The car is checked out

The car is a 2004 Suburu Outback. It went in last week for a pre-trip checkup and now has a new battery, brakes, sparkplugs, belts, transmission and differential fluids, and a new outlook. I will put new tires on it by the middle of the month. Then we should be in good shape. I'm figuring about 4000 miles, but that is just a guess. The most challenging stretch for the car will be the Dalton Highway (featured this year on Ice Road Truckers), a mostly gravel highway that serves the Prudoe Bay oil fields. We will drive it about halfway, to Wiseman, a little north of Coldfoot at the base of the Brooks Range.

You can ignore this photo. I was just seeing if I could download a photo from my digital camera. JoJo, the Japanese Chin, will not be going to Alaska with us. We don't need a hyperactive carsick dog penned up with us in a car for a month.

Preliminaries

Our general plans are to leave on Sunday, July 26 and drive by stages to Dawson Creek in British Columbia, where we will pick up the Alaska Highway. We will then proceed to Fairbanks and, after spending a couple of weeks seeing the sights, will depart for home from Skagway via the Alaska Marine Highway System (the Alaska auto ferry). We will arrive in Bellingham, Washington on August 21.

It would be lovely to be spontaneous, but having no desire to sleep in the car when we find that the few motels in town are booked up, we have made a number of reservations for overnight accomodations. Other than reservations for a bus excursion into Denali National Park and the train trip on the White Pass and Yukon Railroad, we will otherwise let the moment determine what our daily excursions are to be.

Any friends and family who would like to follow our adventure are welcome to check here occasionally. I hope I will be able to figure out how to post photos from my digital camera.