Quick update from the last post: I made it back from Alaska safely, thanks for the comments and support to everyone!  I’ve since graduated from UCF and just this week started working for IBM as a full time Software Engineer!

A month or so ago I received some e-mails from IBM saying that I had to take part in an orientation/training program on my first week.  Well, my first week is this week and I was sent to our headquarters in Armonk, NY to sit through three days of orientation class with a bunch of other new hires.

I went into the first meeting on Monday afternoon expecting to see a room full of other people fresh out of college, boy was that the wrong idea!  It turns out that IBM hires (at least right now, anyway) more “experienced professionals” then they do “university-hires”, which really shouldn’t have been too surprising - they acquire new companies all the time and need to increase the staff of a lot of those companies when they come on.

I won’t bore any of you with the details of the training, and I don’t even really know how much of it I’m allowed to share anyway.  I had a good time, learned a lot, and met some really cool people.  Unfortunately, none of them were engineers; most were sales or consulting hires.

* Any articles I write from here on out pertaining to IBM are my personal viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of IBM, its management, or shareholders.

Time: July 23, 2008 at 11:00 P.M. Alaska Time
Location: Alaska, The Inside Passage, M/V Taku, Recliner Lounge 1, The Floor
Activity: Just got back on the ferry from a break in Ketchikan

• The loud blast of the Taku’s horn woke me up at 7:00 in the morning when we arrived at one of our intermediate ports: Petersburg.  Its a common theme: all the towns in Alaska’s South East are beautiful.  Each of the towns on the way to Prince Rupert: Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan were all really nice to look at.
• Around 1:00 PM the “Purser” (basically the boat’s Customer Service rep) told all of us over the PA system that we’d be stuck in Ketchikan for eight hours while the repairs were being made.  Needless to say, lots of the passengers were torqued.  Some would miss flights, some had to re-schedule reservations for tours, but others were just angry at the otherwise minor inconvenience in their already months-long vacation.
• To assuage the pain a bit, the ship’s captain decided it’d be OK for us to stay on-board during the repairs.  I don’t really know why this helped shut people up; we still had to wait the 8 hours, but I guess of the people who were only annoyed and not majorly inconvenienced were happy to be able to not go anywhere.
• I chose to leave the boat and get some internet access at the restaurant across the street from the terminal.  I spent a few hours and lots of money on food and drinks there before re-boarding the boat and readying for Prince Rupert.  I can’t wait for normal prices for food again, things in Alaska and Canada are very expensive.
• The Taku’s bartender had mentioned that the section of open-water that we would pass through could get pretty rough.  My tent is new and I didn’t want to have problems with saltwater corrosion from waves breaking over the deck of the ship, so I made the decision to sleep indoors: I unrolled my sleeping bag between two rows of chairs in one of the boat’s lounges and grabbed some oft-interrupted by the uncomfort Z’s.

Time: July 22, 2008 at 11:30 P.M. Alaska Time
Location: Alaska, Juneau, M/V Taku, Top Deck
Activity: Sitting in the tent on the deck of the Taku

