The Great Alaskan Road Trip: Week 17 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: 12,150
• Total miles by ferry: 537
• Total days on the road: 116
• Total nights in a hotel: 4
• Total miles hiked: 116.14

Kevin at the pebbly, driftwood-strewn Ruby Beach on Washington’s west coast

Some interesting stats for this week:

• Fuel stops: 2 (diesel: $4.23/gal in Bremerton, WA; $4.06/gal in Hoquiam, WA).
• Technical Issues: 1-ish (propane alarm)
• Wildlife invasions: 1 (see below)
• NPS Sites Visited: 1 (Olympic National Park)

Sea stacks in the fog at Ruby Beach

Thanks to a couple of recent late-night scares, we are both feeling like zombies this morning.  Two nights ago, we were jolted awake at 2am by the screeching sound of our propane detector.  If you want to know what that was like, go ahead and light a match underneath your smoke detector, making sure that the speaker is as close to your eardrum as possible.  It was almost comical – both of us jumped up and scrambled around for a few minutes trying to remember the best way to shut it off.  (Turns out, it’s pulling the breaker on the DC power). 

Anyway, it was a false alarm – there was no propane leaking anywhere in the van.  But the end result was that we were definitely short on sleep all day yesterday.  We found a peaceful campsite surrounded by trees in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park and figured we’d have a quiet night last night.  But that was not to be.

As I was drifting off to sleep we started hearing some scurrying in the undercarriage, like a rodent or something.  It’s happened before, so I wasn’t too freaked out.  Until about 30 minutes later, when Kevin said “It sounds like it’s inside the van, doesn’t it?”  Kind of, but it was hard to tell for sure.  Maybe we were overly optimistic, but we both dismissed it as just some inquisitive squirrel running around in the wheel well or something.

I was sound asleep when Kevin woke me up by throwing back the covers and shouting, “It’s in the van!  I think it just ran across my pillow!”  Well, that got my attention.  We shook out the covers (twice), and then spent the next two hours slowly pulling everything out of the cabinets looking for this unidentified rodent.  Every once in a while we would hear more scurrying and we finally tracked it to the space behind the fridge/closet area.  It was clearly in the walls so we couldn’t actually get to it, and there was no way for us to do anything about it at 3am in the middle of a national park, miles from the nearest hotel.  We debated our options, but since we’d had so little sleep the night before neither of us felt up to driving more than an hour in the middle of the night.  We did our best to try to sleep, but neither of us got much shuteye.

In a daze this morning, we packed up and drove to the next town where we purchased 8 sticky glue boards that smell like peanut butter.  We haven’t heard any noise all morning/afternoon, so we are hoping that the critter left of his own volition before we put the glue boards down.  I am also hoping that the peanut butter scent doesn’t attract any new visitors.  But for now, it’s nap time!

Update from Sunday 9/9 – no activity on the traps for the past two days, so we think the whatever-it-was managed to find its own way out of the van, hooray!  In the meantime, we spent the weekend in Long Beach, WA at the Rod Run to the End of the World.  Every year the town is inundated with a thousand hot rods and classic cars.  There’s just one main street in town, so they spend all day (and night) revving their engines and cruising back and forth. 

This one was my favorite.  The license plate says “WHERERU”.  Clever!