Dream Trip To Yukon and Alaska By Road, To Anywhere Else By Any Means At All

Why make the trip at all?

He who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead;
his eyes are closed.

~Albert Einstein

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

Joseph Heller,
Something Happened, 1974

The lover of nature is he
whose inward and outward senses
are still truly adjusted to each other;
who has retained the spirit of infancy
even into the era of manhood.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I had first heard about the Alaska Highway in 1949, when I was 7 years old.

Known then as the Alcan Highway, its entire 1,400 miles had been carved out of northwest Canada and Southeast Alaska in only 8 months by over 11,000 military and civilian personnel.

Thus it was that by end-October 1942, military supplies could be trucked north day and night to help the US Armed Forces defend the Alaskan peninsula.

By mid 1949 when I first heard on the radio about the Alcan Highway, tourists were actually driving the rugged two-laner and surviving to tell the tale. I decided then and there I was going to be one of them.

Fast forward 57 years.

The trip began, without much ceremony, when a packed-to-the-gills car and I started from Washington DC early on August 9, 2006.

"Car" was a used BMW that I had just purchased, a 2001 model 540i, 6 speed, black exterior, black interior, and 59K miles on the odometer.

Attached to it by a little plug-in-the-lighter FM transmitter was my first-ever iPod. What more could I ever want!

More than once over the next 31 days, I actually got to see heaven, covering 10,578 miles to Coldfoot Camp above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, and then back to DC.

With the encouragement of a dear, dear friend, I decided to keep a hand-written daily journal on this, my dream-of-a-lifetime journey to Alaska and back.

I had never done that before on any trip.

I also promised to send emails back to family and friends, sharing travel highlights, whenever I could access the internet. I had never done that, either.

In the pages that follow, you can read all the emails, and see all the photos included with them (plus more).

I hope the emails and photos succeed in giving you a sense of how incredibly beautiful it all was!

Be who you are
and say what you feel,
because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.

~Dr. Seuss