Northern Lights: A New Trip Is In the Works

---

Although not quite finished documenting our Southern Charms trip, we can’t help but start thinking of where we might go next. We have, conceptually, mapped out the United States into 10 more major trips, carving up the continent based on where we have National Park bucket list items still remaining on our list (and we still have more than 120 of them left, so there is plenty to see.)



Putting together a major road trip, like the 84-day, 9211-mile, Southern Charms trip is not an easy exercise. A lot of the most popular places require reservations up to a year in advance. And once you start making reservations at one spot, you are constrained by geography and the placement of highways on how you can get to that spot and the next one. So laying out the itinerary for a long trip takes some time and effort.



We’ve been asked several times how we put together trips like this and so Joan thought that maybe a series of travel blog posts describing the trip planning process might be of interest to at least some of our friends and acquaintances. This is the first in an anticipated series of blogs outlining exactly how we do this.



It certainly helps that we have my National Park Bucket List. Although some find sticking to such a list confining, it is, for me anyway, exactly the opposite - it provides a framework or structure within which we are free to apply variations and exceptions for our travel. Rather than just heading out on some aimless path, we have a set of destinations and some rough ideas of how we want to get there. While I can appreciate the mind set of those who want no constraints on their traveling expectations and are free to go wherever circumstances of the moment tell them to go, that kind of travel isn’t satisfying to me - I like having some definition and an itinerary. It doesn’t have to be so rigorous that we aren’t free to see something we didn’t know about, but it also keeps us from getting bogged down and missing things that we definitely wanted to see. My view is that I’m not going to live forever, so I should make the most of the travel days that I have and make sure that I see the things that I know I want to see. If other stuff gets in there, well, that’s good too!



One of the most interesting areas on our travel horizon, and one of the most difficult to plan for, is Alaska. The nice thing about Alaska is that it is a self-contained unit - we know where the boundaries are. For Southern Charms, we had to, more or less arbitrarily, define the target area as the six states. One might ask why we didn’t include Mississippi in there and there isn’t a really good answer. We will get there on another trip. But in the case of Alaska, it is just one state, with no boundaries with other states. It shares a border with Canada, of course, but there are no US National parks in Canada, so at least at the beginning of the process, we don’t need to worry about that.



Conceptually, Alaska was destined to be a trip all to itself. But Alaska is not small, nor is it particularly easy to travel in, both of which make trip planning a challenge. Since we knew that there would be some difficult travel issues in Alaska, we decided we should probably get it done sooner, rather than later, while our financial and health resources made such travel at least a consideration. So we have been talking about Alaska for a year or so, now, and were, initially, considering a trip there next summer, 2018. That’s a year from now, so time to start planning.



First we had to come up with a name for the trip. Now that might sound a little frivolous - why does a trip need a name? I suppose we could just call it ‘The Alaska Trip’, but that doesn’t have much appeal to it, not like ‘Southern Charms’ does. Naming a trip allows us to package all the components and put a nice handle on it. If chosen correctly, the name also makes it more interesting and appealing, adding to the excitement. After seeing so many pictures of Alaskan scenery, we realized that one thing that kind of identifies Alaska is the northern lights, the aurora borealis. After playing with different possibilities for a few days, Northern Lights seemed to have the best emotional effect. And so the name is born.



Alaska poses several difficult questions that we will need to address during the planning process. For example, according to Google Maps, it is more than 3100 highway miles from here to Juneau. At our normal driving range of 300 miles per day, that will take us over 10 days just to drive there. Although I don’t have concerns about the car, I am worried that the trailer might not handle that trip too well. And since several of our bucket list sites don’t even roads to them, much less campgrounds, then the trailer can quickly become a liability. So, maybe we don’t take the trailer. And if we aren’t taking the trailer, we probably can’t take the dogs either. Fortunately, my sister has volunteered to watch them for a while, but it is hard to imagine traveling without our girls!



Should we drive at all? There are, after all, cruise ships that travel through a few of the parks on our list. But they certainly don’t go inland very far and none of them, that I am aware of go above the arctic circle. We could take a cruise through the coastal areas and then disembark for the other parks on our list. But cruise ships are expensive - is that the way we want to spend our travel dollars? We are leaning against a cruise.



We could fly! From Albuquerque, there are no non-stop flights to anywhere in Alaska, so we will definitely have to endure a layover some where. And one of the things that provoked the purchase of a travel trailer is that I can’t fit in an airplane seat very well. But some preliminary research suggests we can fly round-trip to Anchorage with a single stop in Phoenix for about $500 each. That saves the 10 day drive, but means we definitely have to rent something when we get there.



Without a trailer, we are faced with difficult decisions about meals and lodging. One possibility is to rent an RV once we get there. Initial queries suggest that can be done, in Anchorage, for about $200/night. Clearly, that is going to mount up. There are portions of the trip where the RV wouldn’t be of much use, so maybe we only use the RV for a week or two of the trip and stay in motels and lodges the rest of the time. The downside of that, though, is that without an RV, then you are looking at additional meal costs.



It seems that all options are going to be rather expensive. In the continental US we just assume we will be traveling with the trailer, because we already own it and that is what it is for. Alaska, though, is a bear of a different color, and we have some interesting travel arrangements to be made.



We have some time, though, to figure these things out. We’ve determined that some of the things that we think we want to do are already booked up for the entire summer of 2018. So looks like this trip can’t possibly happen until the following summer. Seems far away, but we have lots of work to do before then.



The Northern Lights beckon!

---