Maine news, sports, weather from Waterville Morning Sentinel

DAVID B. OFFER: Coming into the home stretch after a yearlong adventure

KINGSTON, Rhode Island — 5,844 miles down; about 250 to go.

My wife and I will end our transcontinental drive on Wednesday.

We could have been home sooner, but we’ve used our trip from Alaska to Maine as a way to visit friends and family in British Columbia, Seattle, Milwaukee, Rhode Island and places in between.

It has been a grand journey, the long driving adding one more wonderful experience to an amazing year.

From west to east, here are some along-the-road observations.

Alaskans love to shoot road signs. Some signs were so bullet riddled you couldn’t read them. Warning signs about bears and moose on the road were the favorite targets. I don’t see the fun in this odd form of target practice, and I saw no evidence of it in other states.

Bison are not afraid of cars. I drove up beside one in the Yukon Territory and lowered the passenger-side window so my wife could take a picture. Flies buzzed around the bison’s head. We were close enough for my wife to reach out and pet it. Fortunately, she didn’t. I’m not sure bison enjoy friendly pats.

Despite horror stories warning of terrible roads in the Yukon and northern British Columbia, the driving was easy. There were stretches of gravel and dust, but it was possible to drive 50 or 60 miles per hour without problems.

That’s all the speed I wanted, because our car developed a front-end wobble when we went faster. (More about that later.)

The greatest difficulty on the road was RVs — hundreds of them, many towing small cars — creeping along. We watched for opportunities to pass.

Few troopers patrol the roads in Canada — at least the part where we were driving. We thought we spotted our first patrol car after three days on the road. It turned out to be a painted plywood fake, designed to slow traffic. We didn’t see a real trooper until the next day and didn’t see another for at least 1,000 miles.

Thick smoke hid the sun, filled the air and stung the eyes as we neared Williams Lake, British Columbia. Lightning caused nearly 40 forest fires in the area; firefighters from all over Canada and some from the United States were in the area trying to bring them under control.

We drove several hours the next day before we’d left the smoke behind.

 As we neared Vancouver the roads improved, so I tried to boost my speed. At 70 mph our car wobbled so badly that it was hard to control. I slowed down and called the Toyota dealer in Seattle to arrange for service there. I also was concerned that the tailgate door kept coming ajar.

I took the car to the garage in Seattle, rented a temporary replacement and waited for the diagnosis. I worried about possible bent axles or other costly problems.

The news was far less drastic. The mechanic reported that my tires and wheels were so packed with mud that the car had become badly unbalanced. They were cleaned; the wobble disappeared. Once the shaking stopped, the tailgate stayed locked, too.

Eagles soared as we drove through Montana. Open fields, uninterrupted as far as the eye could see, made it clear why Montana is called the Big Sky State.

We stopped briefly at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, where there are herds of buffalo and wild horses on the range. A sign warned that bison may seem tame, but they are dangerous and can run 30 miles per hour. That reinforced my thought that petting one would not be a good idea.

Traffic was not too bad coming out of Chicago, and my Maine EZ Pass, unused for a year, made it quicker. There were maintenance delays in Pennsylvania, but it wasn’t terrible. The worst traffic snarl was, as always, I-95 in Connecticut from south of New Haven nearly to New London.

 It’s been a good trip, but not inexpensive. I’ll wait ‘til I get home to add up the cost of meals and motels and total the gallons of gas. The most costly fill-up was in Muncho Lake in the Yukon where gas cost $6.81 per gallon. (Gas is sold by the liter in Canada; I did the math to convert the figure.)

The most expensive gas in the United States was, as I expected, the leaving-town fill-up in Fairbanks where I paid $3.52 per gallon. Outside of Alaska, the most costly gas was $3.25 in Seattle. I think I’d have found a lower price, if I had searched harder. The lowest price was $2.38 in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

We’re just one tankful from Maine. It will be good to get home.



David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He is returning to Maine after spending a year as the C.W. Snedden chair of journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. E-mail davidboffer@hotmail.com.

click image to enlarge

Select images available for purchase in the
Maine Today Photo Store