o highways lead to Juneau. I'm not being poetic, there's really no highways. To get to Juneau one has to fly or take the ferry, which is pretty ridiculous when you consider that it's the state capital, for crying out loud, and when we asked a woman who lived there how they chose Juneau to be the state capital, she said, "I don't know, I think they picked it out of a hat."

That same woman told us a story about a colleague of hers from Juneau who was visiting Seattle for the first time. She and her friend were driving along the highway when the woman demanded they stop the car so she could take a picture. She had never seen a cow before.

In Fairbanks, Alaska, all the cars have plugs sticking out of their grills. At first, we thought it was something fancy. A light-up license plate! An electric bumper! Then we realized that every car in the parking lot except for mine had one. Turns out it's so you can plug your car in during winter and keep the engine from freezing when the temperature has dipped like 50 degrees below. The parking lots are lined with electrical outlets that look like parking meters, so that you can warm up your car while you're in class, say, or buying groceries. This might make one suspect that Fairbanks was cold when we visited, only actually it was 90 degrees, hotter than it was back in Texas.

People in Alaska receive something called the PDF, which stands for something I don't remember, but the point is this: The government pays you to live there. Usually around $2000 a year.

In Sitka, a town on the coast, people leave kayaks in their front yard like bicycles.

The city of Ketchikan gets more rain than any city in North America, like 160 inches a year, or a 160 kilometers a year, or 160 knots or fuck-all, I don't know, a lot.

At all the construction sites along the Alaskan Highway, woman are posted on the edges with signs saying "Stop" or "Slow," depending on the traffic. They stop your car and come to the window and explain the situation. As in, "We're waiting on a pilot car to pull through. It'll be aboot five minutes." And they smile sweet and wave and say things like, "Have a safe trip!" and we call them "The Stop Girls." John is particularly fond of them.

For the most part the Alaskan Highway is in good condition. About 45 minutes from the Alaskan border, however, it's a doozy. A slalom of poor road conditions -- gravel pits, ribbed road, families of potholes side by side. But this is the exception, and it only lasts about an hour.

But there's so many places in Alaska you can't drive. Look at a map, how the highways run through major cities in the southeast and then practically nowhere else. Other than that, it's just white space, true wild, the last great frontier. Sigh. Maybe next time.