road friendly vehicles (???)



So we plotted our course, with absolutely no guidance or reference aside from an old AAA map a fellow participant gave us and the ever challenging Google, and decided it would be best to bee-line it for the Gulf Coast and follow it to USA.

The research I did suggested this wasn't the most picturesque route, but would be the fastest. What I know now from traveling in Mexico, choose the slower, more picturesque route and budget 2-3x more time than you think you need. Regardless, we ground out the 'emerald coast' without issues and continued on our trip. It might be a refreshing place to jump in the water in the middle of summer, but it wasn't very appealing at the end of December. The impression I got was this was where locals vacationed, but not where people went that could choose their destinations. Having said that, my wife used her Superpower of being able to befriend anyone to meet several different groups of people.We rarely were bored or without people to talk to, we had the opportunity to meet many different people...

Life continues on the trek northward...