We (my youngest daughter Amanda and I) have started her senior adventure. We are driving from Denver to Seattle, catching a bus to Bellingham, WA to the ferry that runs through the Northwest Passage known as the Alaska Marine Highway. We will travel by ferry to Homer. We will then catch a bus to Anchorage and fly back to Seattle. From there we plan on driving to a friend’s cabin that sits on the western end of Yellowstone and spend 3-4 days touring Yellowstone National Park. From there we then drive back to Denver.
Last night we camped in western Wyoming. We drove until about 8:15. We stopped at a KOA campground in Lyman, WY. It was the first time I felt relaxed since I quit work. I have been a total road warrior in all the driving and working on the boat so far. We set up a tent, played games until it was to dark to see without a flashlight and then went to sleep. It made me aware of how much I have been pushing and I need to slow down.
These senior trips started with my oldest daughter Sara. She wanted to know why I had been doing adventures with my son Tim through Scouts and they never got a chance to experience these kind of trips. Up to that point I am not sure if I wasn’t aware of their need for adventures or never thought about it. I told her that when she graduated we would go on an adventure. The only rule was it needed to be a challenging adventure (ie no sitting on the beach outside the hotel). It would need to challenge you physically and mentally. Suggestions I gave were things like a white water raft trip down the Grand Canyon, hike the Colorado trail, do a long bicycle trip, etc.
The trip my daughter chose was to sail from Key Biscayne to Key West and back. We would need to pull the boat 2000 miles and back as part of the trip. This was a compromise from what she first suggested, which was to sail from Key West to San Diego. That would have been a real adventure. She then suggested sailing down the whole east coat of the US. I needed to put a restriction in of a total trip of 3 weeks. This was the most time I would be able to take off from work on a vacation.
My son decided he wanted to sail to the Bahamas from Florida. We pulled the boat to Florida again, spent a week sailing with our Boy Scout troop on a charter boat and then took off for the Bahamas. This was a stretch for me as it was my first off-shore experience. As with most things that you have a fear of in your mind, it was much worse in the mind than the trip across. We had a great nine days and did a night crossing from the Berrys back to Bimini. We then got chased out by a hurricane, but stayed ahead of it.
Both of these experiences, as many of sailing experiences, have set me up for the grand adventure I am taking off on later in July. As the Winter Warlock in the Christmas show Santa Claus is Coming to Town says, “to get anywhere you need to put one foot in front of the other and soon you will be walking out the door”. As I journal here, I hope to share with you those different steps I have had the experience to take to bring this adventure to fruition.
The adventure in this trip is going to be our forms of transport and sleeping conditions. We are driving 1100 miles to Seattle, use public transportation to Bellingham, ride a ferry of an unknown distance for a total 8 days, catching a bus from Homer to Anchorage, flying back from Anchorage to Seattle and then driving back to Denver via Yellowstone National Park.
For sleeping arrangements, we plan on tenting while driving and staying in a Hostel in Juneau. On the ferries we will have a couple different types of arrangements. The first leg of the trip we will be sleeping in deck lounge chairs and on the second and third legs we will be in a “sleeping” cabin which is suppose to only have two sea berths.
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