If you go to Texas you have to see the Alamo because, well, it’s the Alamo. So after Padre Island we drove up to Guadalupe River State Park, which is about 45 minutes north of downtown San Antonio, to use as our base camp while exploring San Antonio.

The next day we braved big city traffic (something about living in a city of more than a million makes people drive like maniacs) for our whirlwind tour of downtown San Antonio. First stop was the Alamo. For me, the Alamo significance is as the site of the pivotal scene in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure: “There’s no basement at the Alamo!” At the Alamo we read plaques and peered at exhibits for a few hours (I still don’t understand why they didn’t just retreat and live to fight another day, and why an avoidable military defeat is so renowned). After lunch we put Little Kid on my back and walked the downtown portion of the Riverwalk, a former river turned into a picturesque canal lined with restaurants and shops. The Riverwalk runs below street level, and the streets cross it on bridges, so you can walk through the downtown area without having to cross any streets and without a lot of traffic noise. After the Riverwalk we trudged over to the historic Market Square, which is basically a collection of tourist traps. Finally, we hit the Witte Museuem.

After San Antonio we headed up to McKinney Falls State Park in Austin so we could take the Jetta to an Austin mechanic to have our squeaking front suspension fixed. I found the mechanic on the “trusted mechanics list” of tdiclub.com, the online fan club for the Volkswagen diesel engine (known as the TDI). Once again, the internet makes it easy to live on the road.

While in Austin we swung by the Texas capitol building and got the treat of seeing a young northern tourist make a what-the-heck?! face as she read the Confederate memorial (“DIED for state rights guaranteed under the constitution”). Inside the capitol building Becca was entranced by a cowboy trick roper who was there for the speaker of the house’s private christmas party.

In Austin we also continued our tour of North America’s city parks with a visit to Zilker Park where we walked around Barton Springs, took the little train, and walked the trail that loops along the Lady Bird Lake.

We had been planning to spend a week or two more in New Mexico, visiting White Sands, Roswell, and Carlsbad, but when we inventoried all the places we wanted to visit in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida we realized that we didn’t have enough time to visit everything.  So we decided to skip the rest of our New Mexico destinations and start driving towards Big Bend National Park (in Texas) today.  Right now we are spending the night at a Walmart outside El Paso, Texas, and tomorrow we are doing the long drive to Big Bend.

There is no cell phone service in Big Bend, so we will be out of pocket for a few days at least.  There is allegedly wifi at the store at the Big Bend campground, so we may have intermittent email contact.

Our plan for after Drumheller was to make our way to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota (mostly because Ma wanted to see North Dakota). It was a long way from Drumheller to North Dakota, so Ma studied the map looking for somewhere to stop in between and noticed Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, just north of the US border. I was very hesitant to stop in Saskatchewan, but Ma insisted we give it a try. It turned out to be a great stop.

The drive through Grasslands National Park to the campground was spectacular: rolling prairie with dramatic valleys, bison, and a huge prairie dog town, the first that any of us had ever seen in the wild. The campground was beautiful too, with widely spaced pull through spots, great views, and even a teepee. The fee structure for the campsites was the oddest we have seen: $15.70 per night (all other campgrounds have whole dollar fees), and the same fee for sites with and without electric hookups (all other campgrounds charge at least a $10 premium for electric sites). Since there was no extra charge we opted for an electric site, only the second or third one of our whole trip.

While at Grasslands we finally got some summer weather for the first time since we left Tucson on June 1. All through the north country it was almost always at least partly cloudy and the temps never got out of the low 70s at best, and towards the end it was in the low twenties at night and forties during the day. Now in southern Saskatchewan we had cloudless skies and temps getting up into the low 80s.

Grasslands was also my first chance to use the compact Orion Starblast telescope I had purchased just for the trip. All summer in the north country there was no full darkness (we literally didn’t see stars for about two months), and even if there had been it would have been cloudy. At Grasslands the skies were dark and cloudless, and Big Kid and I were able to observe a number of galaxies, nebulas and even Uranus. Ma and I also got our final glimpse of the northern lights (sorry we did not wake you, Big Kid).