• On the morning of my second day in Juneau I woke up to the noise that twelve tourists make while getting ready for a day of exploration.  The Hostel was buzzing with activity: four middle-aged Aussies were making breakfast in the kitchen, a man from France was doing his laundry downstairs, and a disheveled woman was pacing back and forth in the living room.
• It turns out that woman’s name was Suzanne, and her phone had been stolen (or lost, probably lost) while she was hiking the day before.  I think she saw me put my blackberry in my pocket and immediately came over to ask if she could borrow it for “just a few minutes”.  I have always heard that its a bad idea to let other people use your phone when you’re traveling, and I found out why.  After fourteen phone calls (yes, I counted them on my call log) taking more than 45 minutes, to what seemed to be corporate offices for a rental car company, I learned that she couldn’t return her rental car from Chicago to the Juneau Airport office.  Maybe it was because I thought that nobody could be so rude or because I thought that it wouldn’t really take that long, but I couldn’t bring myself to just take my phone back.  I wonder if there is a polite way to solve that situation?
• After the ordeal with my phone and Suzanne, I remembered one of the rules for the hostel: before you check out for the day you have to do a chore.  Because I arrived so late the previous night, I was unable to be assigned a chore by the Hostel manager and had to wait until he arrived at 8:00 only to find out that the dishes needed putting away.  Its not too bad of a deal to get a warm place to sleep and a hot shower for ten bucks and 5 minutes worth of work.
• Before getting on the ferry to Prince Rupert, I had a lot of time to kill so I decided to check out the Mendenhall glacier again.  This time I took the easy half-mile trail up to “photo point” with all the other out-of-shape tourists.  I’m glad I got to do both the challenging hike and the easier route.  The hike afforded me with enough solitude and quiet to admire the geology of the glacier for myself while the easy trail allowed me to learn from interpretive signs and park rangers who were giving some interesting talks.  Having pulled a huge block of glacial ice out of the lake, one of the rangers sat it on a table for us to check out; in the process a few smaller pieces of the ultra-clear block broke off.  I picked up one of those pieces and all I wanted to do was lick it, but I figured that’d be in bad form.
• To pass the remaining hours before I had to line up for the ferry I decided to update the blog a bit and try some of the “famous” waffles at the Juneau Waffle Store.  The waffle was alright, the internet was better.
• Those of us who were driving their cars onto the ferry and had a final destination of Prince Rupert learned that we would need to vacate the ferry in Ketchikan for a few hours while a repair was being made.  I wonder what was so important…
• After parking behind a group of motorcycles towards the aft of the boat I grabbed both my big pack and my normal backpack and went to the top deck to stake a claim for my tent (no pun intended - heck, tent stakes are useless when the ground is made of iron).  The top deck is made up of two main segments: the solarium and the tent deck.  Even though camping used to be a popular activity in the 80’s and 90’s, it turns out that nobody really spends the time to set up their tents on the ferries anymore; they just grab one of the white reclining deck chairs and unroll their sleeping bag on it under the protection of the solarium.  Is this what people mean when they say generation Y is lazy?
• A guy in his late 20’s named Jason who goes by “JJ” had finished setting up his sleeping bag and pillow on one of those chairs when I arrived.  I don’t know whether you’d call it an accent or a dialect, but I could immediately tell that JJ was from Southern California.  After some pleasantries, we both agreed to watch each other’s stuff to make sure it wasn’t stolen and he gave me one of his beers.
• Like I said above, tent stakes are worthless on the deck of a ship.  I had to jury-rig my site by using the tie-lines to tie one side of the tent to the railing on the port side of the ferry and a three-gallon jug of water to weigh down the opposite side.
• It was around 8:30 when I finished setting up camp and I went for a walk around the Taku (our ferry, named after a glacier) to do some exploring.  The exploring came to an abrupt and happy end when I ran into the ship’s bar.  Inside, I saw JJ again and after grabbing a Vodka Soda for myself invited him to play one of the games of chess sitting on the bar’s tables.
• I’m a pretty bad Chess player, but I think the SoCal sun must have fried one too many of JJ’s brain cells and the game didn’t last too long.  During it, however, I learned that JJ had just finished working at a resort on one of the islands West of Juneau (and hated it), has a father who is a bushpilot in Ketchikan, and is headed to there to meet up with his girlfriend before they go back to California.
• After the game, JJ and I grabbed another couple of drinks from the bar and met a Civil Engineer from Anchorage named Nick.  Nick was traveling to Ketchikan on business, to do some surveying on one of the nearby islands.  He moved to Anchorage with his fiance pretty recently from Chicago, where he had just finished school.  I can’t really remember his answer, but when I asked why he wanted to work in Anchorage he ended up mentioning that he had worked several of his summers during college on the “north slope” (an area above the arctic circle in Alaska where lots of mining and oil drilling is done).
• With three or four drinks in me and the bar coming to a close, it was time to get some sleep.  I was a bit worried that the wind from the moving boat would keep me up all night, but I fell asleep easily to the rhythm of the tent’s fly flapping in the breeze.

Some of the photos I’ve taken so far are now online.  I got tired of trying to get Flickr to recognize my login information and went with Photobucket instead.  You can find the whole album here, but I’ve included a few of my favorites in this post.

Northern California...

Snapshot of my campground in Washington.

Lake, and Me, at Battle Ground State Park

This sign was awesome... Applanche!

