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Lou Ann's Folly 
Summer 2003 Road Trip to Alaska!!
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• Links to the pages with PICTURES  :-D
• The Idea to DRIVE to Alaska
• Why a Trip Website?
• The Route
• The Vehicle
• The Travelers
• The Itinerary
• Trip Statistics
• Personal Recommendations
• Letters From a Traveler - documenting the entire trip ... my travelogue

The IDEA to DRIVE to Alaska!!

During the summer of 2001 I made my first cross country road trip.  I'm a school teacher (8th grade math!!) and love having my summers off.  I figure that, since I've got a couple of months that I can protect from obligations, I may as well travel!!  You can read more about my first cross country road trip (DC to Seattle to San Diego and back to DC).  I had such a BLAST that I knew I would want to do another summer-long road trip.  I started thinking about what might come next before I even got home that first time!!

I happened to have picked up the book Sitka by Louis L'Amour sometime during that Fall of 2001.  To show my ignorance ... when I read that book, I didn't even know that Sitka was a real place.  But, I fell in love with the Alaska that I read about in that novel of historical fiction.  As a result of that book, I began to do a LOT more reading about Alaska and a lot of looking at maps ... and became INSPIRED!!  My desire quickly grew to include driving the Alaska Highway, spending some time driving and ferrying around to the major places in Alaska, and then to drive back through a western route and into Washington State, and then back to DC at the end of the summer.

I also enjoyed the book Alaska by James Michener.  Although it's long and very detailed, it's a fabulous historical fiction novel that exposes the reader to lots and lots about the history and atmosphere of many of the main areas of Alaska.  I'll highly recommend it, as it provided much more motivation for me to travel to the Great Land as well as motivation to drive the Alaska Highway (as if I needed more motivation!!).  :-D

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Why make a website about my trip??

As I worked on planning each of my road trips, I spent some time surfing the web.  I did searches on key words such as "road trip" and "cross country drive" and "road trip Alaska" and  so on.  I gained invaluable information about how to plan a cross country trip and about Alaska just from reading the mostly non-professional web pages created by other cross country travelers.

Now that I have completed my own trips, I would love to present my own version of a web page about a road trip to Alaska.  My desire would be for anyone who is surfing the internet while planning their own road trip to Alaska to stop at this site and gain ideas to add to their experience.  Please feel free to e-mail me asking any questions or for any recommendations.

The other reason for putting together a website is to give my family and friends an opportunity to peruse information about my trip at their liesure.  You can choose to read all of this drivvel or not.  You can choose to look at the pictures or not.  If you are a "spreadsheet person", you can look only at the charts that I've included with all of the wonderful numbers.  :-)  It's a lot better than having ME show up at your door with my photo album, at which point you might feel obligated to "ooh" and "ahh" over each and every one of the 816 pictures that I took.

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Choosing a route

Like I said above, I did some reading of historical fiction about a year or so before I made the trip to Alaska.  The main inspirations were (1)  Sitka, by Louis L'Amour, and (2) Alaska, by James Michener.  Sitka inspired me to travel the Inside Passage by ship.  Alaska inspired me to drive the Alaska Highway, as well as reinforcing my desire to visit Sitka (the Russian capitol of Alaska) and other places in Alaska.  I decided that getting from DC to the Alaska Highway and back again would need to be as quick a trip as possible, so as to maximize my time IN Alaska.  I went against my own advice, and did the Interstates across the U.S. ... and wished there was some other way.  I'm glad that I got a month in Alaska, but did NOT enjoy spending all of those days doing LONG hours of BORING Interstate driving.  Avoid it if you can!!

The Alaska Highway is detailed in a yearly publication called The Milepost.  You MUST have a copy of this.  The Milepost has literally every mile of the Alaska Highway described in detail ... including every rest stop, gas stop, food stop, small/large/abandoned towns, river crossings, mountain names, etc., etc., etc.  Using The Milepost and a large map (actually, several large maps) of the state of Alaska, we chose a route.  We decided to do the Inside Passage early in the summer, so as hopefully to avoid the large crowds of tourists and cruise ship passengers (hah!).  We then chose the cities to which we wanted to go in the "Interior".  There are very few roads in Alaska, so my route pretty much mapped itself out.

The vehicle that made the trip

Well, I knew that a different vehicle than my little hatchback was in order for upcoming road trips, so in February I purchased an SUV ... a 2000 Nissan XTerra (pictured above).  I am convinced that Nissan is THE make of automobiles.  I have never had any problems with either of my Nissans.  (In fact, I kept my little hatchback NX and use that for commuting to work, and use the SUV for road trips.)

The car had 57,404 miles on it the day I left home.  The day I returned it had 70,105.  The only trouble I had with it was a little ($60) problem with the air conditioning.  Of course, there was the "Alaska Windshield" problem ... the fact that so many of the roads up there have rocks that kick up and destroy people's windshields.  In my pre-trip reading, I had learned that you HAVE to plan for a new windshield after a road trip to Alaska.  My windshield was cracked on the first day on the Alaska Highway.  Figures, huh?  I had five oil changes throughout the summer ... one in Virginia before leaving, one in Billings, MT, one in Fairbanks, AK, one in Whitehorse, Yukon, and finally in Colorado Springs, CO.  I only had it washed once (in Fairbanks, AK) ... not because it didn't need more washing, but because it seemed so worthless to wash it to get it dirty again.  Besides that, the car didn't need any maintenance.

The travelers

This is not a trip that one would want to make alone.  There are some VERY remote places up there.  It is also VERY expensive up there.  I might consider doing the Inside Passage alone on the Ferry system ... and find inexpensive campsites, hostels, etc.  But ... to drive those roads where you might be hours (literally) from the nearest other person.  So ... I talked the trip up with many of the people I interact with at church and at work, etc.  I found someone at my church who is retired (available) and was interested and we made it a "go!"  We visited several of her friends along the way ... the only people I knew and stopped to see were cousins in Colorado Springs.

Where I went and what I saw...

Here it is ... in spreadsheet form:

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Trip Statistics
AAA VISA card with a 5% rebate on pay-at-the-pump up to $3 in a 24 hour period!!

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Personal Recommendations

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Letters from a Traveler

Prologue
Chapter 01 - Washington, DC to Calgary, Alberta (via Montana)
Chapter 02 - Calgary, Alberta to Skagway, Alaska (via the Alaska Highway)
Chapter 03 - Skagway and Haines (via the Alaska Marine Highway System ... aka the Alaska Ferry)
Chapter 04 - Juneau and Sitka (continuing on the AMHS)
Chapter 05 - Sitka and Petersburg (continuing on the AMHS)
Chapter 06 - Ketchikan and the AMHS ride back to Skagway.  Continuing on to Tok, Alaska (via the Alaska Highway)
Chapter 07 - Fairbanks and the tour to Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay and the trip back on the Dalton Highway
Chapter 08 - Denali NP and the drive to Valdez
Chapter 09 - Valdez
Chapter 10 - Seward and Homer
Chapter 11 - The LLLOOONNNGGG drive home (Seward, AK to Washington, DC)
Epilogue - Coming soon!!  Check back in a few wweeks!!

http://www.louannsplace.com/Alaska/index.html