After a couple days at Grasslands we studied the map again, and noticed an Army Corps of Engineers campground at Fort Peck Dam in Montana that was about halfway to Teddy Roosevelt NP. We had heard good things about Army Corp of Engineers campgrounds so we decided to give it a try.

Leaving Grasslands we headed south for the border on a very lightly traveled two lane farm road. After our four very laid back border crossings into the US in the north country (Hyder, Skagway, Haines and the Alaska Highway) we expected that this would be another two minute stop at a tiny and lightly staffed station. Nope. The first surprise was the size of the station, which seemed much too large for a farm road where we hadn’t seen another vehicle for the past half hour. Then there was the barrage of terse questions about exactly what we had on board, with an emphasis on fruits, vegetables and dog food. Fifteen minutes later we were on our way again, minus the mandarin oranges and apples whose provenance we could not prove. The Customs and Border Protection officer graciously allowed us to keep the dog food of undocumented provenance, though he said he would note on our record that we had been informed that all dog food crossing the border must be in its original container.

Fort Peck Dam also turned out to be a great stop. Although none of us had ever heard of it before, Fort Peck Dam was a huge Public Works Administration project during the Great Depression. The project employed around 10,000 people and spawned a number of boom towns with names like New Deal and Delano. The concrete spillway structures were on the cover of the first issue of Life Magazine.

We stayed at the Downstream Campground at the base of the massive earthen dam, which just looked like a big grassy hill from down below. The campground was in a lovely grove of cottonwoods with a lush green lawn, and had three playgrounds. Even better, we paid only $8 a night, and the sites all had electricity for no extra charge (probably because there is big hydroelectric power station at the dam). The electricity came in handy because our belated summer weather continued with temps in the nineties and we had to run the rig’s AC for the first time on the trip.

Right next to the campground was a very nice interpretive center that had dinosaur skeletons and exhibits about the construction of the dam. They even had crayons and coloring sheets for Little Kid. Down the road, at one of the dredge sites, we got to cool off with a swim.

The only downside to the campground, and it was a big one, was mosquitoes; thick clouds of them. I made the mistake of going out in shorts, and at one point there were probably about two dozen feeding on my legs simultaneously. We had lucked out in north country, only getting bad mosquitoes in two campgrounds in BC, but our luck ran out at Fort Peck. If it wasn’t for them we probably would have stayed at Fort Peck for a long time, but as it was we only stayed three nights.

After spending too much time in Fairbanks we were happy to hit the road again and head to our last major north country destinations before heading south: the Taylor Highway, Top of the World Highway, and Dawson City, Yukon.

There are only two routes into Alaska by road. You can drive the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse, Yukon, to the tiny town of Tok (pronounced “toke”) Alaska, or you can drive from Whitehorse up to Dawson City, Yukon, then take the gravel Top of the World Highway and Taylor Highway to Tok. On the way in we took the Alaska Highway route, so for the return trip we took the Top of the World Highway route.

The Taylor and Top of the World Highways have a bit of a fearsome reputation among RV travelers. The guidebook recommends against driving them in the rain because of slick conditions, recommends carrying a spare tire or two because of the harsh gravel, and says to be careful when making way for oncoming traffic because RVs have toppled over after pulling over too far onto soft shoulders. When we passed through Whitehorse in late June we heard horror stories about terrible conditions and lots of flat tires in a long construction zone and, sure enough, a story of a RV just recently toppling over and then sliding down a hill until it was stopped by trees. Needless to say these stories made Pa (but not Ma) a bit nervous! However, as the summer progressed and we talked to more people the consensus seemed to be that route was perfectly doable, so we decided to go for it.

