Dateline October 2011, A Look Back at Our Spectacular Adventure
Travels have ended for now. We've landed in Flagler Beach, Florida, where we are looking for a new home. We expect to restart in the spring with new adventures. This is a summary, photos with a few words, and some fun statistics from our 2011 adventure. Enjoy.
Best, John and Janice
The Walkabout Canada-Alaska portion of the trip (what the Roadtrek group called it) began on April 30, 2011, when we entered Canada at Vancouver Island, and ended when we entered Montana on July 19. But let's start from the beginning of the adventure.
We left our home in Dade City, Florida, on March 14, 2011. We traveled from Florida to Seattle, seeing beautiful sights through the south, visiting in Arizona, then up through California and Oregon, some extreme weather, and on to Washington State.
Once in Seattle we left the Roadtrek at John's brother's house and flew over to Hawaii for our nephew Clay's wedding.
Our house in Dade City had sold while we were in Seattle, so we flew back from Hawaii, packed the house into PODs, then flew back to Seattle to begin the adventure proper. By that point we had logged 11,800 miles in the air.
Through British Columbia, we made our way to meet our soon-to-be Roadtrek family in Dawson Creek.
Into Alaska.
Up to Denali National Park.
Back through the Yukon.
And finally back to the lower 48 and on to Florida. In total we drove 20,260 road miles and 950 ferry miles on the Canada and Alaska Marine Highway.
We saw fifteen black bears, including one mother with two cubs.
Several brown bears (grizzlies).
Twelve moose.
Plus caribou, elk, deer, buffalo, wild sheep, wild goats, and big seals.
Eagles, which they call buzzards in tuxedos in Juneau, where there are so many of them.
And puffins.
And many other birds.
We also saw a raft of sea otters, the largest raft the captain of the boat had ever seen.
And, last but not least, the pod of orca whales.
The numbers. We drank about sixty bottles of wine and ten liters of rum, give or take. We averaged 17.4 miles per gallon, which means we burned around 1,164 gallons of diesel at roughly $4.30 a gallon, about $5,000 in fuel for the year. We replaced the computer board on the hot water heater, replaced two tires, and changed the oil twice. In the entire trip we slept in hotel rooms for only four nights. Even visiting family we slept in our home away from home, the Roadtrek.
The continued trip home took us through the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, up through the Michigan UP, down to Traverse City, over to Pittsburgh, on to Clinton, New York, and up to the Thousand Islands. From there we went deeper into New England, through Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, and rode out Hurricane Irene on Cape Cod. As Floridians, it felt strange to be fighting a hurricane in the northeast. Down through New Jersey, where we visited Janice's cousin Kathy and her better half Eddy.
On to Delaware, then out along the Chesapeake through Ocean City, Maryland, Virginia Beach, and Nags Head, on the way to Cape Hatteras. Hurricane Irene had wiped out Highway 12, eliminating the only way in by land. We stopped in Raleigh, North Carolina, for two days to visit our granddaughter Izzy and our son Courtney and his lovely wife Amanda.
From there we took the highway down to Flagler Beach, Florida, where we are now hunting for a new home. We are waiting on a bid for a short sale four blocks from the ocean. It has plenty of room for the Roadtrek.
The question we keep getting: what was the most spectacular thing you saw? Honestly, it was all spectacular. But if we had to pick one day, it would be the day we took the Adventure Bound 56-foot boat to Tracy Arm fjord and the Sawyer Glacier. The photo we have used at the top of the blog is the Sawyer Glacier. The boat wound through the icebergs.
It took us to about four hundred yards from the glacier itself, a view you don't get from a cruise ship because cruise ships can't enter the arm. Beautiful beyond belief. The biggest thrill of the trip.
We will never forget the adventure and the wonderful people we met along the way. And, of course, Benny.
We look forward to 2012 and our next adventures. Stay tuned.