The road, I think this was in British Columbia

Time: July 21, 2008 11:30 P.M. Alaska Time Zone
Location: Alaska, Juneau, Juneau International Hostel, Couch H-1
Activity: Lying on the couch at the hostel

• Rather than finding a campsite, sleeping in the tent, and having to pack up and rush to the Ferry Terminal in Haines I decided to sleep in the car.  The place where I parked for the night was a cliff that overlooked the harbor.  Not too shabby!
• Boarding the Ferry in the morning was an interesting undertaking.  I’ve never had to back a car into a deeper “parking space” before.  They made me drive onto the boat, turn around, and back down a corridor about 100 yards long with a little turn at the boat’s stern.  Luckily when I approached the stern there was a deckhand ready to tell me which way to turn the wheel to get myself aligned.
• I’ve been really enjoying the “Alaska Marine Highway” experience, its like an inexpensive cruise.  Here are some of the great things that my boat from Haines to Juneau had:
  • Talks by a U.S. Forest Service Ranger - Her name was Amy and she gave two lectures: one about glaciers and the way they shape the landscape, and another about the differences between seals and sea lions.
  • A Movie Theater - Maybe less of a movie theater and more of a large room with rows of chairs and two big screen TVs, they showed two movies.  The first was some comedy that I didn’t pay attention to the title and the second was Into the Wild (go figure).
  • Cafeteria - I was pleasantly surprised at both the cost and quality of the food onboard.
  • Arcade - Didn’t really check it out, but its cool that there was one at all.
  • Bar - My trip to Juneau was from 8:00 AM to 1:30 PM, so the Bar wasn’t open. I could imagine it being a fun place to hang out on the longer trips (lets hope my boat to Prince Rupert has a bar!).
• On a clear day we would’ve been able to see more wildlife according to Amy, but we only ended up seeing a humpback whale “spouting” off the starboard deck once.
• We arrived in Juneau on time.  Its a very rainy city and has been drizzling the entire time I’ve been here.  Rain aside, its got a similar charm to Haines but is a full-sized city with lots of stuff going on.
• As Amy suggested, I took the Glacier Highway about half way from the ferry terminal towards downtown Juneau to get a look at the Mendenhall Glacier.  It is absolutely gorgeous.  If you’re like me and you haven’t ever seen a glacier in person, you’d be awestruck at how the bright blue light gets refracted through thousands of years worth of accumulated snowfall.

  That’s really what a glacier is: ancient compacted snow that flows down the sides of a mountain range just as a river would.  The Juneau Ice Field’s 100 inches of snow per year feeds 38 named glaciers, Mendenhall is just one of them.

• Not knowing exactly what I was getting myself into, I parked the car at a trailhead and started hiking.  I didn’t learn until after my feet were cold, wet, and muddy that I should’ve worn something more substantial than sandals; its alright though, I had a great time on my 7 mile hike up the side of the mountain through an old-growth pacific rainforest to get a better view of the glacier.  Afterwards, I rewarded myself with a hot shower at the Tongass National Forest campground to wash the hardened mud off my feet and legs.
• Having changed into dry clothes after my shower, my stomach was telling me that it desperately needed to be filled with some food.  It led me downtown where I walked around amongst the thousands of cruise ship passengers looking for something to eat.  The only restaurants I could find were either too expensive, or full of way too much cheesy tourism crap so I went back towards the ferry terminal to a little sports bar I spotted on my way to the glacier.
• At the bar, I met and talked with a few interesting people:
  • Adam - Goes to the University of Alaska, Southeast.  He was a 21 year old Theater and Law double major (what a wierd mix).  He is the one who suggested I stay in a hostel for the night instead of camping in the downpour.
  • Shayna - The bartender, she was very nice and told me all about her story.  She used to live in Prince of Whales and moved to Juneau with her two children after she separated from her husband.  Someday she hopes to move back to her hometown in Oregon.
  • Scott - Your stereotypical Alaskan fisherman.  He was in his 60’s, had a big gray beard, wore rubber boots, and had just finished a day on the water (I should mention this bar was across the street from a small marina).  He is a captain of a commercial salmon fishing boat and was drinking with his crew that night.  I told him about my experiences in Newport and how much I like to be on the water. Immediately, he invited me to come back to Alaska and be a deckhand on his boat if I ever need a Summer job for a couple of months.  Referring to his crew, he said “I could use some younger blood on the boat, these old farts won’t last long”.  It’d be so cool to save up a bunch of vacation time with IBM and be an Alaskan fisherman for a summer.
• Phone number of the hostel in hand, I got in the car after a nice meal at the bar and went to the Juneau International Hostel and checked in.

