Let’s see , where did we leave off……..

Here I am. 7:15 AM on July 19th and I’m sitting next to the Canadian Customs office, in the grass, with my lap-top plugged into an outlet on the side of the building, writing this in MS Word because I can’t log on…….Why am I doing this you ask?......Because freak’n Canadian customs on the Haines Road doesn’t open until 8am!!!!! We got up early to make some time today, as we need to cover about 600 miles……….and here we are waiting for over an hour for customs to open. We have an option. The motorcycles WILL fit through the opening in the locked gate, but I think I feel a machine gun trained on us just waiting for us to “make a break”…..So not to cause an international incident, we wait…..

…I believe we left off with us making it to Haines Alaska. We spent two nights in a coastal Grizzly Bear (the biggest kind) infected campsite. I have never seen so much bear poop! All over the road in front of the campground, and even IN the campground. This is the place where once we had set up out tents and got settled in, the campground owner informed us that there was a Grizz in the campground the night before……nice touch!
The first night wasn’t too bad. There were two groups of other folks in tents that had been fishing, so we figured they would draw the bears away from us if they showed up again. But last night, they had all left and WE were the bait……….Got to go…Customs agent just showed up………I’ll get back to this later.

I’m back…..seems they just came out of their house to walk the dog…….

So anyways….didn’t sleep all that good last night. It didn’t help that I was reading a tour guide about the area we are in just before I went to sleep that said about 2 miles up the road was one of the largest concentrations of Coastal Grizz in the world!

Yesterday was the first day we did not ride…..we took a fast ferry over to Skagway so we could ride the White Pass narrow guage railroad train up into the mountains, just like the gold rush folks did 100 years ago. This whole Gold Rush thing is extremely interesting. To see how hard they worked to get into the interior of the Yukon, and out of an estimated 100,000 men that attempted, only 30-40,000 made it to Dawson City, and of those only a few hundred actually struck gold and a handful became rich.

Skagway is a really neat town. But there were four huge cruise ships in port at the time we were there. Way too many people for a little 1890s town like this……..we took an earlier ferry back to Haines……Went looking for more bears. Didn’t see any because they were most likely all sitting in MY TENT! Did see a bunch of Bald Eagles….

Looks like the Customs Agent just showed up……or is this a Canadian Mountain……..Without a doubt, this is the fattest customs agent I ever saw! He’d make a great snack for one of those costal Grizzlys……….sorry….

Once we get through Customs, were heading over to a little town called “Copper” on the Copper River. The Copper River is world known as the numero uno river for Alaska King Salmon……….We are going to attempt to remove a few with hook and rod…..More later.