"Sure you don't want to spend the night?" the tall, dark-haired thirtysomething woman asked.

"It'd be tempting, but it's a long drive, and we want to get some miles on today," Josh replied, starting the engine.

"If you want to do it again next year, feel free to give me a call," Shelly told him. "It's been a real adventure for me. And, thanks for coming to visit the kids."

"Hey, we enjoyed it too," Josh smiled. He waved his hand to the cluster of elementary school kids clustered around the truck, and raised his voice a little, "'Bye, kids," he called to them.

"Goodbye," Tiffany chimed in from next to him.

"Be careful," Shelly said, then added, "Watch out for moose."

"Sure will," Josh said. "See you next time." He let up on the clutch, and waved again. The heavily loaded old pickup with the "Run-8 Kennels" logo on the side began to move out of the parking lot of the Eagle River Elementary School.

"I sure am glad we found her," Tiffany said as Josh started to roll up the window. It wasn't a bad day, in fact, warmish, compared to what they'd gotten used to. Although it was overcast and the mountians off to the south disappeared into the overcase, in the distance they could see that it was clear out across the Knik Arm. There was beautiful country out that way, and they knew it. They'd been there. "It was a big thrill for those kids."

"It sure was," Josh smiled. It was a big deal in Alaska for a pair of Iditarod mushers to visit an elementary classroom; it didn't happen every day, even there. It was one more thing on a busy list that Josh and Tiffany had to do this day to get set to go home, but it was the last thing. They'd flown in from Nome with their dogs and gear the day before, but there had been a lot of sorting out and loading to do, people to thank, and arrangements to make.

It would have been a whole lot harder to organize everything without some local assistance, Josh and Tiffany knew, and Shelly had made a big difference.. The people at the Iditarod headquarters in Wasilla had been helpful, but there was a limit to what they could do. But, entirely out of the blue one day last summer after their official announcement of their plans to run the Iditarod in their home town newspaper, the Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, they'd received a letter from Shelly Goodlock, one of the only three Record-Herald subscribers in Alaska, offering assistance. They didn't find out until much later that Shelly had been in the same class as Josh's older brother, John, and had dated him once or twice, although Josh hadn't remembered her. The Spearfish Lake connection worked even in Alaska.

Shelly had handled a lot of arrangements for them, and had been a big help, especially on the Anchorage end of the race. She'd never asked for anything, and Josh and Tiffany had offered to visit her fourth graders in repayment of the favors done to them. They'd just finished doing a presentation for the whole school, but Shelly's class got dogsled rides around the school, as well.

"Let's stop and check the rig one last time before we get out on the highway," Tiffany suggested.

"Good idea," Josh agreed, spotting a store parking lot not far ahead that would work. The camper on the back of the pickup was so loaded with gear that they wouldn't be sleeping in it on the way home -- they'd barely managed to get the door closed. Behind the truck was a dog-box trailer with two sleds tied on top, and 36 dogs aboard. Twenty three of those dogs had gone all the way from Anchorage to Nome with them. There were a couple new dogs there that Josh and Tiffany had picked up earlier in the day from Joe Reddington; they'd traded and bought a dog from Joe and a others from some other Alaskan mushers, and Joe had agreed to keep an eye on them till the race was over. The new dogs were a little too old to race again, but would play a part in their ongoing upgrades of their dog breeding program.

A quick walkaround of the rig showed that everything was secure. "Well," Josh shrugged. "Guess there's not much left to do but go home."

"Yeah," Tiffany sighed as she climbed back into the right seat of the pickup. "I guess I know how Cinderella felt when the coach turned back into a pumpkin."

Josh nodded. Five years before -- he'd only been a year out of high school, and Tiffany was still only 13 -- they'd made the decision that they wanted to develop dog teams capable of running the Iditarod. Two years before, they'd made the definite decision to attempt it this year, the first year that Tiffany would be old enough to be eligible. Over the years they had developed the strongest teams on the local sled dog racing circuit, but they had suspected that they didn't measure up to the Alaskan teams. Though their twenty-second and twenty-third finishing places were out of the money, although Josh had won a special prize, but they were respectable finishes for rookies from the lower 48. Josh had driven this rig by himself up to Alaska from Spearfish Lake right after New Years, and had stayed in the camper for weeks to try and condition both teams for Alaskan conditions. Tiffany had taken time off from her high school classes five weeks before to help with the final preparations and run the race. Those last five weeks had been the most intense of what had been rather intense young lives, at least the last few years, preparing for the grueling race, running it, and considerable aftermath.