Time: July 20, 2008 at 6:30 P.M. Alaska Time
Location: Alaska, Haines, Chilkoot Lake State Park, Picnic Grounds
Activity: Writing in the journal as I watch Bald Eagles hunt salmon in the Chilkoot river

• I thought I was awake enough to drive through the night to Haines, but my eyes were shutting themselves as I neared the town of Tok.  I decided it’d be best to pull into a parking lot and pass out.   A couple of hours later I woke up and started towards Haines again.
• The border crossing into Yukon from Alaska was almost humorous in its casual nature.  It was probably only 7 AM Pacific Time and the Canadian customs office was almost devoid of people.  I had to wait about 5 minutes by myself outside the window for a patroller to take my passport and birth certificate only to be pretty much allowed into the country without hardly any questioning.
• After stopping in at the Lake Kluane visitor center to read about the glaciers I tried to exit the parking lot but was stopped by a signal person to wait for construction crews to go by.  During the fifteen minutes that passed, I learned that she had been working on the Alaska Highway with that company for eight years.  Apparently I was correct when I supposed that all road construction is done during the Summers.  She said that its almost like a three month vacation for her family; the kids and her husband come down to the lake where the road construction is going on and fish, camp, and visit her.  In the Winter time you might think that they go towards warmer climate, but no, most of the construction workers go further North to work on mining and logging roads.  Thats crazy!
• When I left the Alaska Highway for the last time I was in Haines Junction, a town about 150 miles north of the city of Haines in the Yukon and is the Northern terminus of the Haines Highway.  Outside the gas station were two laid back dogs that have a really great life of laying in the sun and being petted by every customer who goes into the store.
• The Haines Highway connects Haines with the Alaska Highway and the rest of the outside world.  Its considered by a lot of people to be one of the most beautiful drives in the world, and I’m inclined to agree completely.  The highway skirts the edges of two national parks as it winds its way through an alpine landscape of snow covered mountains and arctic tundra.
• At one of the passes that the highway crosses over, I stopped to take some pictures.  There were two motorcyclists taking a rest there also and one of them offered to use my camera to take a picture of me.  This is the only picture I have of myself this trip that wasn’t taken by holding the camera at arms length.
• I think the border patrolman at the US border crossing on the Haines Highway must have been worried I was trying to sneak an illegal Canadian alien into the country: he had me pop my trunk and poked around back there for a little bit before sending me on my way.  People by themselves in cars going cross country must be a little suspicious?
• The city of Haines is about 40 miles from the US-Canada border and the highway changes from alpine scenery to Pacific rainforest.  The landscape was covered with wildflowers, gigantic spruce trees, and was dotted with gold-rush era houses.  I didn’t realize until later that I was actually driving right next to the largest concentration of Bald Eagles in the world: the Chilkat river.
• Haines is an adorable coastal town nestled into the mountainsides with an active harbor and has only been slightly affected by the recent attention from the large cruise ships.  Skagway and Haines only have one radio station: an NPR-affiliated frequency that has interesting shows, one of which was a lesson on the Tlingit (Southeast Alaskan Native American) language.
• For dinner I ate fish and chips at a little restaurant overlooking the harbor.  The food was outrageously expensive ($18 for the meal, which was made from locally cought fish), but I guess I was paying for the great view I had while I ate.

I know it has been a while since my last update, I’ve been either too tired to find internet or out of the range of civilization.  This post is the first of several I plan to put online today, to make up for the gap.

Probably the biggest motivator for my trip to Alaska was wanting to visit untouched wilderness and see animals in their natural habitat.  Going to Denali National Park helped fulfill that desire.

Time: July 19, 2008
Location: Alaska, Denali National Park
Activity: Recalling the day

