My Trek to Alaska
Preparing for the Trip
After trying the van out on my trips to
Sequoia and
Yosemite
National Parks here in California, I decided to fulfill,
sooner rather than later, a long-standing desire to visit
Alaska. As I was looking for an adventure, I plunged into planning and
preparing for the trip. There was a lot of stuff to do just to
get the house ready for my absence, much less planning the trip itself.
As might be expected, the departure date rushed up on me and I was very
excited and filled with a variety of loose plans for the trip. The only
two things I knew for sure was that I wanted to try
to find the place my parents had lived in Alaska, called "the Butte", and
I wanted to take the van on a ferry trip thru the Inside Passage. Oh,
and I wanted to look at real estate along
the way, for a potential vacation or 2nd home.
A host of secondary goals were also floating around ... visit the Kenai
Peninsula, visit some friends-of-a-friend, see the famed Denali
National Park, do something semi-extreme like a rafting trip or
an airplane ride, and so on. I was all over the place researching things
on the net. In addition, I had put a fair amount of effort into
outfitting the van for the trip, including adding a bike rack and
fixing some leaks in the water tanks, but I spent the most effort
setting up a computer based navigation system.
It consisted of a tiny Fujitsu touch-screen laptop computer that I
bought used on e-bay. It's 8x10x1", weighs about 1.4 lbs, with a
500Mhz processor, 256M of RAM, and a 20 gig HD. It's a cool little
computer on it's own. To that I added the top of the line Garmin
G60-CS handheld GPS unit. It has a color display that is easily readable
in full daylight, can store gobs of detailed maps, runs for 24 hrs
on 2 AA batteries, and is rugged and portable for hiking.
I loaded the computer up with all of the available Garmin and
National Geographic Road and Topo maps for the entire trip. At
any point I had the most detailed 1:24000 scale maps available
anywhere right at my fingertips. As I drove the system kept a complete track
of the trip, including bike rides and hikes, when I would take the
handheld unit with me. It was really cool having that map up there
in the front of the van, continuously showing my position
and direction in realtime. The system allowed me to make much better
travel decisions, especially allowing me to wander around
on dirt roads in strange new lands and never get lost.
When I finally left San Diego, I set out with little in the way
of a plan than an exciting sense of adventure and a full six weeks
to get to Alaska and back!
Click here to see the next Alaska trip web page ...
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