"Yeah, I guess I do, too," Josh agreed, a little exhaustion seeping through his voice as he climbed back into the pickup and got it moving. He felt totally drained, and suspected Tiffany did too. But there was nearly four thousand miles to drive home down the Alaska Highway and halfway across Canada, mostly on slow two lane roads. With both of them to drive and care for and exercise the dogs, they hoped to do a little better than the ten days it had taken Josh to make the trip solo. Tiffany was supposed to have flown home, but had decided to stay with Josh and help with the trip. "But, I'm glad you're coming with me," he added, glancing over at the diamond ring on her left hand.

Tiffany had been just a little girl, only ten years old, when she and Josh had got involved in dogsled racing, along with her father and Josh's brother-in-law. For the last five years they'd pretty much lived in each other's pockets, working with dogs and going to races, pushing each other to improve their skills. Both had suspected for years that eventually their relationship would get even closer once she got out of high school, although neither had said anything about it until the Musher's Banquet in Nome a couple days before. Josh suspected that it wouldn't surprise anyone at home, either. He'd spent a good chunk of his prize winnings on that ring, and thought that it looked pretty good along with the Iditarod finishers belt buckles they both wore.

"We'll have plenty of time for a critique," Tiffany said, perhaps not noticing Josh's glance.

One of the things that had gotten them to the Iditarod in the first place was that they worked hard to learn from their experiences. They ruthlessly critiqued every race, almost every training session, trying to see ways to improve. Over time, they had learned to be very honest with themselves and each other. Sometimes it didn't take -- they'd had some difficulty learning to accept that criticism. There had been a lot happen in the last few weeks, few days, and they really hadn't had time to pick at it. Both knew that the next few days were going to be an advanced dogsledding seminar, and they were both looking forward to it. It would have been harder to do if she had flown home.

"Yeah," Josh agreed, signaling for a turn. "We're not going to lack for things to talk about. In fact, we ought to make a list of what we need to talk about, just so we don't miss anything."

"Makes sense," Tiffany agreed, reaching for a spiral notebook with a pen stuck in the binding. She had sat in the cab of the pickup and made notes from their critiques many times on the way home from dog sled races in the past. Josh tended to see the big picture a little better than she did, she knew, but she tended to be a little more obsessive about detail. Between them, they didn't miss much. "You've obviously thought about this a little," she said. "Where do you want to start?"

"Well, actually, I see two big questions," Josh said. "The big one, of course, is, do we do the Iditarod in the future, next year or whatever? I don't know that we can even answer that one on this trip, maybe not until next fall, maybe not even then. But, we need to talk about it since the decision will obviously affect the other big question."

"Which is?" Tiffany frowned.

"You and me."

"Why is that a question?"

"It's a question because a lot of things are going to change in the next few months," Josh replied. "We've got questions like how soon we're going to get married, or even if we are. After all, just living together and not getting married is an option."

"True, and we wouldn't get much static about it if we did," Tiffany agreed. She didn't explain why. She'd been her mother's bridesmaid after her mother and father had lived together for fifteen years, and Josh had been one of her father's groomsmen..

"But even that begs the question of how soon you move across the road," Josh smiled. "More importantly, we've got financial issues to discuss. Your folks have been picking up a chunk of our expenses, for example. When you graduate, that's going to change. We barely managed to come up with the money for this trip, and blew up quite a bit of savings in the process. But, that leads right back to the other question: are we going to try the Iditarod in the future. If so, how? If not, what do we do? Do we still run dogs, but at a lower level? If so, what level, and how do we finance that?"

"I can't see us not keeping dogs," she replied with a frown.

"Me either," Josh said, thoughtfully. "But, do we do it on the level of Mark and your dad, just keeping a few dogs to go on camping trips, or maybe run a local race or two without being top rank? Or, do we try to be strong on the local level? Or, maybe be competitive on a lower 48 level, so we'd stand a shot in stuff like the Michigan 200 and the Beargrease? Or, come up here again next year, with the idea of at least making a good shot at a top ten finish? For any of those options, how?"

