South to Panama, north to Alaska: Earl George, 95, still has the drive
By Susan Gilmore
Seattle Times staff reporter
Two years ago Earl George, as a 92-year-old with just one good eye and three words of Spanish, drove in his 2002 Cadillac to Panama.
He put 12,000 miles on his car, got many flat tires, ate day-old pizzas in the back seat and struggled with a significant language barrier.
Asked what his next adventure might be, he said maybe he'd drive to Alaska.
He did.
George, now 95, just returned from a 5,500-mile trip from Lynnwood to Prudhoe Bay in the same Cadillac.
"I don't drink whiskey, chase girls or bark at the moon anymore," said George, who lives in Lynnwood. "There's no place else to spend my money."
And as a widower, "I have no wife to say you can't do it."
"This car has been as far south as you can go and as far north as you can go," said George, who was raised in Kansas but moved to Seattle while serving in the Navy and never left.
George, who lost one of his eyes in a kamikaze attack on his warship during World War II, pulls out his Alaska maps, where he scratched the mileage as he completed his nine-day adventure: Lynnwood to Prince George, B.C., to Watson Lake and Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. Tok Junction, Alaska, to Fairbanks. Up the Haul Road to Prudhoe Bay. And back home.
He figures he put 600 miles on his car each day. Asked how much his trip cost, he said it's all on plastic and he won't know until the bills arrive. "If I'd added it all up, it would have spoiled the trip."
He quickly learned that on the Alaska trip, when you come to a gas station you fill up your tank. It might be 200 miles until the next one. On this trip, he had no flat tires but brought several spares just in case.
His itinerary was spontaneous.
"If you plan it, things don't go the way you planned."
Asked why he would take such a grueling trip, he said, "It's the same reason people climb mountains. It's there. I've been as far south as the highway goes, so I thought I'd go as far north as it goes.
"If you can drive to the grocery store, you can drive to the North Pole, except the traffic gets a little easier on the highway."
George worked in Anchorage once and even went to Prudhoe Bay to help build a headquarters building for oil companies.
But he'd never driven there.
He decided to leave in May because he hoped by then the snow would have melted, and it had. He kept looking at temperatures in the newspaper, "and when I saw Alaska with days above freezing, I figured it was time to go."
It was the first trip he'd ever taken where he saw bears, a dozen of them, plus moose. Along the way he picked up four hitchhikers, including a gold miner and an Alaska Native artist.
When he tried to check into a motel at Tok Junction, he was told the rate was $195 a night.
"I said I'd sleep in my doggone car." He found another motel for $115.
He came back with no pictures. His camera got wet and didn't work.
What did his doctors say about his trip to the far north?
"I'm 95. It don't matter a whole hell of a lot if I just die. I got my time in and am ready for a transfer. If I got sick and died, that's someone else's worry."
His doctor told him he would see him "if" he got back. Trying to talk him out of it wouldn't have done much good, George said.
His next trip? George plans to drive to Cape Cod, Mass., in November to attend a military reunion. He may drive to the tip of Maine, too, just to say he's crossed the country end to end.
The odometer on his car? It showed 114,062 miles when he rolled back into Lynnwood. |
