Back in the day (17 months ago), we had planned to travel to Alaska and back during 2020. Unfortunately, COVID-19 happened and we had to figure out a 2020 Plan B. That Plan B was actually a lot of fun, exploring much of the Rockies and the desert Southwest in a masked, socially-distanced way. Still, we continued to hanker for Alaska and (as revealed in our last blog entry) we're trying again in 2021!

The Ciaowagen takes off in a few days, and we want to share more about our plans for the next five-and-a-half months. This blog entry covers Phase 1 of our travels (there will be four or five phases overall).

In a normal year, we would head up to Alaska through western Canada. Unfortunately, the Canadian border has been closed to non-essential travelers since the pandemic began, and it's unclear whether it will reopen in the next couple of months. Therefore, we will bypass Canada on the way up, instead traveling from the Seattle area to Alaska by ferry on the Alaska Marine Highway System. We will leave from Bellingham, WA and sail up through the Inside Passage to Whitter, AK.

We have about six weeks (between mid-May and June 30th, the day of our sailing) to get from Virginia to Washington state. We will take a northerly route as shown in the map above. We hope to check some more national parks off our "never-visited" list on the trek westward, including:

• Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio

• Indiana Dunes National Park in Indiana

• Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota

• Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota

We also hope to see a couple "previously-visited" national parks, including:

• Glacier National Park in Montana

• Mount Rainier National Park in Washington

SIDE NOTE: Alaska is not allowing any cruise ships to visit during 2021, and cruise passengers make up about 1.2M of Alaska's 1.8M annual visitors. Also, no foreign visitors will be coming into Alaska. Due to the much smaller visitor count, we have been able to book experiences in Alaska that would normally sell out a year or more in advance.

Please stay tuned! We'll drop a blog post within a week or two of taking off from Virginia.