"I can't see us not wanting to run it again," she said. "I mean, we've worked toward it for so long, it's kind of a letdown to have it over with. But we're both going to want to try it again and do better, even if we can't afford to. Let's start out with the assumption that we're going to try to try it again next year, or at least in a future year if we can't manage it next year, for some reason."

"Fair enough," Josh agreed. "That's the toughest proposition in a number of ways. You know, I don't want to sound defeatist, but I really doubt that we're ever gonna win this thing."

"We knew there was no chance this year," Tiffany frowned. "But ever? Well, there's a chance we could."

"There's a chance," Josh conceded. "But it's a long shot. I think we have the capability of a top ten team, maybe even a team that could contend for a win. But luck plays a part, and I can tell you the names of a lot of people that have been in the top ten any number of times, but never have come close to winning this thing, and don't ever stand a chance unless they get lucky the same year that several other people get unlucky all at the same time. The competition is tough. To win this thing, we're going to have to come up with a team that gets all the right breaks."

She nodded. "We're going to have to concentrate on coming up with one team that can go all the way. I mean, the way we did it this year made sense, but not another year."

"Yeah, we did almost exactly what we set out to do," he agreed. "We wanted two teams that were pretty level with each other." He smiled. "I guess we managed that pretty good."

That drew a chuckle from Tiffany. "We did get that pretty close," she agreed. She had been half a dog length behind Josh after a mad race down Nome's Front Street to the finish arch. She flashed him a knowing smile, and went on. "The idea was to get in a competent rookie run, be able to support each other a little if we needed to, and learn something of what we need to know if we want to run this race in the future. That all worked just about like we wanted it to, and if we hadn't made a couple of first timer dumbass mistakes, I think we could have been a couple spots higher, maybe. But if one of us had had all the best dogs, instead of splitting them up, we should have been able to do better than that."

"Couldn't agree more. There were obvious economies of scale for us to bring two teams up here this year," Josh agreed. "But, I don't think we want to do it that way again. I think we should concentrate on getting one team as high in the standings as possible. A lot of the top ranked people do run second teams, but they're the junior varsity, dogs getting experience and evaluated for the future, and we might want to do that some time in the future. Hell, Rick Swenson's ex-wife ran his JV team for him this year. It might mean that one of us winds up in maybe tenth, and the other in, say, fortieth."

"Makes sense," Tiffany agreed. "Who gets the varsity team?"

"I dunno, at this point," Josh said. "It might be pretty obvious as the race draws close, like if one of us has been sick or something. But then, we could change off each year, too. At this point, though, I'd say that you have dibs on the varsity next time."

"What?" Tiffany was surprised. She'd come to the conclusion that they couldn't again run two level quality teams long before, but she'd expected a fight over who got the varsity.

Josh smiled. He knew that Tiffany had expected to have to fight over that decision. He and Tiffany had each other pretty well taped, after all. "Well, first, on account of where you placed, you obviously had the JVs this year," he teased. "So, it's only fair. But, more important, I think it's going to be a little easier to raise money for next year if you're the lead musher. We've had a good ride out of you being the little girl against the world. It's colorful, it makes stories. You had a whole lot more publicity out of this run than I did. We might as well capitalize on it while we have it. We won't have quite the angle on it another year, but, in general, if everything else is equal you're always going to get more publicity. And, publicity is the key to raising money, after all, so for the future, you may be the lead musher, anyway. But the money is the key to everything."

Tiffany nodded. "It's a bummer, but there it is," she said. It hadn't been until Christmas that they had been sure they were even going to have enough money to run this year, when Jenny had given them a large check. And, that wasn't the major share. Most of Josh's income had gone into this year's run, plus a lot of Tiffany's from when she'd worked at the Burger Bummer, as she called it, most of the last two summers. They'd had a few thousand dollars from sponsors, and there had been contributions from others -- her family, Mark and Jackie, and some of the local mushers.

Some of their support had been unexpected; Josh had taken the pickup into the Dodge garage for a brake job a few weeks before leaving, and it had taken longer than expected to get the pickup back. Half a dozen mechanics had, on their own time, just about jacked up the radiator cap and put a new truck underneath it, with the dealer donating parts out of his own pocket. He did bill Josh for a set of brake pads, though, with a big smile on his face.. Josh had been real worried about making this trip at all in his old pickup, which had an odometer reading well over 200,000 miles.

