Before: The Plan...
This will be the vacation to beat all vacations. The planning started in the Fall of 1998. At that time, looking out on the calendar to 2001, we almost laughingly said "Let's do it." In the following few months as we grew more weary of the hectic Chicago lifestyle (and perhaps the American lifestyle in general), we progressed quickly from "maybe we'll do this" to "we're going to do this", and as the insanity of day-to-day life in the big city piled upon us, to "we don't care what gets in our way, we're going to do this". And now, it is 2001.

We will leave on June 15th, travelling via land, air, and sea, spending the majority of our time in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. We will be returning home sometime before October 15th. This web-site will give you a preview of our plans, updates along the way (perhaps), and post-trip pictures, journal entries, etc.

In case you're wondering, the way to see these places is not by moving from hotel to hotel. You've got to get out there, and we will be. The plan is a very active hiking/fishing/camping/kayaking "vacation". We have hikes planned that will take us away from roads and towns for 3-8 days at a time, a 7 day kayak trip, and more.


The original plan was to not plan anything really - let the locals guide us on what to do and where to go. In doing some research about the locations we were visiting we quickly found that reservations would make life a lot easier, thus an itinerary was born. It's rather detailed and will most likely be diverted from a bit, but there are some events that are already planned and paid for, so we'll try to stay on schedule for those. Take a look at the itinerary. We've accumulated some good information about the places we'll be going. As great as the internet is, there's nothing like sitting down with a good book to do some trip research. We were suprised at how many published resources are available to research for a trip such as ours. Take a look at the books that we used to prepare (with brief reviews).
You may wonder how two people can live for four months mainly on what they can carry on their back. The answer is... carry a lot of stuff on your back. Check out our detailed checklist of things we're taking along, and if you're interested in where we got all of our stuff, we've accumulated a great set of links to online merchants where we spent a lot of money over the past few years.
Are you going carry a gun (for bear protection)? How did you get so much vacation time from work? Are you quitting your jobs? Who's taking care of your cat? There are a few questions such as those that just about everybody asks. I'm guessing you too may want to ask these, so we've thrown them on a Frequently Asked Questions page. How can you have a web page without one anyway? :-)