Re-Cap Of Our Denali Road Trip - Part III

This picture is out of order, but so nice that I had to include it in the blog.

This is Bob and his mom (Brenda) in Cooper Landing at the very beginning of our road trip.
Cooper Landing is one of our favorite places on the peninsula. It's just gorgeous and really takes our breath away every time we drive through it on our way to Anchorage.

Look closely and you will see millions of tiny mosquitoes and "no see-ums" These little bugs are everywhere and so annoying! Brenda stepped out of the car to take a photo and this is what was left of the swarm that immediately engulfed her head while she was outside the vehicle! YUCK!!!

The worse thing is, our new home in the bush is filled with these things! Well, not inside the house, but all over the village. In fact the school mascot is a "no see-um" bug! Seriously!!! That's BAD!!!
Great things to look forward to in the bush, huh?

This is the famous gas pipeline built in the 1970's. It stretches all the way from Prudoe Bay to Valdez. It was an amazing feet of engineering. Maybe some day I'll write about it for Fun Fact Friday posts.



Our second evening was spent scrambling for a place to stay. When you're in the middle of the wilderness, your options are REALLY limited. Everything we saw (which wasn't much) was pretty scary. In fact, we even went inside one place to check out the rooms and almost immediately upon entering the room Bob and I heard Brenda say, "How far is it to Valdez (the next town)?" I guess you had to be there to really understand how Brenda felt, but this place was a dump. Anyway, we stumbled upon the Princess Lodge way up on a hillside and it turns out this was a classy hotel that catered to all the Princess Cruise Line travelers. Fortunately, for us, we happened to arrive on the one night they had NO cruise travelers and so the rate was half price....SCORE! It was so late by the time we got there that we hadn't eaten so we created our own smorgasbord for dinner from an assortment of snacks we had with us in the car.
This was us eating from our very own dinner buffet.