But, they'd cut it close. What with everything, after two years of work, including a thousand dollars in race winnings, the trip home was being financed out of Josh's credit card, and he hoped to limit the motel stays.

"It's the biggest argument toward just cutting back to local level teams," Josh agreed. "I haven't had the time to work out the exact numbers, but it costs us about thirty thousand dollars a year to just pay the direct expenses of the dogs, training them without even racing them, what with food, gear, and whatnot. That doesn't even figure in the cost of the land, the taxes, and so on. And, we should spend more; we cut come corners, compared to other people, and we really don't have enough dogs." They'd had to borrow six of the dogs in the trailer behind them from other Spearfish Lake mushers, just to fill out their teams, but at least they'd been able to borrow dogs that were the average of their own, or better. "On top of that, there are the extra expenses of racing this thing. I haven't got all the figures in yet, but it'll still come close to twenty grand, over and above the maintenance expense of the dogs. There is an economy of scale in running two teams, though. The second team only costs about another five thousand, maybe a little more, since so much stuff has to be done for the first team anyway."

"It makes a good argument for running the second team," Tiffany agreed. "But, you're leading up to something."

Josh looked around. They were well out of Eagle River by now -- it was a town about the size of Spearfish Lake, although located on the edge of Anchorage. It was beautiful countryside, and signs of spring were on the way. They'd see more snow inland on the way home, but by the time they got home most of the local snow would be gone, mud would be everywhere and the rivers would be raging -- and he'd have to be getting back to his real job, a railroad engineer for the local short-line railroad, which all but shut down in the winter, the only reason he'd been able to devote his winters to dogsledding the last few years.

"I guess I am," he agreed finally.. "What with everything, in another year I don't see how I can contribute much more than about ten grand from my own income toward the dogs and running this race again. If you work at the Burger Bummer again, maybe you can contribute a few thousand more, but it really won't be much. And, once we're living together, married or not, there's going to be expenses we didn't have before, because your folks were picking them up. So you're working may not actually gain us anything toward the race, and maybe we'll even lose a little ground. But somehow, we've got to come up with about forty thousand to have the dogs and do the race next year. The alternative is to decide not to race next year, sell a lot of dogs, and soon."

"I'm not going to be making that much at the Burger Bummer," she agreed. "That means we need solid sponsorship, and that means that for all practical intents, we're going to have to turn pro. I mean, we could get help this year because of the novelty of the thing, but there are a lot of places that we can't go back to again. As pros, we have some possibilities that open up to us, but a lot of the support we got was from people that didn't mind one donation to a couple kids chasing a dream. And, the one person where I do feel pretty sure of getting the money from is someone I really don't want to have to go back to."

"Me either," Josh said. "I'm happy to have her as a friend, but this is business. Or, at least, if we run next year, it's going to have to become a business."

"That's exactly how I feel," Tiffany agreed. "But you know, it's business for her, too."

Tiffany's friendship with Jenny Easton went back a long way, and Josh had known her a little too, to the point where they still usually thought of her by her real name, Jennifer Evachevski.. Jennifer had been Tiffany's babysitter long ago, but when she'd left school, she'd taken a swing at being a country music singer. More than a swing; she'd knocked the ball clear back into the cheap seats, with a bunch of top records and a not inconsiderable Hollywood career. She and her boyfriend/bodyguard Blake Walworth now kept a house on Point Drive in Spearfish Lake, although they were rarely there.

In the last few years, Jenny had produced and starred in an annual Christmas variety special, "Wonderful Winter World", which featured music against a winter outdoor activities like skating and sleigh rides -- and dogsleds. Their own dogs had been a part of each of the specials, usually as backdrop to one of Jenny's songs, although Tiffany, wearing a long blonde wig, had actually been Jenny's double in some of the dogsledding scenes.. Although Tiffany was shorter and chunkier than the willowy singer, with heavy winter clothes on it was hard to tell the difference at any kind of distance.. Shooting actually went on at odd times all year -- Josh and Tiffany had done some scenes back in December for the coming year's show, and Tiffany had done a little more in January, but the majority of the show was actually shot in a studio in the summer. It had been fun and they'd never asked for a cent to help Jennifer out, but she'd paid them, only because the unions she dealt with said she had to. When they'd been raising money for the Iditarod this year, they hadn't wanted to presume on Jenny's friendship, which was more important to them than the money, but Jennifer had heard about their money trouble and had written a large check, writing it off to publicity for Wonderful Winter World. They'd carried banners on their sleds promoting the show, and an Alaskan film crew had shot a few scenes of them during the race for Jenny Easton Productions that they suspected might get into a future show, but Josh and Tiffany both figured it was mostly just a tax writeoff that really stemmed from Jennifer's genuine friendship and kindness.

