I was informed by my college roommate that his father, who was more of a father to me than my own father, was not doing well with his cancer. My roommate said that if I wanted to see his dad Bud again, I should make the road trip to Alaska sooner rather than later.
My wife and I decided to leave my business in the capable hands of my employees and head to Alaska from our home in New Hampshire, where we both had grown up. We had a 1990 Marathon 40’ conversion at the time. We had it for almost 17 years before trading it for our 2000 Country Coach XL.
We made plans to travel to Ontario, Canada, pulling my race car trailer with my race car inside, where I taught at a racing school at the Calabogie Motorsports Park in Calabogie, Ontario. I made provisions with the track owner to leave our trailer and race car at his house after racing school, and we continued on toward Alaska with our daughter Melissa, who had just graduated from high school. We traveled long days due to our tight schedule and needed to drive 800 miles daily to stay on schedule.
When we arrived in Alaska, we “stayed” with family, who had visited us while we lived there, loved it, and moved to Alaska years ago. We also flew our other three children and daughter-in-law up to Anchorage to visit with Grammie and my brothers while we were there. They each took two weeks off for vacation but could not take the time to travel with us on the entire trip on the bus. Thank goodness. LOL!
I had a wonderful time with Bud while he was still relatively mobile and enjoyed my time back in Alaska. I had gone to college in Fairbanks, and my wife and I ended up raising a family and staying there for 25 years. While there, we took my mother on a bus trip, which entailed a round trip to Fairbanks, past Mt. McKinley (now called Denali).
Along with this part of the trip on the bus, we had our daughter Rebecca, our son Jesse and his wife, my wife, and my 80-year-old mother. As we were heading north on the Parks Highway, my daughter Rebecca received a call on her cell phone (we had no cell service for 95% of the trip!). It was from a high school friend she hadn’t seen in a couple of years.
They were chatting when he told her he was interning as a nature guide in Alaska (at Denali Park!). He went on to say that it was his day off, and he was hitchhiking the 80 miles out of the park to a poker game at a lodge up towards Healey. My daughter asked me where we were, and I told her we were about 20 miles south of the Denali Park entrance road on the Parks Highway. Why?
You guessed it! In another 35 minutes, my daughter’s high school friend was on the side of the road, 130 miles from the nearest city, Fairbanks. They hadn’t spoken in many months, and my daughter did not know of his internship in Alaska, and he did not know that my daughter was not still in New Hampshire at her job. What a small world!
We all said hello, and I asked him where the poker game was. He said it was north towards Fairbanks, at a lodge I was familiar with. I told him to get in, and we would take him to the lodge. The kids had a great time catching up, and when we arrived at the lodge, I decided we would continue visiting over dinner. After dinner, he went to the game, and we continued on, toward Fairbanks (where my daughter was born). It was summer, so it stayed light outside for almost 24 hours daily.
We finished our “trip to Fairbanks” and spent the rest of the kid’s vacation visiting with friends and family. The “kids” flew home at the end of the two weeks, along with two coolers full of salmon, halibut, moose, bear, and caribou from my brother’s freezer as extra baggage, and the three of us said goodbye to the family for the drive home. I had never been on the ferry system through southeast Alaska and had booked a spot for the bus with a room for us.
We had to drive into the Yukon Territory to get to Haines Junction, where we took the Haines Highway back into Alaska. You can only reach Haines, Alaska, by road from the Yukon Territory. We drove onto the ferry and spent four days sailing through southeast Alaska to Prince Rupert, British Columbia. From there, we drove to North Dakota, back through the border into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie, where we picked up my race car and trailer in Ontario and headed for home.
In total, the trip was 11,700 miles of driving in 31 days, and because of the over $5.00/gallon diesel price at the time, the fuel bill was about $12,000. We had crossed the Midwest, the western prairie, the Canadian Rockies, the Wrangell St Elias Mountain range, the Alaska Range, and the Chugach Mountain range. The bus had over 300,000 miles on it by then and ran flawlessly. We were glad to have made the trip; we saw people we could no longer see and were glad to get home.