• Because I chose to head straight from Denali to Haines I didn’t get a chance to sit down and record my thoughts for the day.  I definitely had one of the best times of my life out there though.  By “out there” I really mean it: even though you usually go with a group of people through the park, you can’t mistake the fact that you are in pure wilderness.
• The night before, Jodi got wasted and was having a belligerent conversation with another drunk until 4 in the morning.  It was loud enough to wake me as well as campers in other sites throughout the night. [I will post a full story about Jodi and some of the other campers in Fairbanks when I can compile my thoughts coherently-enough]
• Already warm from sleeping at a campground downtown, it didn’t take long for me to get out of my bag and onto the road at 6:30 that morning.
• I heard something along the lines of “I only shoot when I feel threatened…” groggily muttered from Jodi’s tent while I was packing everything up.  The rustling of my tent’s canvas probably awoke him from his peaceful blacked-out slumber, poor baby.  After responding like I only knew how (by laughing uncomfortably) he made a remark about being pleased that I actually said something back and proceeded to exit my life forever, I hope.  He must have still been at least four or five sheets to the wind.
• The drive to Denali National Park is about 120 miles south of Fairbanks, which is extremely close by Alaskan standards.  Its hard to confuse the swarm of businesses capitalizing off of tourism for anything other than a sign that you’ve arrived at the park’s gates.
• Inside the welcome center I purchased my ticket for the 9:15 AM “Wonder Lake” bus excursion, bought some presents for the people back home, and waited in a line of 20 old men before I heeded nature’s other call.
• John, our bus driver, pulled up outside the rear of the welcome center around 9:05 and herded us all onto the vehicle.  We had no idea just how rewarding (and long: 11 hours) our 172 mile round-trip journey along the only road in 6,000,000 acres of wilderness would turn out.
• Sitting nearby on the bus were a few people whose acquaintance I made.  They all belonged to a larger tour group run by Holland America, I think.
  • Dave and his wife - Hailing from North Carolina, they were a really nice couple who for some reason were sitting on opposite sides of the bus instead of next to eachother (perhaps to avoid missing anything?).  Dave is a pretty hardcore photographer armed with a huge telephoto lens; he said he’ll be putting his pictures online soon and I hope to mirror them on this blog as soon as I get an e-mail from him saying where they are.
  • Steve - A nice guy from LA who sat across the aisle from me, he slept during the first couple of hours for some reason and awoke only to calls of “OOOH!” or when John slammed on the brakes to let us take pictures of something.
  • Lang - A really cute Australian woman who let me borrow her binoculars when we would see some wildlife that was across the valley or just too far to be seen well with our naked eyes.
  • The old man who sat next to me after we “rescued” him - We picked him and his wife up from a bus that broke down 30 miles into the park.  Good-natured and interesting to talk to, he joined us for the last three hours of the trip.
• So much interesting stuff happened that I can’t possibly list it all effectively here, so stay tuned for when I actually get the photos online.  I hear each one is worth at least 1000 words.
• We saw the following animals in the park:
  • 1 Arctic Fox - Had recently killed an Arctic Ground Squirrel and ate it in about 30 seconds while hiding behind a bush.
  • 19 Caribou - We saw them all over the park, a group that stuck out in my mind was about 4 or 5 caribou that were running across a hillside of arctic tundra.
  • 26 Dall Sheep - Divided into three herds, they were all high up on the rocky mountainsides grazing on grasses.
  • 2 Golden Eagles
  • 1 Gray Wolf - None of us actually thought we’d see a wolf in the park, there are only 100 known to live within the 6,000,000 acres and they keep to themselves pretty well.  This one was relatively close and had just killed a Snowshoe Hare.  Dave got some amazing pictures of the wolf, I got one or two but my lens doesn’t zoom enough to get a really good look.
  • 4 Grizzly Bears (including 1 cub!) - All the grizzlies we saw were munching on grasses on hillsides across the valley from us.  According to John, the bears will eat up to 40 lbs of blueberries per day when they’re in season.
  • 2 Arctic Ground Squirrels - Cute but annoying, I think one too many people fed the squirrels and they’re very unafraid of humans.  One of them came right up to my shoe and begged.
  • 3 Moose - The first one we saw was busy eating willow brush, he was probably 7 feet tall and had pretty horns.  I also learned that there is no difference between Elk and Moose, the name “Elk” is the European term for Moose.
  • 1 Owl
  • 4 Ptarmigan - I didn’t realize that the Ptarmigan was Alaska’s state bird until this trip.  They turn a bright white in the winter as a defense against predators.  Two of the four we spotted were chicks with their mother.
  • 2 Red Foxes - Elusive little buggers, one was only seen briefly while running across the tundra.  The other one was curled up like a kitten and taking a nap in the afternoon sun.
  • 16 Snowshoe Hares - These guys are everywhere, they have the same defense as the Ptarmigan in the winter.
• It was easy to get lost in how beautiful the scenery was and forget to look for animals, but when someone spotted something we all snapped out of it and started scanning the horizon for movement so that we could aim a snapshot.  I hit my head really hard against the luggage rack on the ceiling twice because of the excitement.
• Tired but excited to have had such a successful experience, I got back into the Fusion and started on the 700-mile trip to Haines, AK.

