Day thirteen…..a terrible road and a great road

Today started off with rain again. It’s really hard to get motivated when you wake up to rain hitting the metal roof and your bike is soaking wet. But we hopped on anyway. We knew we had a long day….468 miles…..so we did our best to get out by 6:00….so naturally it was 7:00 by the time we left.

Most of our ride was on road we had already covered and it was the least interesting scenery too so there are no pictures from the first part of the day. There are however some videos showing how completely ruined the Alcan highway is. When we were planning this trip everyone said to watch for road construction and frost heaves (water gets under the road then freezes and lifts the road. Then when it melts it leaves behind a gigantic dip in the road). The Alcan highway between the Canadian border and Beaver Creek is so bad….it was like riding a motocross course. We don’t have any pictures to prove it but there were two times that both our bikes were in the air…..saw it with my own eyes and Enrique saw me later. And then there was the “construction”…….apparently Canada thinks that throwing gravel in SOME of the millions of pot holes is sufficient. All it does is spread loose gravel all over the road. So…..if you ever ride the Alcan highway……be very careful! It’s in terrible shape towards the end. And also….if I ever hear someone back home complain about road construction or how bad the road is…..I’m going to punch them right in the face.

Once we made it to Haines Junction we got to turn onto a new road headed for Haines. This road was light years ahead of the old one……you could even still see the lines painted on it! It was wide and very smooth and unfortunately not very twisty but we made good time on it. The scenery was also much better.

Yay! We made it back to Alaska!

We made it to Haines around 6:00pm and got to our hotel. It’s a very neat place…..it’s a really old building that has been restored to its original beauty. The hotel is all three of the buildings in the picture below. We ate at the resturaunt that is in the hotel….my goodness! That was good. I figured that since it was my last dinner in alaska I had better get one last piece of salmon……it was the best salmon I’ve had on the entire trip.

Then it was bed time.