Chicken, Alaska

I got back from my Eagle tour on Saturday. I realized that I hadn't posted any pictures of Chicken on my last post, so here you go. Chicken is a mining town of about 12 - 50 depending on the time of year. Sue owns downtown Chicken, which you'll see pictures of. It's a great place. When we're doing our tours, we meet up with our pilot car here in Chicken if we're coming from Tok or our pilot car leaves us in Chicken if we're heading to Tok. We drive about 100 miles from Chicken to Eagle. The other 60 miles are paved, sort of. This picture is one side of the downtown parking area. In professional driving terms, we call that a parking lot. :)

This is another view of the parking lot. Sue keeps promising that she's going to have them come put gravel down and fill in the potholes. Some of those nasty potholes are big enough to swallow a motorcoach!










This is another picture of the potholes, the parking lot, and my friend Mike standing next to the pilot car. Mike has been filling in as the pilot car driver for a week while Robin, who usually drives, was on vacation. Check out the mud on the pilot car. Yeah baby!









The highway department is doing road construction on the Taylor highway which doesn't usually slow us down TOO much. On this last trip, however, we suddenly had to pull off the road and then the construction guys started asking if we had any medical people on either of our coaches. I had a doctor and Karen, the other driver, had a nurse. It turns out that one of the construction vehicles had rolled off the side of Polly Summit. Polly can drop off as far as 2,000 feet. The guy rolled three times but he survived. If he had been wearing his seat belt, he would have walked away. There's my plug for safety. Anyway, I didn't look at the accident site as we drove by but behind me I could hear my passengers saying, "Oh my gosh! Look at that! That is scary! Do you think he survived?" I'm just happy that everything turned out all right in the end.

Here's a picture of the store in Chicken. It's mostly a gift shop. Our Holland America passengers keep Sue in business.












Here's the Chicken saloon. I had a very nasty old man that was extremely drunk at 5:00 in the evening hit on me. It was gross.












Here's the Chicken Cafe. Sue is an excellent cook and she gives us free cookies.













Here's my motorcoach at one of our picture stops. Isn't my coach beautiful? :)













Here's a view of the Tanana river from that picture stop that I took a picture of and is the picture above this picture and I'm wondering how many more times I can write picture in this paragraph.

If it wasn't cloudy, you'd be able to see the Alaska Range. It's very pretty.