Alaska - Week 3

 

Help me Wanda.  Help, help me Wanda

We last left you with the news that while waiting for our flight to Los Angeles, we purchased, sight unseen, a car on the internet. A long weekend with family and enjoying the thrill of sharing in a celebration of our nephew's college graduation was an elixir extreme. Our flights back to Anchorage were smooth and on time, and Wanda’s (the car) seller met us at the gate. We followed him to a nearby gas station to consummate the deal. Lacking paper or printer, I had fashioned a bill of sale from inside the packaging of a tube of hand moisturizer. Everybody signed, money changed hands and we headed eastward and outward into the wild Alaskan terrain.

Just in case our little GMC Jimmy might have an appetite for fluids, we stopped at Walmart and picked up a quart of oil, a quart of transmission fluid, a pint of brake fluid and a gallon of antifreeze. We also bought a can of bear spray.  We nursed the car for fifty or sixty miles. I stayed in the right lane, kept below 55, watching the temperature and oil pressure gauges a lot closer than the speedometer. Susan kept her eyes peeled for moose. Steep mountains loomed at the halfway point, yet little Wanda putted sprightly up every hill, showing off plenty of compression for a gal her age. By the time we reached the Wrangell area, we were topping 70 now and then. The car tracked well and the brakes worked without a screech jerk or pulsation. The major annoyance was the de-studded tires on all four wheels. When taking curves or making turns, the metal studs buried in the treads roared like irritated lions. We made it back to the lodge around 830, enjoyed dinner in the “Two Rivers” dining room and hit the sack.

On Monday I drove to Glen Allen to fuel up and register the car. We had averaged 18 miles to the gallon on our trip, causing me to believe the engine operates normally. Unsurprisingly, all the idiot lights on the instrument panel are permanently illuminated, but we will refrain from “servicing the engine soon” or resolving the “anti lock brakes'' warning. There’s a hole in the dash where a radio once lived, but we get no radio reception out here anyway.

At the DMV, the clerk took one look at the title I produced, shredded it, then laughed when I showed her the bill of sale. She let me know the title had been replaced in 2017 and the seller had signed the line indicating a lien had been released rather than the ownership change. She told me I need to get the seller to order a replacement title, signed in the right place and mailed out to me. I did. Let’s see if he does.

As mentioned in a previous post, we’ve met the State Trooper who patrols this area. He’s the fellow who let Susan blast the siren on his patrol car. He warned me that when we go into the city of Valdez, it’s the locals who enforce the law. I decided it would be prudent in Valdez to back into parking spots so as keep the long expired license plate decal out of casual view. It seems there are many old and beaten down cars out here. Perhaps the old plates might help us blend in.

The work has been mostly fun and mildly rewarding. We get a real kick out of dealing with people. Susan tracked down a man’s water flossing charger at the Denali Lodge, arranged to have it put on a train to Whittier and be delivered to his ship cabin before he arrives. There’s an app required for ship passengers passing through Canada and I’ve spent a lot of time installing it on phones for codgers, scanning passports and vaccination cards in order to produce a QR code they can display to get into the country. I helped one lady with it the other night and she dropped off a thank you card the next day with a C note inside. How about that?

On the other hand, we’ve also had some real pistols to deal with. Guests headed to Valdez for transfer to the ship are tested for Covid here and we keep those testing positive overnight until an ominous black van comes for them the next day. We’ve had five positive tests and as most people are couples, we’ve hung on to as many as ten people who will miss their ships. Upon leaving the building one man threw his key across the counter as he blurted out insults. And a woman tossed hers, saying, “I should have spit on it”. It was all I could do to refrain from advising her that the past tense for spit is spat. We all smiled instead. It is interesting to see how different people deal with disappointment and the travails of travel.

We went to Valdez with Wanda last Sunday for kayaking in and around the port. I parked on the street with the tags facing the curb. It worked. Later, I stopped by an RV park and have made arrangements for “off street” parking for our next and future trips to town.

That’s it for this week. Fun continues to outweigh aggravation, and that’s the standard we’ve set for the continuation of our stay.