First Principles

On my recent trip to Alaska, I saw a couple of signs that just made me shake my head.  They are perfect examples of what becomes necessary when a socialistic culture takes root, and we all lose the ability to take care of ourselves.

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Finally, after we got on the other side of the Canadian Cascades, the mountains served to protect us from the weather instead of funneling it our way.  We’d run into a few more wet patches along the way, but weather-wise, the worst was really behind us.  It’s amazing we could travel so many miles and […]

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Besides the many birds, the first wild animal we saw on our drive was almost our last. We and another car were passing an RV, an evolution that was progressing just fine until a deer bounded across the road in front of all of us, forcing us all to slow nearly to a stop. Needless […]

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One cannot travel through the Pacific Northwest without seeing a lot of interesting place names. Many of their origins come from ancient Indian languages, others from bold explorers. But one thing you can count on – many of them can bring out the 13 year old in all of us. They could not pass unremarked […]

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To cross the border, we didn’t just stay north on I-5 to make the crossing at Blaine. That would have been a traffic nightmare, especially with Vancouver just over the border. Instead, we went a couple crossing east, to the Sumas, WA/Abbotsford, BC crossing. We didn’t really get started out on the right foot with […]

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I woke up on my friend Bob’s couch just north of Seattle around 4:00 AM, and was wide awake by 5:00. Bob had just moved into a new place that can only be described as a compound hidden in the tangle of suburbs north of Seattle. (I told him he should have at least three […]

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The mighty steed that we’d be taking to Alaska had spent most of the last year in Reno, but Eric had some business in the Bay Area and I hadn’t earned that much vacation time. It was a good thing that he had to do a shorter road trip of sorts before we started north, […]

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I’ve always loved the road trip. I got my first driver’s license as soon as I could after I turned 14 (God bless growing up in a farm state), and I’ve loved to be on the road and exploring new pavement ever since. I’ve done some great ones. In high school, I explored the Black […]

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I’ve spent the last week on an epic road trip to Alaska. We rolled in to Anchorage last night. I’ve taken pictures by the boatload, and will be posting some and telling some stories here when I get back. My friend and travel partner, who went to a mountaineering course in New Zealand several months […]

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