We're Off - Alaska Here We Come!

We are finally taking our long awaited RV trip to Alaska. Our travelling companions for this trip are our friends Bill and Pam Dickey who we met through our Country Coach owners club. After reading everything we can get our hands on including the latest edition of the Mile Post, numerous tour books, and several online web logs we are ready!


Wednesday, May 20, 2009 - The start of our trip today was a fiasco unlike anything we have experienced in any of our previous trips. We loaded the last of the groceries into the motorhome, connected the car, locked up the house and drove out of our driveway at 8:30 AM. As we pulled out of the gate it dawned on me that we had failed to get the GPS out of our truck. Bill pulled over and I walked back to the house and got the GPS. Since we had forgotten the GPS I rechecked my packing list and discovered we had also forgotten our binoculars and with all of the spectacular scenery and wildlife in Alaska we definitely want them for this trip. Bill decided that rather than drive the motorhome back to our house we would pull into the parking lot of the grocery store and disconnect the car so I could drive back to the house and get the binoculars. He disconnected the car and I drove home and got the binoculars. As I was driving back down to the store I noticed a hitch pin in the street and pulled over to pick it up. At the time I was thinking to myself “that looks like the ones we use and it will be good to have it as a spare.” When I arrived at the parking lot and pulled in behind the motorhome Bill got out to connect the car to the hitch. It was at that point he discovered that when he had unhitched the car he had placed the hitch pins on the front bumper and left them there. Somewhere along the ten mile drive from the parking lot to home the pins had fallen off of the bumper and the one I found in the street was in fact of ours. We retraced my route to see if we could find the other pin to no avail so we went to our local RV Repair shop and bought a new pair of hitch pins. We went back to the store, hitched up the car and FINALLY got on the freeway at 11:00 AM. Once we got on our way I called Bill and Pam Dickey to let them know we were finally on our way and would meet them at the Oasis RV Park in Las Vegas as planned. They told me that they also had gotten a later start than expected but they were ahead of us and would reserve a space next to them when they registered. We pulled into the RV Park at 3:30 PM and surprisingly they were pulling in right in front of us. We got set up and drove down to the Strip to show them all the new construction and then had dinner at the Excalibur Buffet. We returned to the coach and watched the season finale of American Idol on television. Tomorrow we will continue on Interstate 15 and probably stop somewhere in Utah.


Thursday, May 21, 2009 – We left Las Vegas around 9 AM and headed north on Interstate 15 with the destination being the East Bay RV Park in Springville, UT which is just south of Provo. The drive was uneventful and other than a couple of detours due to road construction and changes in off-ramp numbering we had no problems. We checked in around 4 PM and settled in for the evening.