Day 41

Monday – WE ARE HOME! 41 days 10 hours and 54 minutes and 12,266 miles are 25th anniversary trip is official over. Now to get back to the routine. Praise the Lord for a safe good trip. We thank each one of you for your prayers.

Day 38

Friday- We left Goshen about 8:30am and arriving at our campsite southeast of Wooster, OH about 2:00 pm. Tonight we went to the BMA Convention and met a lot of friends and acquaintances. Tomorrow the sessions are from 9am to 9pm so I don’t know when I will have time to post again.

Day 37

Thursday - We had a uneventful trip to Goshen other than a lot of traffic around Chicago where we had bumper to bumper traffic in five lanes going our direction and people weaving in and out. Even had a motorcycle with a rider and neither had helmets driving about 80 mph in and out of traffic. Some people don’t value their lives very much. We had a good time with the Burkholder’s catching up on each other’s lives.

Day 36

Wednesday – We were on the road by 8am and made it to Davenport, Iowa by 3:30pm. Trip went very well and now we are 450 miles closer to home. It is hard to believe that just 8 days ago we left Hyder, Alaska and that it is so far away now, but when I look at the odometer I realize it is 3072 mile behind us. We didn’t even take one picture today. Basically the scenery consisted of miles and miles and miles of soybean and corn fields. We were really missing the seafood from Alaska so we eat supper at the local Red Lobster when we got into town. We are now parked at an RV park at route 80 exit 292 in Davenport and Debra is washing clothes for what she hopes is the last time before we get home. Tomorrow we have a much easier day. We have about 265 mile to Bremen, Indiana where we plan on meeting Larry Burkholder around 1:30pm at his place of work. He would like to show us around before we go to their home in Goshen. Larry and Vanita Burkholder and we became good friends when they started attending Hammer Creek church in the mid 80’S. In March of 95 they moved to Goshen to do 2 years of service with Gospel Echoes. When their term was up they stayed in Indiana so we like to visit them when we go west. For those that are not aware Larry is a brother to Raymond who had our evangelistic services at Shiloh in April. Friday morning we plan on driving to Wooster, Ohio to take in the BMA convention Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Day 35

Tuesday – We got an early start this morning knowing it would be a full day. Went to the Crazy Horse Memorial and got there before anyone was manning the entrance gates where they charge admission by vehicle. There were three motorcycles ahead of us. We had the place mostly to ourselves. The visitor center changed drastically since we were there 12 years ago. For those who don’t know what Crazy Horse is about 60 years ago the Native Americans asked one of the guys that had worked at Mt. Rushmore to carve a mountain so that the Americans would know that the Indians have heroes too. They asked him to carve one of their former chiefs “Crazy Horse” sitting on a galloping horse pointing towards their lands. Crazy Horse was quoted as saying “my land is where my people lie buried” when the US government was trying to put the Native Americans on reservations. The four faces at Mt. Rushmore would fit in the face of Crazy Horses face. This is a very large rock excavation project and that is where my interest lies in this undertaking. Our drive across South Dakota was uneventful. We drove 417 mile and stopped at exit 62 on I-29 midway between Sioux Falls, SD and Sioux City, Iowa. I decided to drop down to I-80 here rather than drive through Chicago on Thursday. Tomorrow we plan to drive to Davenport, Iowa which is about 400 miles.


Progress at Crazy Horse

Typical South Dakota landscape

Day 34

Monday – After catching up this morning with what we thought had to be done we left Billings at 10am. It took over three hours of internet time so as it was. Today we drove 350 mile to Custer, SD and are camped at a site a few miles south of the Crazy Horse Memorial. Today we passed the half way mark from home to Hyder, Alaska so I guess since it is closer home than to Alaska we will come home. We also said good bye to Montana and Wyoming today and since Montana would be our choice to live will set our eyes on PA. We know that the Lord has called us to the work at Reading at this time so we are eager to get home next week and seeing all our friends at Shiloh. We have been gone long enough and miss you all. We are looking forward to seeing most of you on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday night of next week. Till then may the Lord bless and keep you!


We saw lots of train cars loaded with coal. We went past a
huge open strip coal mine. Each train was over a mile long
with two engines up front and two engines at the back with
about 125 cars.

Day 33

Sunday - We went to church today with the Swartzentuber’s and had a wonderful time worshiping with the group there. Five of the seven families come from Lancaster Co. so we made a lot of connections in the fellowship time after church and around the lunch table at the Swartzentruber’s. We needed to drive to Billings, MT on Sunday to keep up with our schedule. We finally got off at 4:30 and got to Billings around 10pm. That kind of was what we planned since we were going to stay in a Flying J truck stop for the night so we would have a good wifi connection. Something we didn’t have since Saturday morning and we were getting on behind in our email. We wanted to park after dark so it would be cooler since we didn’t have electric. From Billings we have about 2300 miles home.

