Day 1: Fort Larrington - Calgary AB

If you are thinking that Calgary is an odd place to be starting this year's pilgrimage to Battle Mountain you would be this: right.  It's all the fault of a Man With A Gun at the border somewhere in Idaho who, in September 2015, fell about laughing when I said I'd been to Alaska.  Hyder, to be precise.  Hyder, as any fule kno, is at the very bottom of the Alaska Panhandle (aka "The Bit Of Alaska Which Really Ought To Be Canada") and is entirely cut off from the rest of the state and so Doesn't Really Count.  Or so he said.

Well yarbles to you, matey, bolshie great yarblockoes!  This time we're going to Alaska Proper.  Fairbanks, oh yes, and Anchorage, and Wasilla¹ (from where you can't see Russia in spite of what quasi-notable loonspud Sarah Palin maintains), and Chicken.  Nyurrr! The late Phil Llewellin may have had something to do with it too.  He usually does.  The tail end of his account of a trans-Canada trip from St Johns, Newfoundland, finished in Whitehorse, some way up the Alaska Highway.

Uneventful trip thus far, although the amount of dihedral on the wings of a Boeing 787 in flight is a bit alarming.  You have to look quite a long way up to see the tip of the wing.  I presume this is because it's mostly made of compressed soot.  The car is not a Chrysler Pacifica chiz but rather a poxy Dodge Grand Caravan which means the hours I spent swotting up on the former's manual were all in vain and now I have to learn how to operate the wireless all over again.  It seems the stupid wireless does not know what a .m3u playlist is, so if I want to play what I want to play in the order in which I want to play it I have to rename all the files so they have a unique sequence number as part of their name and spend hours copying stuff and deleting other stuff and forgetting to forage for milk so I can't have Proper Tea.

As we all know, Canada is home to dangerous wild animals like BEARS and moosen and wolveses, and giant rabbits:

A bunny-wunny, yesterday

I wot not the kind of herbivore this specimen is but s/he's about five times the size of the bunrabs sometimes spotted at the bottom of Fort Larrington Road in Leafy Surrey.  I'm keeping the windows closed tonight.