It’s been a while since I took a proper trip. And yet, I have not been staying still.
I started traveling essentially as soon as I had control over it. In childhood, my parents tended to center travel around a fixed location, a weekend house they built on the opposite side of the city in the Pocono Mountains. But once I graduated high school, travel became a bit of an unconscious habit. I don’t really remember the exact progression of my road trips, but I started practicing with the eight-hour drive from Long Island to Houghton during my first bit of college. After my sophomore year in the chaos my life entailed at that time, I ended up starting to take the occasional impulsive overnight trip, starting with a music festival in Illinois. Then I joined the Navy and flew back and forth when I wasn’t driving, and eventually took my first real cross-country trip as a move in 2005, and then back again less than a year later. Really, I look at it as one continuous voyage because I didn’t come back or fly at all along the way. I left New York for California in late fall 2005, and then from there took a six-month deployment across the equator and international date line, to Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Dubais, and then myriad figure eights off the coast of Iran for a while, then back to California via Hong Kong and Pearl Harbor, and then back across the country. By that point in my life I had been to around half of US states (I had a little laminated map) and a total of eight countries, on only three continents. Over the next almost two decades, I continued to travel habitually between work and my hobbies, not to mention the occasional idle meander. I started to track states where I had visited, states where I had worked, and after a business trip to Montana in January 2020, I realized I was within striking distance of all fifty states. With the lockdown in progress, I saw little reason not to just go and explore the backwoods of those seven remaining states. Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska. Along the way I would also revisit the PNW with my car and my own boating gear. But the trip essentially ended at Bellingham, as the border was closed.
I did some more road tripping the next year, when a Grand Canyon paddle trip became available, and then I ended up briefly dating someone in Arizona. Jackson and I and the Volvo checked off a few more states that way.
I have been wanting a “redemption run” to cross the border successfully and drive up to Alaska. Then this year happened. Man, I guess this year snuck up on me but it’s been a doozy. My father had a stroke and died, and the event itself wasn’t as painful as I feared, but boy did it force me to think about the course of my life. I realized that it is time to reboot and reorient, and that this up and through plan with the law practice just maybe isn’t the right answer after all. And I don’t know what is next, but I need a break. I need time off the grid. I need new settings and fresh air. So, it’s time to go to Alaska.
I arranged things with the government back in April to keep most of August and September clear from my hearing calendar, and then went a step further and hired someone to cover the bulk of my hearings for the foreseeable future. Currently the plan is to go yet the final step and simply walk away from the whole practice, helping my employees get jobs elsewhere and referring my cases to a colleague. That is all in motion, and it’s time to get moving. Nothing is holding me back here. Work is squared away; the little that I do need to do on the road I can easily handle remotely. My finances are in adequate shape to coast for a while without worrying about income.
So here I am, a little past due for departure, and I’m realizing that I still have some planning to do. Not a ton, but some.
I realized that if I was driving the Alcan Highway anyway, I’d be close enough to the actual arctic to go just that much further. Canada has a road all the way to the Arctic Ocean, the Inuvik-Toktayuktuk highway. From what I have gathered so far, it’s a challenging road as roads go, but still a road. I can traverse it in my Volvo no problem, certainly with the small cargo trailer; possibly with a larger camper. I’m still doing research.
Back to the “what a year” factor, it was just a few days ago that I learned that I have Lyme disease. So, no big deal, it’s just a bunch of pills for two months, the same two months I had this trip planned. I have actually suspected the disease for a while, but now there is a little less doubt, and some hope for treatment. But the fatigue and joint pain I have been increasingly feeling over the last year isn’t just in my head, it’s not just laziness, something is really wrong. And that makes my kind of think it would be kind of okay to indulge in a slightly more comfortable travel setup. More on that in another post, I guess. As I type this, my Apple TV is showing me a lot of old travel photos just because that’s the screensaver. I must go.
The basic itinerary is pretty simple. I’ve got a couple specific people to connect with, starting with two of my dad’s sisters, in Atlanta and Sacramento. I’ve also got to pick up a boat I bought near Sacramento, and I may be doing some boat transport along the way. I think me and Jackson and the Volvo may also just swing down to Florida for no good reason just so that THEY can get a little closer to my fifty state total. After Sacramento, there are no deadlines or schedules, just north and whatever happens along the way. I’ll decide along the way, I suppose, which is first between Denali and Tutoyaktuk. I think that maybe Tuk first makes sense, but I figure I’ll figure out more detail along the way. There’s a junction point where each is 500 miles in the opposite direction, so distance does not give me an order to visit them in; they are both forks off the same road. And after I have visited both, then I guess I just come home. Meander even.
I am struggling to plot the route on apps, too, just because I can’t find one app that can handle the whole multi-stop route all at once. But basically, out and back again in a circular pattern around the country will be at least 15,000 miles, with room for more. It’ll be around a thousand gallons of gasoline too, almost anyway, and in some spots premium is up to $8 per gallon in deep Canadian backcountry.
I actually opened this document window to just start updating the packing list. I don’t want to just start loading, and I think I’m basically ready to pack and stop worrying about getting the house perfectly ready. I may want to lock some stuff in the storage room, and clean the kitchen and some stuff, but I can still be on the road by the end of the week. Boy that didn’t sound convincing at all.