Jo and I have spent the last three months cooking up our plans for “The Big One.” We have mapped out our strategy to drive our rig about as far as is possible in North America.
April 1 wraps up our winter stay in Palmetto. The plan is to head west and then north, all the way to Alaska. It is just about impossible to make the trip more distant because we are heading from the southeastern edge of the U.S. to the farther places in the northwest.
Getting your arms around the distances involved in this trip is tough. When you superimpose the state of Alaska on the lower 48 states (above), you see that Alaska reaches from sea to shining sea. So, when we get to San Francisco in California we still face an additional 5,700 miles of travel through Washington and Oregon, then British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory in Canada. Then we enter Alaska.
Our motor home may be stressed in making this expected journey of 16,000-plus miles in a single trip. But we feel if we are going to make this voyage, it is better to do it now than wait for a better time.
After we reach the farthest point, Denali National Park, and then explore Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula, our plan is to put the rig and our car aboard the ferry system that is the lifeline to the little towns on the coast which have no roads leading into them. We'll cruise south and stop off in Juneau, the capital, Sitka, Wrangell, Ketchikan and then come back to the highway system at Prince Rupert in British Columbia.
I was worried about the possibility of stopping in some of these wayward towns and I wrote to them, asking if there is space to park our motor home. The friendliness and helpfulness of the various people who responded to my questions makes us anxious to meet them. They seem genuinely keen to have us visit their little towns on the outer edge of the continent.
When we get off the ferry in Prince Rupert, it will be the first week in September. Then we plan to head south and east toward Banff and Jasper and Glacier National Park in Montana. Thereafter, we'll roll across the U.S. Until we come back into Canada again in Ontario. After visiting my sister, Rose, We'll drive up the highway that lies along the northside of Lake Ontario until we come to Vermont to spend time with daughter Stephanie and her family. We'll linger for a little while in Kent, Connecticut, with daughter Lynn and her family before rolling on south again to get back to Florida by November.
We look forward to packing all of you into the motor home. There's plenty of room for you. You just have to be able to tolerate a precocious kitten who seems to believe she is descended from some Himalayan tiger.
