Sorry, Tok. Maybe some other time?

(Sorry in advance for the long post - we did a lot today.  If you just skip to the pictures, I promise I won't be offended.)

So the original plan was to have an easy eight or so hour day today and just do the drive from Whitehorse to Tok, Alaska.  This isn't what we ended up doing.

Heading out of Whitehorse, we had fun trying to find a gas station that would give us gas at 7 a.m. on Easter Sunday (by the way, Happy Easter to all those who celebrate!).  This was harder than we thought it would be, but eventually we found a place that was open and we filled up before heading out of civilization.  We had been told by those in the know (hi, Uncle Jim!) that Whitehorse was the absolute end of the earth - I think because we had been driving through some pretty isolated places for a while, we thought this was a bit of an exaggeration.  Nope.  There. is. nothing. after. Whitehorse.  Not until basically the border, which is also in the middle of nowhere.  Really the first town is Tok, which is 8 hours from Whitehorse.  The one thing they have in spades out in the middle of nowhere is some amazing scenery:

Driving along the Alcan, you spend most of this part of the trip skirting Canada's Kluane National Park.  Just beautiful mountains and (frozen) lakes everywhere you look.  I would love to see this place in the summer - depending on when I get a job/sell the house, I might get my wish.

Driving into a seasonal (meaning, not open in April) area with a gas station/and rest stop we saw one of the most anticipated sights of the trip.  Andy had been talking this up for days and I was really excited to finally see it.  This sight isn't a mountain or lake or even some amazing wild creature that only lives in the Yukon.  Nope, this is pure human creation:

It's actually really convincing from a distance.

It's the Canadian solution to how to get people to slow down when there is one police officer for every 1,000 square miles (I totally just made that up) - a cardboard police cruiser.  I have to admit, it tricked me! I'm glad we actually saw one since Andy really had been talking about this phenomenon since we got into Canada.

After driving through some snow flurries and perhaps the worst road in the world (the cats caught air over pretty much every bump), we hit the border!

hurray! 

And, just for visiting, they gifted us an extra hour in the day! 

We hit the border and made friends with the customs agent who told us his life's story (spoiler alert: he and his attorney wife who he moved across the U.S. with so she could go to law school end up getting divorced 17 years later...all is not lost though, he finally fulfills his dream of writing songs about Alaska and their now-adult son is a grammy-nominated bluegrass fiddler).

With the extra hour we got from crossing the border and the improved road conditions - seriously, Canada, you need to repave the Yukon...all of it - we hit Tok before lunch.  Looking around and realizing that our option was to either sit in our motel room for the next 16+ hours with the cats or push on to Anchorage, we decided to push on.  I got behind the wheel, filled the car with $4.50/gal gas and went for it! (we never noticed the price of gas until Tok - something about it being roughly 143.4 Canadian cents to the liter (litre) that made us totally oblivious to the cost of fuel.)

Time for more mountains!!

This is the view from somewhere before the "town" (highway intersection) of Glennallen.  Giant mountains surrounded by lots of teeny tiny trees.  These mountains are in the Wrangell-St. Elias Preserve.  From looking at the map, we think this is Mt. Sanford.

Then we drove some more hours and entered the Mat-Su Borough, which is the borough that neighbors Anchorage.  This part of the state is ALL mountains.  We just about filled the memory in our camera with pictures of the scenery here.  We're already thinking of some fun day trips we can take out here to explore the glaciers and mountains.

Finally, around dinner time, we rolled into Anchorage.  Just to give you an idea of just how far we drove in 4 days, here's a map:

Yes, it does seem like a really indirect route.  It feels more indirect when you look at the compass in your car and see that you are heading EAST for forever. Frustrating.

When we got to Anchorage we saw this:

Yes, that idiot is riding with the top down. No, there's no way that's appropriate.

Tomorrow we get into the house!