Alaska Packing

By the time we finished our road trips to Kansas City and then the Oklahoma panhandle, our motor home had already been sitting idle for two weeks at Mark's brother's house.

But it will be here for another three weeks. We returned for a few days to do some packing for our trip to Alaska. We are so blessed to have this time and space to get organized! We've packed for vacations while living in our motor home before. But this time it was nice to be in their house where we had extra room to lay out our clothes and supplies. We had to buy some things for this trip, and some extra time during these packing days also gave us a chance to try them out. Do you know what this is?

Mark ordered ice cleats for some of our hiking in Alaska. They fit over our hiking boots and make walking on snowy trails and icy glaciers easier.

He also ordered a new solar battery pack. The first eight days of our Alaska trip will be in a camper van with no electrical outlets to charge our phones. This new device has enough amp-hours to charge a phone about ten times, and will hopefully charge in the sun during the trip.

We are traveling during the dry season, but we are still expecting rain while we are in Alaska. Because most of our activities seem to be outdoors, we also purchased light-weight rain pants to go with our rain jackets. They fold up into a little zipper bag that becomes a zipper pocket when we wear them.

We'll be gone for three weeks, and we plan to do laundry twice in Alaska. So we managed to get seven days of clothing into our carry-on suitcases.

Mark's suitcase is full, and his "personal item" allowed on the plane is his hiking backpack.

Denisa wants to pack our inflatable kayak, but Mark thinks that is a crazy idea. So we will be without our boat and our bikes--two items that would be great to have on a trip to Alaska.

We love motor home travel, where we have everything with us all the time. We have to be so organized and keep everything small when traveling by airplane! So it took a lot of time to get everything whittled down. We also had to whittle down our research material. We bought the 2021 version of the Alaska travel bible--the Milepost. This book came recommended from everyone we know that has ever traveled to this big state. It literally lists every turn out, every gas station, every road-side attraction on every highway---and most of the gravel roads.

Because it also includes the highways through Canada to get to Alaska, we didn't want to have to take the entire book with us. So we basically cut the book in half so we only have to pack the pages that we will be needing for our three weeks on all the drive-able roads in the interior. 

Even though this state is bigger than Texas, California, and Montana combined, it's road system is quite small. Most of its area can only be visited via bush plane. On this map of Alaska, we circled the relatively small part that can be seen on a driving vacation.

For our trip, we will be driving on a triangle of highways in the interior, and then dipping south into the Kenai peninsula.

Most rental cars insist that you drive only on highways. But the company where we are renting our camper van and Class C RV will allow for gravel travel. So while packing, we are also doing research on the condition of the dirt roads we plan to drive. Denisa is checking on the current conditions by making phone calls to the visitor centers at Kenai Fjords National Park, Wrangel-St. Elias National Park, the Kenai Wildlife Refuge, the Chugach Mountains State Park, and any other place with a phone number she can find. We are finding that Alaskans are usually friendly and happy to help. We'll be arriving before the normal tourist season, and some visitor centers aren't open, but they usually have someone answering the phones. This is the view out the sunroom window as Denisa is making those calls.

Mark's brother and sister-in-law are actually in Dallas doing some grandbaby-sitting right now. But they have allowed us to spread out in their home to get this Alaska packing and planning accomplished. We had forgotten how much exercise you get from walking around in a big house all day! After a very social two weeks on the road, it's nice to have this time to finalize plans and do our packing!