Great Alaskan Road Trip: Week 5 Roundup

Each Friday, I post some relevant (and not-so-relevant) stats about the trip, as well as a little write-up of what it’s like to live out of a van for weeks on end. Here’s where we are overall:

• Total miles driven: 3458
• Total days on the road: 32
• Total miles hiked: 62.2

Here are some interesting stats for this week:

• Fuel stops: 1 (diesel: $4.39 / gallon in St. Mary, MT)
• Technical issues: 0 (Good week!)
• National Park Service sites visited: 4 – Glacier (US) Waterton, Kootenay, Banff (Canada)
• Elk/Bison/Deer/Sheep sighted: Too many.  No bison this week, but the deer and elk have been plentiful and we’ve seen loads of bighorn sheep too.  These two males were butting heads along Canada’s highway 1A as we drove toward Banff.
• Moose sighted: 1 (But so far we haven’t seen any with antlers – Kevin really wants to see one with antlers.)
• Red Fox sighted: 1 – this was exciting to me because I’ve never seen one in the wild before
• Birds of Prey sighted: 2 golden eagles (soaring together above the Iceberg Lake hike)
• Bears sighted: 8 (Two grizzly sightings and six black bears.  We saw five along the roadside in just a single hour on Canada’s highway 93 – that stretch of road seemed positively infested by black bears.)
• Cougars sighted: 0 – Sigh.  I don’t know whether or not I’m happy about that.

Someone asked what it’s really like to live day in and day out in a tiny van.  Most of you know that Kevin and I spent three and a half years living aboard a sailboat.  We thought those quarters were cramped, and the van is about one-quarter of the boat’s size.  And yet, it seems even harder to really keep the inside clean.
When we are camped for the night, we put out the outdoor mat (our glorious, glorious mat) and that does a pretty good job of stopping us from tracking stuff in.  But during the rest of the day, we stow the mat and just get in and out via the driver & passenger doors, and neither footwell has a mat (the van didn’t come with any – we have “auto mats” listed as “must buy” items).  So really we track all the dirt, leaves, and pine needles (which are the worst) in at the front of the van.  Then the debris tends to migrate over the course of the day to the back/living quarters.  So I am constantly sweeping because a pet peeve of mine is getting pointy pine needles stuck in my socks as I walk across the floor.  Grumble.

Because the space is so small, we’ve had to become even more “neatniky” than usual (and when I say “we”, I just really mean me – Kevin isn’t fazed by clutter).  If things aren’t put in their proper place after they’ve been used, it doesn’t take long for an already cramped space to feel even more so.  Leaving a jacket laying on one of the chairs at home isn’t a big deal, but when you just have one chair and have to constantly move the jacket out of the way to sit down it can get annoying.  (Of course another very valid reason to put things away is that stuff tends to go flying when you’re driving at highway speeds.)

But these are minor complaints, especially since we spend most of the day outside the van, and it really doesn’t take long (all of five minutes, actually) to sweep and tidy up.  For the most part, this size of van has worked out well for what we are using it for.  I probably wouldn’t want to live in it full-time (definitely would want something bigger for two people).  But for a road trip-style van it has really lived up to expectations. 
So on a completely different tangent, I have a little Rorschach test for you guys.  What is the first thing that comes to mind when you see this image?  What message do you think this sign is meant to convey?

In the U.S. the sign for “scenic overlook” is usually a pair of binoculars with the word ‘'scenic” or something like that.  The sign above is Canada’s way of telling you that something worth looking at is coming up – the adult is supposed to be holding binoculars, I guess.  But to me it just looks like a parent knocking back a cold bottle of Molson after a long day of sightseeing while his kid is looking the other way.