As it turned out, the Taylor and Top of the World Highways were a piece of cake, and some of the most beautiful scenery we have seen. The first sixty miles or so were paved and had lots of vivid fall colors. We spent the night at the beautiful West Fork Campground on the Taylor. The next day was Ma’s birthday, and we celebrated by stopping in the community of Chicken, Alaska, a tiny collection of rustic tourist attractions in the middle of nowhere. After Chicken we hit the gravel portion of the Taylor, but it wasn’t bad it all; it was soon enough after a rain that the dust wasn’t bad, but not so soon that it was still muddy. Then we had thirteen miles of brand new pavement; the construction zone that had spawned so many horror stories back in June was now the nicest roadway in all of Alaska. After passing through a tiny customs station we drove another few hours on good gravel on the Canadian side. This part ran along the ridges of the mountains instead of down in the valleys (hence the name “Top of the World Highway”) and there were gorgeous vistas of fall colors on all sides. The highway ended at the Yukon River, where a small ferry takes travelers and their vehicles across to Dawson City and the Klondike Highway. The Yukon River is fairly wide at Dawson City, and apparently it is cheaper to run a ferry 24-7 for the summer months (in winter vehicles just drive across the ice) than it is to build a bridge.

Rather than immediately taking the ferry across we camped for a few days at the lovely Yukon River Campground, which is across the river from Dawson City and right next to the ferry landing. Our site is next to the river, and there is a large gravel bar right below our site for the kids to play on. A few minutes downstream is a sternwheeler graveyard where the hulks of at least five or six old paddlewheelers are lined up in the woods next to the river. To go into town we just walk up the to free ferry and take the next one; it runs back and forth continuously and the wait is never more than five minutes.

Dawson City was the center of the Klondike gold rush, and it still looks much like it did back in those days. Many, if not most, of the buildings in town are from that period and have been well preserved. The Canada Parks system has a nice visitor center, and there is an old sternwheeler parked along the main street. All in all, Dawson City is probably the most attractive tourist oriented town we have seen in the north country.

The gold mining in the Klondike was, and still is, placer mining, where miners dig up rock and dirt from current and ancient river beds and then run it through sluices to separate out the heavier gold nuggets. Over the past hundred and some years every single bit of land in the valleys around Dawson City has been dug up and processed, so for a few miles outside of town the landscape is nothing but big piles of discarded river rocks interspersed with ponds. What surprised me is that placer mining is still very active in the area. On one drive up the creek where gold was originally discovered we saw at least three active mining operations, which generally involves an excavator digging up gravel, and a big machine to process it to sift out the gold. Many businesses in town have a sign up that says “Placer mining supports this business, and this business supports placer mining.” We talked to a couple who are working for the season at a placer mine four hours from Dawson City on dirt roads. He is one of the operators for the excavator (they dig 24-7 in shifts) and she cooks for the camp. They said they processed 300 tons of gravel an hour, and that yielded about one ounce of gold.

While Dawson City is one of the nicest places we have stopped we are probably going to be leaving in a couple days. Fall comes on fast here, and the puddles and ponds are already starting to freeze at night, and the days just barely get up to the fifities, and the forecast is for some nights to get into the low 20s and upper teens in the next few days.

After a week by the sea in Seward, followed by a week by the sea in Homer (Ma will write more about Homer) we said goodbye to the ocean for a few months and started heading towards Denali National Park yesterday.  Because we had to pass through Anchorage to get to Denali from Homer we turned the move into a combination of moving and logistics.  First stop was at Costco in Anchorage to stock up on a month or two of staples (our next big city with a Costco will be Edmonton in Alberta, probably in four to six weeks). Next we stopped at an Old Navy to buy some more inexpensive clothes suitable for the outdoors for various family members.   It was dinner time by the time we finished at Old Navy, so we spent the night at Eagle River Campground, just north of Anchorage, and this morning Ma is doing mutiple loads of laundry at an Eagle River laundromat while I watch the kids play in a nearby playground.  Next up is a big shop at a grocery store, followed by driving up to the town of Talkeetna which is just south of Denali.