Josh frowned. "Somehow, I don't think she gets out of it what we do."

"I don't know," Tiffany said. "In any case, I don't want to ask her for the money."

"We do need to spend some time with her," Josh said. "Just to fill her in on what happened, and let her know how grateful we are for her helping us this year. Tell some stories, and help her to feel that she was really as big a part of it as she was."

"And, when we do, I wouldn't be surprised if she asks us how much we want for another year," Tiffany finished his thought.

"Me, either," Josh agreed. "And, if she offers it, we about have to take it, but I don't want to depend on it, and more importantly, I don't want it to be all of our sponsorship. I just don't want all our eggs in one basket, and I think we need to do everything we can without it."

"I agree. And, I think we need to let her know that we feel that way, that we don't money to interfere with our friendship. In any case, I don't think that we should let her contribute more than she did this year, and less if possible."

"That sounds about right to me. Well, there are some other sponsors that we can hit on, now that we've got a successful run under our belts. We probably need to work up a more formal proposal, though, just so we can present it. I think that we don't ever want to plan on winning a cent, though. If we do, well, fine, but let's not plan on it. But, lets look at other angles, too, like maybe getting the dogs to support the effort a little."

"What do you mean by that?" Tiffany wondered.

"Well, after dealing with Joe and Vern back there, it struck me that our dogs are worth quite a bit more now than they were a month ago, just from being Iditarod veterans. I suspect that we'll be able to sell some of those dogs for more than we've been able to in the past."

"Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, we've got some dogs we probably wouldn't run again, for age if nothing else, that would still be valuable in something like a Warsaw Run or Michigan 200, maybe even the Beargrease."

"Yeah, and it should make pups more valuable, too. I don't expect that we'll make big, big bucks out of it, but it should be worth a few thousand, and everything helps".

Tiffany looked out the window at the passing Alaskan scenery for a moment before speaking. "Well, if we're turning professionals, I suppose there's something else we could do to make some cash," she said. "When people have come out and wanted a dogsled ride, we've always just given them one. As long as it was among friends, I don't have any problem with that, but when people you never heard of before start knocking on the door, well, maybe we ought to start charging."

"That's bugged me on occasion, too," Josh said. "It's not an unreasonable thing to do. And, you know what else we could do?"

"What?"

"We could advertise winter camping trips. For years, we've taken the sleds up to Riverbend or other places and spent a night or two, just for the fun of it, and for training, and it's gotten to be no big deal for us. But there are people that would get a big thrill out of it, and pay well to do it. We'd have to do some advertising, and it would take a while to build up, but in time, that could turn into a fair chunk of change."

"We'd have to upgrade the food," Tiffany laughed. Their winter camping trips had been fun, but the food had been pretty catch as catch can, like the time that Josh had spread out a package of store-bought frozen burritos on the lid of a dog food cooker to warm up. It had actually worked so well that he'd done it on the trail last week, but that wasn't atypical. After all, most Iditarod mushers gave a lot more care to what they fed their dogs than what they fed themselves on the trail, and Josh -- and Tiffany -- had been no exception.

"Nothing we can't do, I suppose," Josh said. "We'll have to give that some thought. There may be some other angles on that one, too."

"I can tell you one," Tiffany said. "We can lease the JV team for the Iditarod."

