Welcome to Seward, Alaska, home to Real Men and Real Few Women. Like a lot of Alaska, the male-to-female ratio is pretty high. Bill says, "The women have a saying..'The odds are good, but the good ones are odd', referring to the male-to-female quota in town. The men say...'You don't lose your girl, you just lose your turn!'". The beans didn't quite get that last one, but since they are featured on a family site, they'll just leave it well enough alone...

This is a local Seward hangout, called "The Pit". Naturally, when the sun is only up for a couple of hours a day during the winter, you need something to do with those long nights. Bill says that The Pit closes at 4:00 in the morning, and opens again around 6:00 AM. Why bother closing at all? The beans had a great time at The Pit, even though they were scammed out of their label by a pool hustler...

Benny Benson is the local kid who designed the Alaska state flag. We would have given him honorary BATW Ambassadorship for putting our beans on it, but alas - Benny made the flag long before BATW was hatched, and there aren't exactly a whole lot of black beans growing in the Alaskan wilderness. Better luck next time...

This is the starting point for the Iditarod trail, where dogsleds mush their way across the frozen tundra each winter. While it sounded like a novel idea, the beans would much rather travel in the comfort of a wide-body 737 than inside a pouch made from seal skin, if it were all the same...

Here the beans visit Exit Glacier, where little do they realize they are about to meet their maker. Disaster is just around the corner (literally), but they remain blissfully unaware. Still, for a final view, this ain't too bad, now is it?

Most glaciers move downward at the rate of less than less than 3 ft per day, but observation of the Black Rapids Glacier here in Alaska, during 1936-37, showed that it was moving more than more than 100 ft per day. This is the swiftest advance ever recorded for any glacier in the world and was probably due to the fact that it was getting late and it needed to get home in time to watch TRL.

And here, at this very location, the beans meet their demise. You see, shortly after this photo was taken here at Portage Glacier, Bill tried placing the beans on a chunk of ice for a photo, but oops - into the icy drink they went. Why he didn't dive into the water after them, I'll never know... So somewhere deep at the bottom of the sea is a can of S & W brand black beans, waiting for some distant explorer 10,000 years from now to stumble across...

So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our beloved beans. Farewell, my friend. There will be millions of cans just like you, but never one that was you. Sniff. Since the beans are now off on a quest to the bottom of the ocean with the wooly mammoths, Bill was courteous enough to send us this picture of an appropriate-yet-impromptu substitute standing in for our long-gone can of legumes. The beans would have wanted it that way.