At 1:00 p.m. this afternoon, which was the last I heard from him, Jason was at Fort Nelson -about 100 miles less than half way. It was a three minute call, a hang up, and then a ten second call, because our cell phone battery is shot to crap. I hardly learned anything.
In redeeming news from yesterday, I remembered later that he said the drive was beautiful and that [sniffle] I would've loved it.
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As for us here on the homefront, Zoralee figured out today how to close the bedroom door, thereby locking herself in and having the run of the place. Once I gave her a couple minutes of freedom, and when I went in to see about her, she was standing there looking at me with a chicken feather sticking out of her mouth. Where on earth she found it, who can say?
This is her in a quirky hooded sweatshirt that I got at the thrift store before she was born. By a coincidence, I made my first origami crane today. I think the two of them go together, even if she doesn't. 
You can see there the 50-gallon drum of diesel he took to save fuel costs, but otherwise this is one of the least hillbilly looking outfits we've ever configured for driving the Alcan. All the stuff we took, including his work tools, fit in the backseat, with a few things in the pickup bed. I feel that our possession choices for this stint were good: sparse but well-rounded. We'll see if we still feel the same way in the middle of the Alaskan winter. I am particularly proud of taking only one box of kitchen supplies, as that's hard to narrow down. Four spoons, knives, forks, and plates, two different sized pots, one cast iron pan and a combo fryer/pressure cooker pan, a casserole dish, a cookie sheet, a few coffee mugs, and a dozen of the most useful utensils, like a can-opener and a spatula. We didn't take any water glasses; we'll have more of those as soon as we buy jars of pickles and eat the pickles. Otherwise, that's why God invented thrift stores.
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