Craig & Marita Swartzentruber and family


The harvest is infull swing in Montana

Day 32

Saturday – We had a relaxing day at Glacier Park. The yellow shuttle took us from the east entrance to the top at Logan Pass. We saw at least15 goats and 5 Bighorn sheep. We were at the Park for about 5 hours and then went south on route 89 to Fairfield, MT. That was another beautiful drive with some really rolling hills with anything from brush land to wheat and hay fields and various areas that were irrigated. At times it was very hazy and almost on the dark side because of smoke from the wild fires. There are 23 wild fires burning in Montana at this time. Tonight we are staying with Craig and Marita Swartzentruber and will be going to church with them. Craig is the pastor at a new BMA congregation starting in Vaughan, MT that should have a name in about two weeks.

Do you see the goat peering at you?

Day 31

Friday- We decided to have an easier day then the last few, and to rest a little before we make a dash across the states. Our plans are to leave Great Falls on Sunday afternoon, stop at Crazy Horse Tuesday am. and be in Goshen, Indiana Thursday afternoon to spend the evening with Larry and Vanita Burkholder. Before we left Calgary we washed the motor home. We hope that we are about finished with dusty and muddy dirt roads. It was a beautiful ride through the prairie where the farmers were busy making hay and combining grain. After waiting 40 minutes at the USA border we drove south to Shelby, Montana and got a campsite. Since we got here we found out that at the east entrance of Glacier Park they are running a free shuttle to Logan Pass. We are only 90 miles from the east entrance so we will go to Glacier Park tomorrow. We were there twice before and love to watch the wildlife at Logan Pass. After that we will drive to Fairfield, about 120 miles and spend the night there.

Day 30

Thursday - Today proved to be another interesting day. We toured the town of Jasper which was basically a town of shops in all kinds of forms to get you to spend any money you might not have spent yet. And the town was full of people stumbling over each other and fighting for parking spaces. We did find a nice secluded picnic area by a lake along route 93A (a scenic route that few people traveled) where we ate lunch. The rest of the day there were people everywhere by the hundreds. I guess we were spoiled by seeing a lot of God’s magnificent creation with only a few people around. When we got to Lake Louise there was a traffic jam to get into the parking lot. You couldn’t get a campsite anywhere in the parks so we decided we seen enough of people and drove to Calgary and did in one day what we had planned on doing in two days. In spite of all the people and traffic we did see three deer and one big horn sheep.
Tomorrow we plan to head towards Great Falls, Montana. We are planning on attending Mountain View Fellowship in Fairfield, Montana on Sunday, Lord willing. Enjoy some of the scenes we where privileged to see today.

Route 93A where we found a nice picnic area

Picnic area by the lake

Athabasca Falls

Lake Louise

Day 29

Wednesday – After catching up on the blog and helping Ryan with some business matters, we left the campsite about 9:45. We planned a big day, 430 miles to get to Jasper, Alberta. Till we finally parked in an IGA parking lot we had driven 480 mile. The local Wal-Mart and the IGA both welcome RV’s to park in their lots. I guess there aren’t enough of campsites because everything was full. We lost an hour when we crossed into Alberta so now we are 2 hours behind what we call home time.
The trip was beautiful with a mix of hay land and cattle in some areas and pine forest in other areas. This was the scenery except for the last 80 mile when we got into the Rockies. Jasper is in the middle of the Rockies and also in the middle of Jasper National Park. Tomorrow we will go south through Jasper National Park and then into Banff National Park. The two parks are connected and all the campsites are public owned so we will more than likely be out of touch till we get close to Calgary on Friday afternoon.

Day 28

Tuesday – We woke up to a light rain again this morning and again it rained off and on all day. We spent about 4 hours in Hyder hoping to see the bear snag fish out of the river. They have been seeing a Grizzly and her three cubs but we missed them. They were there at 6:00 am, before we got there and at 11:30am , when we were up on the mountain. That is still another adventure! We got to the bear viewing area about 9:30 and the rangers said it will more than likely be early afternoon before they would be back because the salmon run is light right now. So we decided to take a “beautiful 2 hour round trip” to the top of the mountain to view the glacier. They also told us that the road was only opened to the summit 4 days ago. They had a record amount of snowfall this year with about 40 feet at the bear viewing area. About 20 miles east of Hyder we had seen an area where an avalanche had come off the north slopes and broke the 12”-16” trees down 50’ up the south slope. My guess would be that there was at least ¼ mile between the bases of these mountain ranges. Well we proceeded through the valley to the top of the summit. First it was potholes that at best you could drive 5mh. Then it was mud slides, both coming down on the road and the road sliding off to make it a one lane path. On the upside you couldn’t see the top and on the down side would drop a couple hundred feet without guard rails. If that wasn’t enough when we were almost to the top the clouds came in and you could hardly find the road. The Lord provided us a place to turn around so we decided we had enough and went back down. We measured and timed our decent and it toke 11/4 hours to go 17 miles. When we got to the bottom they told us if we drove 17 miles we were basically at the top. They also told us we missed the bears by a half hour. We went into town and Debra checked out a gift shop, ate lunch, filled up with gas and set our sights on Houston, BC, a 250 mile trip. By now it was 3:00. We did see two more black bears and drove through rain. It cleared off in time for the sunset. Tomorrow we will try to get to Jasper, BC a 425 mile drive.




The glaicer from the mountain road

A Hoary Marmot. We seen many of these on the mountain
The mountain road
Another glacier seen from Rt. 37A

The sunset at the campsite