Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, February 9, 2005
11:29 - Sittin' on top of the world	(top)
Yesterday I made the final booking arrangements on the Alaska Marine Highway, the ferry that takes tourists and cars down the Inside Passage from Anchorage and Skagway back down to civilization. Over $1000, and space is filling up fast, so it's pretty much a done deal. See, I've decided to drive the Alaska Highway this summer. In August, a friend and I will start out from San Jose, drive north on I-5 and US97 through Oregon and Washington, over the Canadian border, up through Kelowna, maybe taking in Banff and Jasper, then starting the actual Alaska Highway at Dawson Creek in northern BC. From there it's 1500 miles through tundra and forest and sawtooth mountain ranges, through Whitehorse and Liard Hot Springs and Muncho Lake and Haines Junction and Teslin and Kluane Lake and many other ringing names, into Alaska via Tok and Delta Junction. Then it's up to Fairbanks and to Denali, where my parents spent two summers when they were about my age�about thirty years ago�working at Mt. McKinley, my dad driving a tour bus dozens of miles into the interior and pointing out all the wildlife to awed tourists who would otherwise have been disappointed at the fact that the mountain is obscured by clouds 367 days of the year. This whole trip is something of a recreation of their own odyssey back in 1971 (and again in 1972), which they undertook back when the road was all gravel and they averaged no more than 30 mph in their orange VW squareback wagon with a cat riding in the back. They had three weeks to make it one direction. I've got three weeks planned for the entire round trip. After Denali, we'll head south through Anchorage, and that's where the really interesting part starts. This map is about bus routes, and doesn't show all the roads, but it gives the general gist: It starts with the Whittier Tunnel, longest highway tunnel in North America, recently refitted to allow a single lane of cars to share the same driving surface as the railroad that has used it for many years (they queue up 240 deep and then meter them through�if there's a fire or an emergency, there are a bunch of safe-rooms dug into the rock that are fireproof and have their own oxygen supplies). At the other end, at Whittier, is the first leg of the ferry: the brand-new M/V Chenega, which takes us across Prince William Sound to Valdez. Thence it's up through Glennallen and Slana to Tok again, and up one of the last major highways still gravel-surfaced: the Top of the World Highway, though such metropoli as Chicken and Eagle, past the trailer serving as the border station and customs office, and on to Dawson City. (My parents had to rely on The Milepost and hearsay as they went. I can look up all these towns on Mapquest.) Then down through the heart of Yukon and back to Whitehorse, where we head south across the border again, over the Chilkoot Pass and into Skagway, there to wallow in the Gold Rush nostalgia for a night before picking up the ferry for the leg down to Juneau. It's the M/V Fairweather, which looks like a Star Trek shuttlecraft, and will make the trip in 2.5 hours instead of the 7 it takes other ships. So we spend the evening in Juneau and then catch the M/V Matanuska for the long leg, the one down to Prince Rupert, BC, stopping at places like Ketchikan and Wrangell for an hour each, and landing at 6:15AM after a day and a half of travel. At which point we get up, rub the sleep from our eyes, and drive inland to Prince George, then turn south through Whistler on the way to Vancouver and Seattle. And then a straight shot back down south on I-5. The dates all seem to work out. Barring any major mechanical breakdowns or reservation mixups, I think it's doable. It'll be the longest vacation I've taken in... uh, ever. And I think that's just fine; as they say, nobody ever lay on his deathbed muttering, "Boy, I wish I'd spent more time in the office." If I can get this under my belt before I'm 30, I'll feel a whole lot better about my worldly accomplishments to date, and I'll have something I can really, genuinely look back on and brag about. Especially if I take lots of photos. Now I need to get a new camera. A good one. With lots of expensive lenses and stuff. Sheesh. So much for saving money. But then, I guess nobody lay on his deathbed thinking, "Boy, I wish I'd saved more money," either...