Transportation and Accomodation

We will be travelling by road to Seattle and our trusted 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan with Stow and Go seats will be our vehicle of choice.  This van has been on several long road trips and always behaved well.  We have no reason to expect any less this time.  And yes, we have slept in it, most recently on our trip back from Florida in April when we couldn't get a hotel room for love or money. Usually we use it for sleeping when a rainstorm comes up and we are already in a campground.

Now our accommodations for most of the trip are always a surprise to  people.  We camp.  We don't pull a trailer, we use a tent!!  Yes, I said tent.  Most of our friends think we have rocks in our heads, never mind those we sleep on in the campground.  After last summer's camping trip, we bought a new tent.  It is the biggest one we have had yet, but of course most tents go up quickly now.  They are easy to set up, although we struggled with the rain fly on this one until we got it going the right way over the doors.   Doors plural - two entrances or exits depending on what you need to do in a hurry. The tent is 10 feet by 10 feet and almost high enough in the centre to stand up straight - a huge improvement on our previous tents.

We generally stay at KOA's (Kampgrounds of America).  We are always sure of clean showers and bathrooms, nice grassy areas on which to set up the tent and lots of friendly campers.  We have occasionally stayed in public or state parks but the services are hit and miss.  I have found a couple of private campgrounds for this trip which look promising.

The other component of our transportation and accommodation is of course our cruise ship, since we are doing a 2 week Alaska cruise as part of the road trip.  I will post the picture of the Amsterdam, a Holland America ship, but will save descriptions and details for another post.

We just finalized our homeward bound itinerary and that will be the subject of my next post.