My Great Alaskan Adventure

Vanessa

I’ve been dreaming about this blog post for months. About 8 months, actually. I guess I still haven’t gotten over the shock that selling a house and driving up the Alaskan Highway with a trailer full of all your belongings can cause a person. Everyone you talk to in Alaska that has moved up from the lower 48 has their own story of the move. Each one is unique. Here is mine.

From the very beginning, the trip to Alaska seemed doomed. Overloading our trailer seemed like a good idea when looking at the aspect of, “Hey, it’s hard to buy everything you need on a tight budget in AK. Let’s just take it with us.” We very quickly figured out the poor logic of that decision. Not only was our trailer and truck bed fully loaded with household goods, only very few belongings fit in the cab of the truck for easy access. NO LUGGAGE! Yeah, not pretty.

The first week after our trailer was packed and ready to go, we stayed with family until we had the necessary paperwork to leave. As we waited, we noticed our tires getting lower and lower but thought it might be our imaginations and the tire gauge told us that the air level was lower but nothing too low. The day were set to leave, I was in agony and a quick trip to the doctor led to a diagnosis of strep throat. My worry was getting antibiotics in Canada if anyone else in the family were to get ill. My hubby’s was for the tires. When we finally got on the road, it was a holiday and tire stores were closed but we thought we could make the drive to Montana and get the tires checked there. The trip to Montana was…stressful. Anyone who has driven with a loaded trailer can tell you about the anxiety that alone can cause but we could tell something was wrong and it made the first leg of the journey very tense. Montana is gorgeous. The sky really is BIG, ha! After hours of waiting to get new tires, unloading part of our trailer in public. Our trip began at the very beginning of September, and let me tell you, North Montana was FREEZING! Leaving from Utah, with warm weather behind us, my sleepy over taxed brain was not ready for that! We stayed at a hotel where the alarm went off in the room next to us starting at the 3am and not stopping until after 7. Logic says I should have called the front desk. I guess logic left me that night.

The next day was spent in awe of Canada. It is a beautiful place. We stayed at a very shady hotel where we saw many questionable things. Walking out to our trailer, we saw one of our brand new tires was completely deflated. We called a tire place (turns out not Canadian Tire across the street which is oddly enough, more of a department store) and we were able to have someone drive to our trailer and replace the tire. The whole process took around five hours from start to finish. We were very pleased to get back on the road. Our goal was to beat any early bad winter weather.

After another day of driving in beautiful Canada, we noticed our trailer was steadily getting lower on the tires. Our anxiety was high, and we had constant prayers in our minds. At the very end of the night, we drove over a bridge that was We stopped that night in a lovely town called Fort St. John. That’s when we saw the trailer was completely resting on the tires. No space in between the tires and the trailer. Not good. Heavenly father got us to that town. We got a hotel and made plans