RV Adventures

We are home!!!! After 140 days of travel (approximately 5 months), we are back in our “sticks and bricks” aka “our house.” It was an amazing summer and trip of a life time. We had to postpone this trip the previous two summer, but we finally made it happen.

DATA!

We engineers love numbers, so let’s crunch some….

FUEL

Number miles driven in RV	11,054
Number miles drive in truck	3590
Total spent of diesel for RV	$5819
Total spent on gas for truck	$281
Cheapest diesel	$3.19 Las Cruces, NM
Most expensive diesel	$5.04 Omak, Washington
Cheapest gas	$3.49 (after we left Las Cruces)
Most expensive gas	$7.15 Deadhorse Alaska (Arctic Ocean)

Campgrounds

Number of campgrounds	64
Most expensive campground	$85.50 – This place in Utah tacked on a $20 booking fee! Ouch.
Average cost per night	$34.85

Groceries

Groceries are definitely more expensive up north, especially fresh vegetables. For comparison, let’s take a bag of spinach purchased at Walmart (same UPC code, so truly an apples to apples comparison). In Las Cruces, I paid $1.84 for the bag. In Fairbanks, I paid $2.73. That’s 48% more.

Tours

We spent $4701 on tours which we normally don’t do. We usually drive to what we want to see, but Alaska has so many areas that are not serviced by roads that alternate transportation (boats, trains, planes, etc) are required. And we got off cheap! We didn’t do any of the flight-seeing tours in Denali and on the Kenai Peninsula. That would have made that number even bigger. The biggest cost (but worth it) was the train ride from Fairbanks to Anchorage and its associated costs (getting to train station, flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks). Second biggest was the Fly/Drive adventure to the Arctic Circle. We had won the drive portion of that trip, we just had to pay for the fly portion.

Repairs

Here’s a list of items that broke, not all of them due to Alaska, some are just normal wear and tear. All in all, it’s a minor list compared to what some of our Alaska buddies went through! We got off easy.

• Vent fan in ceiling of the RV living area (not fixed yet).
• Rubber weather stripping wrapping around the screws of the living area slideout (rubber removed, ignoring the issue for now).
• Stone chip in RV windshield early in the trip. The fix with Gorilla tape held the whole summer!
• Garmin RV GPS mounting bracket broke (ordered new one and had it delivered to our family’s house in Boise).
• My laptop got flaky. Spilling coffee in the keyboard will do that. BUT, it WAS 7 years old and Windows 10. I ordered a new laptop and had it delivered to the UPS store in Fairbanks. BONUS: No state sales tax in Alaska!
• 30 amp electrical cord wired wrong. Jim fixed it in Kenai, AK.
• 50 amp electrical cord plug came loose from the extension cord insulation. A new plug ordered and delivered in Boise. James fixed while we dry camping in Great Basin National Park.

Our Thoughts

James and I sat down and compiled some of our thoughts around Alaska and Canada. These are in no particular order.

