~Saturday, February 12, 2022~
Day 608
A day to stay “home” as we begin planning out the timing of our summer route to Alaska and the remainder of 2022. One of the best weather days/evenings of our stay in Tucson so far. Made trip planning on our “covered patio” very enjoyable. Honestly, Alaska is such a big “animal” , it seems an overwhelming task. First of all, it’s enormous with its 580,000 square miles and one-fifth of the total land mass of the entire U.S. 🤪😮And since we’re careful, meticulous planners, we understand the complexities of arranging a road trip such as this (at least we’d like to think so). Here’s a list of some of the things we’re investigating:
🔎What does our optimum weather window look like? (with Borealis Lights on the radar)
🔎What part of the state should we focus on?
🔎The best entry/exit points for our route?
🔎Prioritizing the can’t miss experiences?
🔎Overall budget? Gas will be a biggee since we’ll be putting about 5,000 miles on Hank during this little detour to the Last Frontier (diesel prices as of this writing are about $3.80/gallon to $3.90/gallon in Alaska-at least in the portion we think we’ll be concentrating on). Check out this cool AAA site I found to map it out by county at https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=AK
🔎How will the supply chains be? Example: part replacements
🔎Having plenty of food, water and gas for those long stretches between towns
🔎Road conditions, especially the ones with frost heaves!
🔎Cell phone coverages (evidently worse in Canada than Alaska)
🔎This is a road trip where things won’t always go as expected. What are the backups we should consider? i.e. extra spare tire, extra gas cans……..
It appears that documenting this epic road adventure will require a pen to paper journal when we’re out of cell range and that when we’re back in range, will have its own blog, photo and video folio in hopes of helping others and to help jog my memory 20 years from now. We shall see………