Our last days at Mt McKinley

Yesterday we had our last of work in uniform. There were less than one hundred guests on property, and it was pretty boring. Today we worked a half  day cleaning up after the guests left at 10 a.m. Now we are done!!! We met many wonderful people and saw some awesome sights, but we're ready to get "on the road again."

Dan is outside cleaning up the RV for the trip, and I'm doing laundry and cleaning up inside. Fortunately it is a beautiful fall day, sunny and in the 60's. Tomorrow we will start our adventure back to Florida. In addition to nightly stops along the way, we plan to stop in Ohio and South Carolina to see kids and grand kids. So far we have our campgrounds planned through Alaska, Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta. The trick is to find ones that are opened. Many close down in the middle of September. We expect to see some colorful fall foliage as we travel south and hope to miss the snow. Our arrival back home should be near the end of October.
Here is a picture of Mt McKinley that we took recently when the leaves were beginning to change. It is magnificent to see all 20,320 ft of it.




I wanted to share some pictures of a very interesting Alaskan flower called Fireweed. I didn't know until recently that its name comes from the fact that it is the first plant to grow after a fire. In the spring it is green and appears abundantly all around.



In July beautiful rose colored flowers burst out and stay until the end of August.



Then the flowers die off and white puffy seed pods take their place. There are thousands of seeds on each plant.



While the seed pods are still on the plant the bottom part turns red. some of them drop off and some of them stay. While driving down the road we could see many areas bursting with the red fireweed.



We found one area on property where we photographed fireweed in all the stages: the green leaf, the flower, the seed pods, and the red bottom.



As you can tell I was fascinated by the fireweed and hope I didn't bore you with it.

Misc info: Daylight is rapidly decreasing. The last couple of weeks when we worked mornings we drove down to the lodge because it was totally dark at 6 a.m. This past week when we ended at 9 p.m. we also drove because it was totally dark. Bears and moose have been seen on property, and we didn't want a close encounter in the dark. Temperatures have been mostly in the low 50's as highs and 40's as lows. Today is the exception since it is in the 60's. One morning it went down to 32 and there was frost on the Blazer. We'd like not to experience that again!

And the adventure continues.......