North to Alaska

Our drive from Dease Lake to Whitehorse was a great day for spotting animals. We detoured to Bear glacier, and were really glad we did! It was very spectacular.

This is a real bear

This is bear glacier

Most of the drive was just looking at mountains, and trying to get a photos of a gopher. There were hundreds of them beside the road, everywhere. It's pretty much impossible to get a photo of one from a moving car, but luckily one had a home where we stopped for lunch.

This is a mose sprinting away

Coyote

We're also pretty sure were saw a lynx, but it ran off the road so quickly we didn't have time to think about it until it was gone. The drive was pretty nice, but started to get a little boring, since we had already done quite a few long days of driving. We were glad to see Whitehorse when we got there, and went to our Airbnb as soon as we could. It was a pretty awkward Airbnb, the most awkward we've ever had. It really felt like they didn't really want us there, and like they were trying to pretend we weren't there. But it was warm, and their cats had some kind of mental issues (seriously, I think there was something wrong with them...).

We slept in the next day, with no real deadlines to get to Haines in Alaska we thought we may as well make use of having a real bed. The border crossing appears to be a one or two man deal, and it looks like they have to live there. Pretty grim really, since there's not much there other than the townhouses they live in.

When we got to Haines we didn't really have any plans. We'd stopped at the HUGE visitor centre in Haines Junction and collected a forest of pamphlets and maps. Unfortunately the hammer museum was closed... And it didn't look like it was going to open again any time soon. We decided against the raptor centre since we were going to go to the one in Sitka, and I wasn't that interested in the museum. So we wandered around the local grocery store, laughing about the "Ho Ho's" and "Ding Dongs", before wandering around a few shops. Every shop we went into the people were very nice, and always said something along the lines of us being the first people to come in, or some of the few to come in... This was at 4pm mind you.

We figured we needed to find a camp ground, so from the information books I had we set off for the oceanside one. And when I saw it I told Brandon to keep driving, we'd find somewhere that didn't look like a gravel pull off beside the road. The next one we tried looked quite nice, lots of trees, and few campers. There was a sign to check in at the hotel across the road; where we were told the camp ground wasn't open so there were no services there, but we could camp there and use the toilets in the hotel for $15...

We ended up at a very manicured RV park, which luckily accepts rooftop tents. It was literally the cleanest one we've been to. So even though it was pretty expensive (they did give us a little discount because we are Australian), it felt kind of worth it.

The next morning we didn't bother getting us early, since we'd seen pretty much everything there was to see in Haines, and driven around it about 10 times. We thought about going to raptor centre again, but decided it was too expensive to use as a time wasting activity. We ended up driving to the fair grounds, where the set from "White Fang" is still standing. There are clearly shops in the buildings that open as some undisclosed time of year. So we did a very bad job of wasting time there. We did manage to get some food truck fish and chips for lunch, which was still kind of expensive. Alasaka is expensive...

Haines from the Ferry

We ended up going to the Ferry an hour earlier than we needed to, and just sitting in the terminal to wait. When it came time to start loading we jumped back in the car and Brandon started it up. There were a lot of largish trucks and cars with snow mobile trailers on them, so after an hour or so it was our turn to load. Aaaand, the battery was flat. *shakes fist at north american cars that always have headlights on*.
Luckily the people beside us offered to jump it, and it didn't need it on the way off. It is important to note, that unlike the Vancouver Island Ferry, you cannot return to your car after departing. So you need to take everything you will need up with you when you get on the Ferry... We had to run back down and grab our dinner after we read the sign.

The Ferry took so long to get to Juneau, and thanks to being a bit late, Brandon's family thought we had died, and had rung all different places to try and locate us... Anyway, we arrived in Juneau safe and sound, and fed them dinner (here they were worrying about us, and they hadn't even eaten dinner themselves!)... Haha

We're super duper looking forward to our trip back to Skagway... All 7 hours of it! Yay Ferry trips!