Josh frowned. "There are some problems with that." There were a number of people in the race each year that only wanted to run the race one time, and didn't want to go to the trouble of building up a team, or just weren't able to do it. On occasion, one of the Iditarod regulars would lease them a team that was already up and running, providing training, gear, and administrative expenses. It was usually a thing where the leasee spent months with the dog team owner, learning to handle the team and getting ready for the race. "The big thing is, the real JVs I wouldn't want to turn loose with someone I didn't know, since I wouldn't want them to pick up bad habits. Now, if it were somebody like, oh, Fred Linder or Greg Mears, I'd say, fine, cover the extra costs of taking the JVs and go for it, since we know they'd do a competent job with it. But, someone who hasn't owned or run dogs, but would like to do this trip, well, I suppose it would be possible to come up with a few dogs that are too old for the varsity and a few that we're pretty sure aren't ever going to make the cut otherwise, and frankly, I think we could charge them more."

"How about Phil?"

"Phil's one of us. That's more like, 'Hey Phil, my back is hurting, you wanna run the JVs in the Iditarod for me?'"

Phil Wine was all but officially the third member of the Run-8 team. Sort of Jennifer Evachevski's brother in law -- he'd never actually married her sister, Brandy -- he had a job that kept him out of town ten months a year, but he occasionally helped Josh and Tiffany out with the training, and sometimes with other things. He had to go to Alaska for his job now and then, and three different times he'd found quality breeding dogs from Alaskan kennels and sent them back to Spearfish Lake, for a total of five dogs, and those Iditarod veteran dogs had parented pups that had elevated Josh and Tiffany from local musher status to what had to be approaching world class. Josh and Tiffany knew they owed him big time, although Phil wasn't the kind of guy to call in markers. Phil wanted a team of his own some day, when he quit his world traveling job, and with the possible exception of Tiffany's aging leader, George, Phil would have the best dogs they had. And, Phil was a competent musher; two years before, he'd taken what was clearly a junior varsity team, although led by Switchstand, which Josh now conceded was the best race leader he'd ever had, and ran to second place in the Warsaw Run, not far shy of Josh and well ahead of Tiffany, who had had leader problems of her own. There were good reasons why Josh hadn't taken Switchstand to Nome with him, but he'd missed him terribly at times.

"Yeah, maybe even the varsity," Tiffany conceded. "He'd pay his share, though. That's just the kind of guy Phil is."

"True," Josh agreed. "There is a big problem with getting into the outfitting business, though -- we're so busy, so much of the season, and gone so much the rest of it."

"It'd be a little better next winter," Tiffany said. "I won't have to be in school."

"There is that. But, you know, back in Nome I said that we had to figure on spending more time up here to condition the dogs, and maybe even in a colder place than Talkeetna. I've got to admit, though, that I'm having second thoughts about that. I think we could come up here the first part of February, rather than the first of January. It's just too long to be gone from home, there are too many things that have to get dealt with there, and doing outfitting and guiding like we just talked about would make it worse."

"Dad and Mark could probably fill in a little," Tiffany suggested.

"Yeah, but I don't want to have to ask too much of them. I doubt that they'll come up here to watch the race again like they did this year, but I doubt it -- they hit the piggy bank a little hard for that. I'm glad that Dave Stitely agreed to come out and do the chores with the dogs we had to leave in Spearfish Lake." Dave was a local musher that they'd helped get started racing, and they had a couple of his dogs with them. His offer to help had solved one major problem, and again, he hadn't asked for a bit of payment, but Josh and Tiffany had agreed that he might get surprised with a promising pup out of the deal. "Being gone a month less would mean, well, being gone a month less. It's going to be almost three months for me, of living out of the camper or the sled bag or in motels. I really don't want to do it that long again. I don't want to fault Fred, but this camper has been a pain in the ass."

Fred Linder, another local musher, had given them the old pickup camper that rode on the back of the truck -- another donation from a friend that had helped put the trip together. "Too bad it's so full of stuff," Tiffany said. "It would save us some motel bills this next week."

"It would be fine for that if we could use it," Josh agreed. "The problem was up at Talkeetna. Every time I wanted to run down to the store for some little something, I either had to take a dog team, or dig the truck out. It was nice of Shelly's boyfriend to loan us his old Toyota, or it would have been a hell of a lot worse. I'll tell you what, if we're going to keep doing this, we need to do it different. I think I want to find an old travel trailer, and just find a place up here where we can leave it permanently, and train out of it. Then, when we go home, there's a lot of stuff that we can just leave there, and not have to cart it back and forth."

"Where do you think we want to train? Talkeetna, again?"

