I love pickles of many different kinds but Alex is not a fan so I was on my own with this taste test. I saw a news story about Barnacle Foods and wanted to support them so I purchased a bottle each of their Dll and Sweet & Tangy Kelp pickles. Kelp are large brown algae that live in cool, relatively shallow waters close to the shore. They grow in dense groupings much like a forest on land. These underwater towers of kelp provide food and shelter for thousands of fish, invertebrates, and marine mammal species. They make up the order Laminariales. There are about 30 different genera. Despite its appearance, kelp is not a plant – it is a heterokont, a completely unrelated group of organisms.
Texture very like cucumber pickles, taste very different but with the same vinegar bite. Give them a try!!
Sometimes when bad things happen you can turn them into experiences of a lifetime. I was relatively young when the plant I was working at as Quality Supervisor shut its doors after over 100 years of operation. I took my severance package and seeing that I was not tied down to returning at a given time I packed up the van and headed to Alaska from my home in New England. I took my elderly parents with me since they had both recently retired paying them back for all of the family trips they took us kids on when we were young. We headed north up through Vermont passing over the border to Montreal. You can click the links for more in depth posts on each attraction. In Quebec we picked up the Trans Canada Highway and headed west averaging 600 miles per day.
Into Alaska and the end of the Alaska Highway at Delta Junction and then on our way to Tok where a meal of caribou sausage and salmon chowder in a bread bowl was our welcome to the state.
Instead of repeating the route south along the Alaska Highway we took the Cassiar Highway south. We passed by Bear Glacier and made our way to the charming communities of Stewart, British Columbia and Hyder Alaska.
Badlands National Park was next on the agenda. This again was one of my mother’s favorite parks as it was a setting of many of her historical fiction novels she liked to read.
A visit to my aunt and uncle in Cohoes, New York and then home. It was good to see New England and home after many months on the road but the memories of the trip will last a life time. My parents would both pass in a few years and I was glad I could give them this trip in their final years.
I have always felt that the journey is as important as the destination, with this in mind I decided that I would drive to Alaska from my home in New England via the Trans Canada and Alaska Highway. The Alaska Highway begins with mile 0 in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
Summit Lake (Stone Mountain) Provincial Campground was a pleasant change from the mosquitos at lower elevation. It was very cold I made good use of the caribou skin I purchased at the Trappers Den. I had the campground all to myself.
Skagway is a town on the Alaska Panhandle. As of the 2010 census, the population was 968. Estimates put the 2019 population at 1,183 people. The population doubles in the summer tourist season in order to deal with more than 1,000,000 visitors each year.
The port of Skagway is a popular stop for cruise ships, and the tourist trade is a big part of the business of Skagway. The White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railroad, part of the area’s mining past, is now in operation purely for the tourist trade and runs throughout the summer months. Skagway is also part of the setting for Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”. There is a nice campground on the outskirts of the town where we stayed overnight. The Skagway portion of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park is here with the other portion being in Seattle.
The Cassiar Highway is an alternate route roughly paralleling the lower portion of the Alaska Highway. When driving the Alaska Highway it is a good way to catch some different scenery on the trip back from Alaska.
The highway is remote and offers ample opportunity for viewing wildlife along the way especially bears. A junction with Route 37A (The Glacier Highway) brings you to Bear Glacier which can be seen right from a lookout on the road. Bear Glacier is now a provincial park.