Alcan Trip May 2002

In the winter of 2001/2002, I attended art school in San Francisco. After school got out in May, I packed up the necessities, shoved the rest in storage, and hit the road for home. I was living in the little town of Novato at the time, so I took Highway 37 east to Davis, where my friends Shira and Felix are going to grad school. I picked my sister Sarah up from the Sacramento airport, then we set out north on I-5.

Aside from the passenger side runningboard falling off in the first five minutes, the trip was fairly uneventful until we got to Portland, Oregon. We cruised through California and Oregon, stopping to sleep just north of Ashland since we'd gotten a late start that morning. We spent the next night at our Aunt Dee's house in Beaverton. The next morning, we hadn't been driving for more than half an hour when the left rear wheel came off, lug bolts and all. I had just passed a couple of slow cars and was trying to cross back to the slow lane, but some jerk in a van in the middle lane kept blocking me. Suddenly, the bug started to wobble. It felt like a flat tire. I tried once more to get over, and once more the cretin sped up to block me. I tried to slow down to get behind him, but at that moment the wheel let go with a thunk. The car lurched to the left, grinding along on the brake drum at about 50 mph. The wheel merrily bounded off across three lanes of traffic, miraculously without hitting any other vehicles, and into the grass on the other side where it ricocheted off of a sign post and settled in the weeds.

Fortunately, the guy in the truck behind us was paying attention and had slowed down when I started weaving just before the wheel let go. Somehow I managed to avoid hitting either the concrete divider on my left or the cars on my right and brought the bug to a halt, still in the fast lane. The guy behind us also stopped and put on his hazard lights. While I stepped out to assess the damage, which wasn't as extensive as it could have been, Sarah called Aunt Dee to tell her what had happened and ask her to come and get us. To make a long story short, we caused a traffic snarl that stretched as far as the eye could see down the northbound lanes of I-5 about three quarters of a mile after merging off of the 217 exit, so that the police didn't arrive until about half and hour after it happened, it took Aunt Dee an hour to arrive, and the tow-truck driver didn't show up until about 45 minutes after the cop called him. Then, the cop held up the traffic so Sarah and I could run across to Aunt Dee's truck, she having searched through the weeds until she found the wheel, and we followed the tow-truck to Les Schwab. Their theory was that either my lug bolts or my brake drums were too old and stripped (probably both), so they replaced the brake drums and lug bolts on both rear wheels. They also replaced all four of my tires, which I had been meaning to do later that day anyway. This gave us the time to go out to lunch with Aunt Dee, after we snapped plenty of photos of my pitiful crippled Veewee of course. So everything worked out. Click on the tipped 'n towed Beetle above and to the right to see the other photos.

The next day, Sarah and I lazed at our Aunt Marilyn's house and visited with our cousin, Laura. We returned to the road the following day and drove up through Seattle and into British Columbia. The photo at right was taken at a rest stop before Fraser Canyon and Hell's Gate. It's a little blurry because the day was foggy and rainy, and the sun was beginning to set behind the mountains and the clouds as I studied the map and tried to figure out where we'd been and where we were going. The Fraser Canyon road proved to be a beautiful, twisty drive along steep cliffs high above a river. That night, we camped at Lac LaHache, which translates as "Hatchet Lake" after some French explorers who reputedly dropped a hatchet into the water. Not on purpose, no doubt, and I imagine there were some French words spoken that are best left untranslated. The next morning we pushed on to Prince George, where the roads divurge in the wood, as it were, and we chose the one less traveled. So we turned west on the Yellowhead Highway and passed through some towns with entertaining names such as Smithers (or "SMITHAHS," as Sarah always exclaimed with a terrible snooty faux-English accent) and Kitlaguecla (which we generally couldn't pronounce, so reduced it to Kitaguh-guh-gumf). At Kitwanga, we turned north onto Highway 37, the Cassiar Highway.

Click on the photo of Sarah strummin' to see more photos from the Cassiar.