Great Alaskan Road Trip: Week 13 Roundup

Each Friday, I post some relevant (and not-so-relevant) stats about the trip, as well as a little write-up of what it’s like to live out of a van for weeks on end. Here’s where we are overall:

• Total miles driven: 8151
• Total miles by ferry: 489
• Total days on the road: 88
• Total nights in a hotel: 4
• Total miles hiked: 100.94

Here are some interesting stats for this week:

• Fuel stops: 2 (diesel: $4.28 in Soldotna, $3.94 in Girdwood, AK) 
• Bears sighted: 2 (fishing)
• Birds of Prey sighted: 3 Bald Eagles  
• Sea Lions sighted: 4 (plus 8 seals)

We’ve had a couple of people send in questions about life in the van/RVing, so I thought I’d answer those today. 

Q: So do you and Kevin want to kill each other yet?

A: Good question.  No, we’re almost 90 days in and we aren’t quite homicidal yet.  But, two people living full-time in a van can be a little confining/restricting.  There’s not a lot of autonomy – neither of us can just “run to the grocery store” like we can at home.  No, we both have to go and we have to take the whole house.  Also, we can either have a sofa or a bed but not both, so if one of us is tired it means bedtime for both of us.  We’re still enjoying the trip, but I think we’re both looking forward to being on the home stretch.  (And living in a house again.  With more than one room.)

Q: Are there many families with children exploring the national parks?

A: Definitely.  I think more so in the lower 48 since it’s expensive to get to many of the National Parks in Alaska and some of them would be a challenge for parents with very young kids.  For example, unless your toddler really enjoys 6-hour-long bus rides, maybe you would save Denali until the kids are at an age when they don’t mind being confined to a bus while spotting wild animals, etc.  But in parks where you drive yourself around the park at your own pace, like Yellowstone and Arches, we saw lots of families, most of them in rental RV’s.  It can be a fun way to explore the national parks (and much cheaper/more comfortable than a hotel for a family of four).

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While I’m on the subject of rental RV’s…back when we lived on the boat, we were often concerned when a chartered (rented) sailboat came and anchored in front of us.  Mostly because the charter boats often weren’t equipped with enough anchor rode for the depth of some of the anchorages, and sometimes because their crews didn’t know how to properly set and back down on their anchor.  We did have a few incidences where other boats dragged toward us.  But up until this week, we haven’t had a reason to feel nervous around any rental RV’s – most people know how to park a car, and parking an RV isn’t all that different. 

We noticed this boat in the Valdez small boat harbor.  Love the name!

That all changed on Tuesday.  We had settled in for the evening at an RV park near the Matanuska Glacier.  I was reading and happened to glance out the window at a wife standing in the empty spot next to us, shouting in frustration and waving her arms.  As I looked on, I saw her husband ineptly trying to back a 24-foot class C motorhome into the spot.  He wasn’t the only one to blame, she was giving him horribly vague directions.  I glanced over and saw Kevin watching as well – then he sprung up, and was like “Honk the horn!  HONK THE HORN!”.  I looked back outside and the motorhome’s back bumper was just a few feet from our front bumper while still reversing – the guy had obviously cut his wheel the wrong way and was backing diagonally across his spot and into ours. 

Thank goodness he realized it before contact was made.  We watched with a wary eye as they finally maneuvered the vehicle into the spot, and breathed a sigh of relief once they turned off the engine.  Unlike with a boat, at least when a motorhome is parked, it’s parked – as long as they remember to set the parking brake there’s no chance of “dragging”, right?

Nobody on either side of us here in Valdez.  Guess we can rest easy for tonight!