It all seems so long ago – but yesterday morning we left for McCarthy. We loved the drive on the Glenn Highway and it took us, with all of our photo stops, about five hours to get to to Glennallyn. Such scenery! It was just beautiful. Charlie said he had scenery overload. I had read this great article about the Brown Bear RoadHouse, how great the food was and how special all the hundreds of photos of brown bears were that were hanging on the wall. So we stopped to eat. We walked in and no one was in sight. We just sat down to wait and soon a waitress came out. Tom said, “Hello, how are you.” That waitress just threw the menus down on our table and walked away with a sour face. We laughed a minute or two and then got up and left the Brown Bear RoadHouse and the sour faced waitress. We then went to the Caribou Diner to get some Panther Pizza. Walked in to be seated – told the boy we wanted pizza and he just waved us to the back room where a man was making a pizza. The pizza maker didn’t even look up at us just kept working. Tom finally asked if we could get a pizza. He said “What do you want?” There’s no menu on the wall, no prices, no sign anything. We did eventually end up getting a good pizza – but these people don’t like customers too much.

It gets worse. We stopped at Copper River Inn - but they wanted $159.00 plus 25.00 for the dog. We thought that was a little high. We drove on back out to the highway and saw the Princess Lodge up on the hill. Tom wouldn’t stop there because it costs $179. We drove on down about 20 miles and came to Kenny Lake Inn. There were full but called ahead to the next B & B and we drove to those about 10 miles down the road. We paid and went to our cabin – no water, and two twin beds. Tom got mad and went up to get a different room. They only had one with four bunks and still no water and the shower house closed at 10. Well, it took almost 45 minutes to get the charge removed from the card. It was getting to be around 7pm now and we were tired from driving all day. We kept on driving and finally got to Chitina. Miraculously my phone had worked outside town and I was able to reserve the last room she had in the hotel. $179.00 and no pets. The hotel was an old one that had been restored - or rather was in the process of being restored. It was pretty but the rooms were about as big as a closet. They gave Charlie a blow up mattress and once we had that down there was no standing room. It was hot, the shower was mini and the bed was pretty hard. Charlie spent the evening by the lake reading. Tom spent most of the night checking on Roxy since she had been relegated to the truck for the night. I just took my shower and fell in bed. What an evening!


Early this morning we got on the road to McCarthy to visit Carmen. Sixty miles on a bumpy gravel road – it took us three and a half hours since we had to stop for photo ops and lunch along the was. One out of ten cars get a flat tire. We were so glad to finally get here to see Carmen. They have quite an operation here: his planes and airstrip, a tire repair shop, a bread and breakfast with several cabins, and lots of other stuff. They are building their retirement home on some nearby land and we took a tour of that. Great views of the mountains and glaciers and the house is 5000 sq ft. It is truly grand and they are building it stick by stick themselves. There’s a beautiful barn with skylights - well some of the roof panels are clear so it is just like skylights. Thee barn was bigger than our house. We also got to see Katie’s Place – a parcel of land with a small cabin that Carmen bought from Katie. Carmen then moved the small cabin to a better location on the lot and proceded to redesign and double the size the cabin – it is now a lovely little vacation home by a flowing stream.


Supper at Carmen’s house was no less interesting. Her mom and her brother were there and a woman from France with her son. It was fun to hear her heavy French accent. Supper was lively with everyone talking at once. Turns out the French lady works for a restaurant in Paris three days a week getting in 38 hours. The name of the place is Le Relais de Venise and their specialty is “Son Entrecote” I think that means sirloin steak. So they serve this steak with French Fries and a sauce over the meat. That is all that is on the menu – you get it rare, medium or well done and you have to eat fast cause there’s always a line of folks waiting. The manager goes to great extremes to get the customers seated, served and out so that new customers can come in. This restaurant serves about 700 meals a day, they only have seven waitresses and this girl had been there for twelve years. There’s a similar restaurant in London and Barcelona and instead of giving the recipe for the sauce to those two places – the secret sauce is shipped in by truck or plane. A food writer for the newspaper once published the secret recipe in Paris – but listed all the wrong ingredients and when people tried to make the sauce it turned out awful. So interesting and she was so excited about it all – I never knew waitressing could be such fun.