Time: 7:21 PM, Alaska Time Zone (GMT -9)
Location: Alaska, Fairbanks, Chena River State Recreation Area, W1
Activity: Surfing the information super highway at a campground…

• It was definitely a nice break from roughing it to stay in a hotel last night.  Even though my room was located over the hotel’s bar, which had loud music blaring until 2AM, I got a hot shower and fell asleep watching TV (just like home!).
• Either my biological clock is still out of whack or this last hurrah before becoming an adult is actually turning me into more of an adult: I woke up at 6:30 AM this morning without an alarm, checked out of the hotel, and got on the road.
• The stretch of the Yukon that the Alaska Highway runs through is larger than Google Maps originally led me to believe.  I was planning on only being in Canada for a couple of hours this morning, but it took until 1 in the afternoon to cross the border.  That’s alright though, there was some really cool stuff to see today:
  1. Haines Junction - This is the “gateway to the Kluane”, a nice sized town about 100 miles Northwest from Whitehorse.
  2. Kluane National Park - I only saw the outside of the park because I didn’t get a chance to explore its innards.  I definitely want to head back some day though, it looks very pretty: lots of glaciers, mountains, and pretty water.
  3. Kluane National Park’s Natural History Museum - As you can see in the previous post, I learned quite a bit from the museum.  Its admission fee was only $3.95; definitely worth the cost!  They have lots of displays with the different animals and environments you can expect to see in the sub-arctic and arctic regions of the Yukon.
• Crossing the border into Alaska wasn’t nearly as eventful as when I crossed into B.C., I had all my information ready to go and it was rather painless.
• The biggest problem I had today with driving was the construction.  I think Alaska and Yukon try to get all their highway maintenance done while its still relatively tolerable outdoors - which places construction workers in the path of just about all the tourists these places get (and slowed me down by at least an hour).  If I wasn’t waiting for the signalman to flip his little sign from “stop” to “slow”, I was almost idling over gravel sections of the highway.
• One nice thing about waiting with the signalmen was getting to talk to them and even having them point things out that I wouldn’t have noticed, like a Perigrine Falcon hunting Swifts above the trees to the left of our line of stopped cars.  Very cool!  FYI: the Perigrine Falcon is the fastest bird in the world and has been clocked at over 180 MPH in a dive while hunting.
• I was greeted with a nice surprise before getting into Fairbanks tonight: there is a little town called “North Pole, AK” about 5 miles to the Southeast of Fairbanks.  It’s pretty cute.  All the streets are named after something related to christmas (e.g. “Jingle Bell Lane”, “St. Nicholas St.”, etc.), and there is a gigantic sculpture of Santa Claus welcoming you to their city.  I didn’t see any elves, and all the townsfolk were rather normal-sized though.
• I haven’t made my mind up about Fairbanks yet, its a pretty big city by far-North standards but I haven’t found any of its really interesting areas so far.  I also spent about an hour looking for wifi, only to find it at the campsite where I chose to stay.

  Before setting up camp, I took a driving tour of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF for short).  It’s a small university, and I have no idea in what areas they excel - probably forestry and biology.  I couldn’t imagine going to school all the way out here unless I grew up in Alaska: the day/night schedules are all wonky, you can’t really bring a car here unless you want to drive it 3000 miles every summer/fall to get here/home, and it is really a tiny school.

In the comments for my previous post my mother asked a few questions.  I figured it’d be worth it to answer them in their own post rather than another comment:

1. What’s the difference between caribou, moose & elk??
   I got to stop at the Kluane National Park’s Natural History Museum and found out that the biggest visual difference between moose and caribou is their horns.  Here’s the way I figured out how to easily tell one from the other: make fake horns for yourself by opening both hands wide, and put your thumbs on your temples - this is the moose.  Anything else, as far as I know, is caribou.  As for elk, I have no idea as of yet.
2. How is that the ATM works in Australia (across the big pond) and they can’t figure out how to get it to work in the same continent?
   I think SunTrust just doesn’t like me very much.  I was able to get cash out of an ATM today as soon as I crossed the border into the USA, but it still doesn’t work as a credit card for some reason.
3. Have you had any salmon yet?
   Not yet, hopefully soon!
4. How about Alaskan king crab?
   Nope, I’m not sure when it’s in season though.
5. How many hours does it stay light?
   According to the lady I met in Whitehorse, it doesn’t ever really get dark at this latitude.  It just gets “dusky”.  Hopefully I can test that hypothesis tonight in Fairbanks if I don’t fall asleep too early.
6. Do you find yourself worried about your paper towel consumption, and conserving them in the interest of pillow comfort?
   Nah, paper towels are cheap.
7. Are you happy?
   Absolutely!