"Probably not a bad spot," Josh admitted. "We know some people there now, and it's got a good trail network. And, it's reasonably close to Anchorage and Wasilla. Wasilla is a possibility, and there are a lot of mushers that base there, but it strikes me as just a little bit too busy around Iditarod time. We'll just have to nose around and find a place. It's just too damn bad that I can't get free in the summer, or it would be tempting to bring a trailer up here then and find a spot. But, maybe we can write some letters and come up with a spot. Maybe Shelly could help, too -- but I just can't get away from work for the three weeks or so it would take. Even if I could get free, we need the money."

Tiffany turned another page on her pad. Their free-ranging discussion had developed several points needing further discussion in the first few miles, and she'd made a number of notes already. "You know," she said thoughtfully, "It would help out a lot if I could find a better summer job than working at the Burger Bummer. Your job is the perfect job for this -- good pay, and about the right amount of time off at the time you need to be off."

Josh nodded. "We'd never have gotten close to this, either one of us, without it," he agreed.

"Maybe we could talk to Mr. Ellsberg and see if I could start braking for the C&SL," she suggested.

"Ummm," Josh said, thinking. "Well, now that you're 18, that's a possibility. Bud caught hell from the insurance company about Danny and me braking before we were 18. Might be worth looking into, at least for the short run. In the long run, well, maybe we'd be getting our eggs a little too much into one basket. The railroad should be good for a while, but I don't know what happens when Bud retires, and that's in the foreseeable future. Granted, I've got a lot of skills and experience, but it's all non-union, so it would be almost impossible to take it elsewhere, and even worse to have to do it with the dogs. I think that we need to be thinking about something else as a fall back position."

"Yeah," Tiffany agreed. "Boy, look at that." The had been following the south shore of the Knik Arm as they headed north up the Richardson Highway, and now they turned to cross the delta of the Eagle River to head up toward the junction with the Glenn Highway, which would lead them toward the Alaska Highway and home. It was the last glimpse of salt water they would have on the trip. There was no ice here, and the mountains in the distance and the sheltered bay made an inspiring sight. "Boy, wouldn't Ken and Judy have a ball on that," she commented. "It'd be nice to get up here in the summer, maybe even out in the wilder stuff, say down in Prince William Sound, or maybe over toward the other end of Cook Inlet."

"Now, there would be a summer job that would fit in with the dogs," Josh agreed.

"I don't follow you," she said, looking past Josh to see the sight.

"We were talking about doing some winter outfitting, but what's to keep us from doing summer tours? Say, sea kayak and canoe trips, maybe around home, but maybe up here, too?"

"The timing would be right, but we don't know much about sea kayaking, for one thing," Tiffany protested. "I mean, we've been out with Ken and Judy once or twice, but we really don't know about it."

"A few years ago we didn't know anything about dogsledding," Josh smiled. "We can learn."

All of a sudden, Tiffany saw the light. "You've gotta wonder if clients would pay more to be taken on trips with someone who's so hardcore an outdoors person that they're contenders in the Iditarod."

"Yeah," Josh said. "It's sort of struck me as funny that we don't see more sea kayaks on Spearfish Lake, or even Thurow Lake. There's some nice tours there, I suspect. And, the Great Lakes aren't far away."

"Well, we've got the outdoor skills down pretty good, and some good stories to tell," Tiffany agreed. "But, how do we get the kayaking skills?"

"Good question," Josh said, furrowing his brow.

"Yeah," she said, writing quickly. "Isn't there someone in town that has a sea kayak? I know I've seen one riding around on the top of a car."

"Uhhh, yeah," Josh said, thinking. "Joe McGuinniss," he said finally. "You know, he has that bookkeeping agency down by the beach."

"Well, we'll have to get with him, too," she said, continuing to write. "Can you think of anything else we want to put on our list to thrash out, or do you want to get going on the washup from the race?"

"We'll undoubtedly come up with something else, but that'll do for the start," Josh said, making the turn onto the Glenn Highway. "And now that we really have the Iditarod behind us, we might as well think about what we did wrong, and what we can do to correct it."

"Well, I had some thoughts," Tiffany said. "We already talked about team makeup a little, but I think we were loaded too heavy, too . . ."

Josh was only half paying attention. They'd talk about the race, and a lot more, over the next week, but a load was off of his mind. Now, they could begin to think about future goals, not goals of the past.