This morning the folks at breakfast were much friendlier than the guy from yesterday.  We chatted with several folks, a couple from Iowa, an oriental couple from New Jersey and a military couple with their daughter that were heading from Fairbanks to Virginia.  We packed up our stuff and left the B&B.   We've been here three days and we really needed the rest.  We're both ready to go home, even though we don't have a home to go to.  It's been raining the entire time we've been in Alaska, with the exception of a few hours here and there.  The rain is really getting us down.

We took a short walk around Valdez and along the docks.  It's a pretty town, even in the rain.  We think it's pretty chilly, we're in jackets and raingear.   The locals, however, are in shorts, t-shirts and sandals, many riding bikes.  We've noticed that there are more espresso shops and ice cream shops here than anywhere we've been.  Some places we'd pass were not really even towns, just a gas station and espresso/ ice cream shop.  We were surprised at the number of ice cream shops in a place known for being so cold.  One local told us that Alaskans eat more ice cream than anywhere else in the country (I did some research, it's really California, but then, they've got more people to eat ice cream too).  In a place that the sun never sets in the summer and never really rises in the winter, I guess you'd need an espresso jump start every now and then.  Hopefully, the weather will clear and we'll see the tops of the mountains soon.  We did a load of laundry and headed out of Valdez.  

We went up the Richardson Highway, back to Glennallen.  In Glennallen we turned west towards Palmer along the Glenn Highway.  We are heading out to see our friends Kim and Barak who live in Talkeetna, just south of Denali National Park.  We won't get that far today.  

We wanted to get onto a dirt road the Milepost mentioned called Hatcher Pass.  The first few miles are paved, but the rest is dirt and gravel, steep and narrow.  Sounds like fun.  There's supposed to be some pretty cool old gold mining ruins up there, too.  It's still raining (and has been for days) and when we got into the area of public land for Hatcher Pass, we saw a flare in the road.  This is never a good sign.  We saw a large truck dumping a load of rocks into the bend in the river.  As we slowly drove by, we could see the river was splashing over it's banks and threatening to wash out the road!  We had planned to just go up this road a bit and camp and head out in the morning.  However, camping up a road that's about to be washed out and closed didn't sound like a good idea.  We headed back up the road we had just come down and found a free campground.  There was a sign there, it might have said the campground was closed, but the sign had been shot up so much we couldn't read it.  We saw another vehicle there and it was after 10pm, so we camped there anyway.  It's still raining.