In the interest of making my answers as authentic to my experience as possible, I didn’t look up any of the actual answers on Wikipedia or anything (if you want something more accurate for the daylight or moose/elk/caribou questions, I’d point you over there).

If you have more questions, let me know in a comment and I’ll answer them as soon as I can!

Time: 9:00 PM, Pacific Time Zone
Location: Yukon Territory, Whitehorse, 202 Motor Inn, Room 225
Activity: Relaxing on a bed with my laptop…

• Instead of doing what I’ve done the last few nights and driving out of town a bit until I found a campground I deemed worthy; I was convinced by my dad that it would be a good idea to get a hotel room for the night.  Wow, was he right?!  I’ve never been so excited to see a real bed.  Just imagine what people must have felt when they traveled across this same route with all their belongings, their entire family, and their hopes stashed in a 9×4 stage coach to come upon a “major city” like Whitehorse after 800 miles of virtually nothing.  I bet they would have decided to get a room also, if they could afford it.
• After I finished my journal entry last night, the ranger for the campground got my note I left her about not being able to pay for my stay.  She was a very nice, very Canadian (thick accent, lots of “eh”s, etc.), woman who I found out had also recently graduated college and was hoping to get a job working for the logging industry in the North West Territories or Northern Yukon.  After I explained my situation with the debit card, she took me for my word that I would have my bank send her a check (spelled “cheque” here in Canada) for the $14 I owed her as soon as I had access to my online billpay.  [note from today after getting access: the bank doesn't have a mailing option for BC, I'm going to have to mail it manually when I get home]
• Its too bad I’m so terrible with learning peoples’ names, but shortly after the ranger left me the man from the RV nextdoor helped me get my fire started.  Offering me one of their beers, they invited me in to take shelter from the onslaught of mosquitos and talk about our trips after we got enough firewood. I learned that he and his wife had been traveling for over a month, coming from Tennessee.  They’re doing this whole trip the right way: taking lots of time, and riding in a comfy vehicle.  They are planning to be gone for up to 4 months, touring most of North America.
• It was another super cold morning when I forced myself to get out of my nice warm sleeping bag and into a damp pair of jeans laying beside me.  Speaking of “roughing it”: I’ve found that a roll of paper towels works perfectly as a pillow for camping; it fits into my sleeping bag, gives me enough support for my neck and provides a ready source of two-ply absorbency if a situation ever came about where it was needed.
• Much of the road today was the same as yesterday: rolling hills with lots of trees.  There was one major difference, however: the wildlife.  It must be because of a combination of the scarcity of people and the easy source for tasty grass, but the Alaska Highway is chock full of animals.  Heres a list of some of the stuff I saw today - each of which was just off the side of the road, about 20 feet from me:
  1. Two herds of buffalo,
  2. A couple dozen caribou (or cariboo, different places seem to spell it differently here),
  3. Four black bears, and
  4. One deer
• If you look at a map of the Alaska Highway, it dips down into British Columbia after a short jaunt in the Yukon before it heads into the territory for good.  Once I was in the Yukon on the final leg to Whitehorse the scenery changed quite a bit.  Instead of rolling hills or mountains with rivers, it was a nice surprise to see lakes (and mountains, of course).  These lakes were an eerie milky blue-green color that made them almost look like water you’d see in the Caribbean from a bird’s eye view.  I have to assume that they get their color from the minerals washed down off of the mountains with the melting snow, its really spectacular.   The highway followed the edge of one of these lakes for about 50 miles until I reached Whitehorse.
• Whitehorse, while the largest city in the Yukon Territory, is a third the size of Prince George.  Its a cute town with a nice downtown full of shopping and all the other touristy stuff you’d expect.  I was a bit disappointed to find it so difficult to locate a place with an internet connection though, I guess being “wired” deep in Canada isn’t so important (this makes it about 1000 miles since I’ve had signal on my cell phone).

Thanks for reading, I’m off to the bar downstairs!  Stay tuned for some more entries after I arrive in Alaska!