Great Alaskan Road Trip: Week 1 Roundup

Our campsite at the Cottonwood Campground in Canyon de Chelly

For those of you who are into that sort of thing, I’ll track a few statistics each Friday.  Here’s what we have so far:

• Miles driven: 541
• Days on the road: 4
• Fuel stops: 1 (diesel: $3.91/gallon in Joseph, AZ)
• National Park Service sites visited: 2 (Petrified Forest, Canyon de Chelly)
• National Forests driven through: 2 (Tonto and Coconino)
• Bears sighted: 0 (we fully expect this number to increase)
• Dogs riding in motorcycle sidecars while wearing goggles: 1 (for real! Couldn’t get to the camera in time for a photo, though.)
• Mule-driven covered wagons: 1

I will be sure to add other categories as events warrant.

So far, camping in the van has been pretty great.  It is nice to have everything you need with you as you drive around.  The only drawback is worrying about theft (there have been signs at every Canyon de Chelly viewpoint warning you not to leave valuables in the car).  But Kevin has rigged up an alarm system so hopefully that is a deterrent.

Something else we have learned along the way is that we need to take advantage of electricity hookups to charge all of our gear.  We forgot to top off our cell phones at the last KOA and our laptops are real power hogs.  And God forbid if one of our electric toothbrushes runs out of power!  So we need to remember to keep everything fully charged so we can run the generator as little as possible (it guzzles propane like you wouldn’t believe, plus you try not to run it too often out of courtesy to the other campers around you).

We made several attempts to find a wi-fi signal to get these past few posts uploaded for you, but to no avail.  Either the signals we found were too weak, or required a password, or the network was too slow to upload the post.  So bear with us when we are in remote locations, uploads to the blog might be sporadic.  There might be a few days with no posts, but then several posts all at once when we find a location with internet access.  

As I type this we are still at the Cottonwood campground in Canyon de Chelly, hiding out inside the van because it is too windy and dusty to sit outside and enjoy the outdoors.  Hopefully the wind will die down when we head to Monument Valley tomorrow.

We are glad we aren’t camping in a tent in this wind – most of our neighbors’ sites look something like this: