Day 54 -- Leaving Alice Lake and heading for Tacoma and the US of A

Travel   From: Alice Lake PP, BC   To: Tacoma, WA   Distance: 208 mi (334 km)   Travel time w/brks: 5 hr 57   Distance since start: 10,842 mi (17,434 km)

Sunday 8/13/2006

Today it was time to leave Canada and start our snake loop in the US that will eventually take us back to New Hampshire on the east coast. We slept well. When we got up, there was no electricity at all in the trailer. It was so bad, in fact, that the propane refrigerator did not work because a tiny sensor could not get enough electrons to come by to check the temp. Argh. Yet another problem to deal with. I had wanted to head out early from the campsite but this was apparently not in the cards. And, to top it off, the nose of the trailer was very low (so that we could get it properly horizontal at the slope we were parked on). We had no power to raise it up. I started to debug things a bit in the trailer, using the schematic that came from the factory. As far as I could tell, the trailer did not show that any juice was delivered from the truck.

Out comes the multi-meter, trying to track down the problem. Its puppy is dead. No juice from the truck.

No time to debug this now. Erik came up with the clever idea to use our jump cables. Why didn't I think of that? Thanks Erik!

After we had juiced up the trailer for 15 minutes (with the truck running), the deep cycle batteries had enough in them to get us going. Before disconnecting, I raised the nose of the trailer high enough that I'd be sure I only needed to drop the nose with the help of its batteries. We got hooked up and then got on our way. We had learned from Mike Wolinski that going through highway 15 over the border was faster, since it was primarily a border station dedicated to commercial truckers. We snaked our way through road construction on the Canadian side before getting past the Vancouver area. The border crossing was not that hard to find. It took us about one hour to get through, with the backup we encountered. Part of the problem was a store just by the border (in the Canadian side) where many frequent travellers took the exit for it only to merge back with the border traffic much closer to the border crossing, apparently without buying anything. It did not take long until we hit traffic on the US side. But at least we were home.

Back in the USA!

Beautiful and surreal view from the Interstate: Mount Rainer. Now I know what is on the Washington license plate!

Since our experience with KOA has been good so far and that we did not have a good campground directory, I decided we should give KOA in Seattle a try. I made a reservation at the Tacoma KOA from Alice Lake the other day. It was a bit further south than I wanted, but given our lack of connectivity up there this seemed to be a reasonable alternative. When we arrived at the KOA we found the sites to be tight and expensive. In fact, this would be our most expensive campground so far on this trip: $56. And we did not have WiFi that worked at our site. The view was not there and we were close to roads as well. If you have other options for camping in the Seattle area, you might want to try them...

The kids went to the pool in the evening and got a good swim. I hooked up with Mike and Judy Wolinski to work out plans for tomorrow (Monday). These are friends I encountered during many years working for Digital Equipment in Valbonne, France in the mid 80s.

Campground   Name: Tacoma KOA, WA   Our hookups: 30amp, water, sewer, cable   WiFi: Not at site   GSM service: Yes   TV Channels: Don't know   Cost: $55.69/night   Reservation mode: Phone call

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All Pictures (c) 2006 Hamnqvist, Background features the Yukon Sky.