• We were amazed at the number of paved bike trails. You would find them more than 10 miles outside of the cities.
• There seems to be a system of ATV trails that parallel the highways. It keeps those vehicles off the road.
• So in areas around cities you found a three way road system. Bike path, road, and ATV trail, all in the right of way.
• There was a preponderance of excellent IPA beers (says James…I can’t tolerate the bitterness of IPAs). Everywhere they had one or more on tap. Example: Chicken Saloon in Chicken, Alaska had two taps and one of them was a good IPA. James says “If I would have bought some of all the IPAs I sampled we would have needed a trailer to get them all home.”
• There is an incredible amount of outside eating and lots of food trucks. Our typical (limited) experience with food trucks has not been that great, but most of them in Alaska were excellent. I guess they have to up their game when they are the only option at lots of venues.
• Outdoor beer gardens apparently stay open even in the winter. At one (HooDoo Brewing) they told us the tradition is to stand in front of the outdoor thermometer and get your picture taken drinking beer at -50 F. You just have to drink the beer fast so it doesn’t freeze.
• There are lots of Thai restaurants. Go figure! They claim they have more Thai restaurants per capita than any other place in the USA.
• A VERY large variety of terrain.
• There are glaciers everywhere.
• Every major point seems to be 500 miles away from other major points.
• Salmon salmon salmon everywhere.
• Halibut! James has a new favorite fish to eat.
• The Kenai Peninsula brags about its peonies! Especially in Homer. Go figure, peonies in Alaska!!!!
• The highways are challenging. Most are not smoothed out by cutting into the hills. You are consistently go up and down and have to be on your toes.
• James loved the multistage engine brake on the RV. “It was a lifesaver.” There are so may places in Alaska that you are always going up hill or down hill with no in-between. There were times when James’s hand was on the engine brake for an hour or more constantly shifting between stages to maintain speed. But he almost never had to use the brakes!
• Anchorage is just another big city. It felt like a lower 48 city. Whereas Fairbanks feels like what you think an Alaskan city should feel like.
• It takes two and a half weeks to get an Amazon delivery.
• There is a grocery chain is called Three Bears Alaska which gets the majority of its inventory from Costco. Everything had the Kirkland label on it! Costco is fine with that.
• We went to Costco in Fairbanks more times in the two and a half months were in Alaska than we did in the past two years in New Mexico!
• You need to be flexible with your plans, otherwise the weather can do you in. Don’t make a zillion reservations ahead of time. The only reservation we made was for Denali National Park. You have to be prepared to pivot. Lots of people complained about bad weather, especially on the boat tours. We just looked that the weather was lousy (small craft warnings) went somewhere else, let the weather settle, then went back for the tour. We had perfect weather for our boat tours using this tactic. It also worked to avoid most of the rain, which makes a mess of the gravel roads (we traveled on a lot of them, no choice) and the mud is unbelievable, and tough to wash off. Instead we had a lot of dust, but that is preferable to mud.
• Having a 40 ft long RV did not stop us. You park the RV, unhook the truck and go explore in that. And our RV size may even have been an advantage, since we did have the truck. We ended on some roads that we would not have wanted to do in anything else other than a truck. Too steep (need 4 wheel drive). Too narrow. Too low (tree branches) which could easily have damaged a truck camper. These roads were where we saw lots of wild life.
• The Alaska Pipeline is an engineering marvel.
• We saw the most wildlife off the main roads. Again, hop in the truck and go explore. And finding the weird places Alaskans build houses. We were on some roads that seemed to be more ATV trails than roads, we would go around a corner and someone would have a house there.
• Alaskans are very resilient.
• Dirt will get into your rig everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE!
• There are so few paved highways, they’re only numbered with a single digit. But they are referred to by their names. No one talked about highway numbers, they talked about the “The Dalton”, “The Parks”, “The Denali”, etc, all referring to major highways. It seems daunting at first, be we quickly learned!
• Don’t restrict yourself to strictly a vehicle. You need really need to take planes, trains and boats because there are so many places you can’t drive to.
• Everything is expensive. The exception might be salmon.
• Be prepared. We had a Garmin InReach satellite unit for communications while traveling in areas without cell service. Starlink is a necessity, especially when camping in remote areas. And always carry your bear spray (Costco sells it!). In addition, we had roadside assistance for both vehicles that covered all areas of Alaska and the Yukon. We also purchased Canadian Health Insurance and medivac insurance.
• Solar panels don’t work as well as you might think, especially if they are flat on the roof of your coach. The sun may be out 24/7. But the angle of the sun is so low, the panels can’t do their full output. We never got above about 45% output on our solar array, even at noon on full sun days. The low angle gets you. If you were serious about using solar in Alaska you would have to have moveable panels that tracked the sun.

As I said, we are home now and trying to acclimate to being in a house again. It will take a few days.

Thanks for sticking with us through all these blog posts. They were fun to write and share. It has occurred to me that we need to backup the blog so future generations can see what we did!

Also, I just removed the password requirement from this blog. Feel free to explore our other adventures. There’s 11 years of travel and 220 blogs posts on the blog! https://rv.cjsquare.com

What’s next for us? Maybe next summer will be the Canadian Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Foundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick). I shouldn’t say that too loudly, I might jinx us!