Moving to Alaska: Day Two

I awoke feeling MUCH better about the load I was towing but still will wonder if it is too much until I get over the mountains. But nothing I can do about it at this point (or later really, since I will already be there before I know anything). On today's drive I did a few touristy things. One is to visit the grave of the longest lived Confederate veteran of the Civil War, who passed away in 1951. 

I also went to the Natural Bridge in Alabama, which is the longest natural bridge east of the Rockies. I have seen a few of these before but this one is pretty impressive. I made a short visit to the birthplace of the King in Tupelo (though only the outside items; I couldn't bring myself to buy a ticket just to look inside a couple small buildings). And for the literary folks, I made stops at the home and grave of William Faulkner. What is of note with Faulkner's grave is that he drank whiskey and people apparently take a bottle to the grave and do a shot with him then just leave the bottle. However, no shots for me since I didn't have any and none were waiting for me. Of course, a lot of this driving around was in an attempt to find my tenth letterbox in Mississippi (and I failed). For some reason I have decided I don't just want on per state, I want double digits. So I guess I have to come back here and go south next time as that is where most of them are hidden.

Anyway, after that I sped on to Memphis to plant a letterbox in a cemetery. I was in a hurry because it was getting dark and best case, most cemeteries close at dusk. Low and behold, this one was open until 10pm!!! Had I known I would have not worried. I highly recommend you visit Memorial Park Cemetery and find the Crystal Grotto. It alone is worth visiting the cemetery (and what drew me here).

I also stopped to go grocery shopping. I know, you are thinking "really, he has to talk about that in this blog?!?" but there is a reason. When I came out I actually checked the chains on the trailer which I have been pretty good about doing every morning but since I knew I had hit a few low spots near the end of the day, wanted to check again. And what I noticed about made me cry. The cable that powers the lights on the trailer had come unplugged and the actual plug was melted from road friction and unusable!!!

So in my head I am thinking "Hell no I am not reloading this trailer, you will just cut the end of the cable off and attach a new connector" but then I realized it was a jumper cable, maybe 4 foot, so I just needed to replace the jumper and I would have lights again.

So for the first full day the cat did fine, mostly slept in the backseat and I got my butt kicked letterboxing; that is the down side to hunting in a place with no real active people and older boxes.

Start: Oxford, Alabama

Stop: Memphis, Tennessee

~430 Miles Driven

~5.4 Miles Walked
6 Letterboxes Found

6 Letterboxes Not Found

3 Letterboxes Planted

Pictures will be posted on Facebook in this album (and the link will be included in all future posts for this trip):

Moving to Alaska Photos

Moving to Alaska: Day One

Well today is the day. I picked up a UHaul trailer and spent the weekend packing it. I have been targetting a noon departure for the last couple weeks. And I am a packing savant since to me it is just a giant game of Tetris, and I was VERY good at Tetris back in college when I played it. The normal rules of travelling and packing with me is make a pile of all the stuff so I can see it and just stand out of the way unless I specifically ask for an item. However, this time it is different since I have to drag that crap all the way across country and over the Rocky Mountains three times!!! So of course that means on the night I am stating an epic roadtrip I was up until after midnight finishing the packing and woke up at 3am to start pulling things out of the trailer. I had done a mental approximation and was afraid I had too much weight since I am towing with a small car, so have a much lower maximum than most people who do things like this. Anyway, I rearranged/repacked and took out about 150 pounds of stuff. And I only missed my ETD by about an hour.

The first day was not designed to be a long one, hence the noon start. It was more to avoid having to start at 6am the next day and fight rushhour traffic all the way across Atlanta. So I was only going to around Talladega in Alabama. I had scoped out a campground close to where I would be letterboxing so planned stay there the first night.

So back to the tale, I was planning to do some letterboxing around Cheaha State Park. I went to the state highpoint, I power hiked down a trail well after dark and had to climb a ton of stairs to get to the spot, I never got a call back on my reservation voicemail at the campground, which I would not find anyway since I just drove to where I had mapped it on the GPS, and eventually just headed back near the interstate to get a hotel. Oh, and remember that trailer that I removed weight from? It dragged a lot and struggled with the hills in Alabama. That does NOT bode well for the Rockies...

About the time I was finishing for the day I was texting my friend Erica a bit since she had helped me with the final packing and even mailing the 150 pounds I previously removed. The gist of the conversation was that I had a slower day coming up a few days from now in Oklahoma so I was going to remove and mail some stuff from the trailer (again). But she mentioned/volunteered that her boyfriend DOES live about 20 minutes away from where I was staying so maybe I could just go ahead and do it then and be done with it. [Mental Process: Find strong boxes, unload trailer, reload trailer, pack boxes, find post office, ship versus unload trailer, reload trailer, have Stewart take stuff to Erica to pack and send (who obviously loves me for even suggesting this)] Once I finally talked to Stewart, I began unpacking the entire trailer in the hotel parking lot because of course, the item I knew was the heaviest was center/front/bottom. I had about half of it out when Stewart and his two sons arrived and we quickly got it out, then I want through a few things trying to scrape together another 50-100 pounds of stuff (computer stuff, tools mostly) to also have shipped. I was up way too late and completely exhausted but glad to have that done. So again, thanks Stewart and Erica.

Start: Suwanee, Georgia

Stop: Oxford, Alabama

~200 Miles Driven

~8.5 Miles Walked
4 Letterboxes Found

1 Letterboxes Not Found

0 Letterboxes Planted

Pictures will be posted on Facebook in this album (and the link will be included in all future posts for this trip):

Moving to Alaska Photos

Back From the Dead

OK, so this post is really a multiyear catch up post but the Readers Digest version is that I am moving to Anchorage Alaska and thought reviving my old blogger account was a simple way to at least try and keep in touch with friends and to stay connected while on my long drive across country. Yes, I am driving to Alaska and not taking an even remotely logical route. Oh, and there is a cat with me.

Here is the background for those who may not know it. In early 2012 I started going out with a girl, Thao, and just about the time we really started to figure stuff out, she was offered a job (which she has previously applied for) with the Peace Corp in Africa. She actually turned that down, in some part because of me (or at least that is what I keep telling myself). Well, a couple weeks later she was offered a internship through the CDC (which I actually helped her work on, what was I thinking?!?). A slight pause here, she already worked at the CDC in the Hepatitis lab but wanted to get more into Public Health and Policy so anyway, she was offered a job with the CDC but unfortunately for me and us, they assign you a place, you don't get to pick. And she was offered Anchorage, Alaska!!! I asked her if there was any chance I could talk her out of it again and was pretty much told "no". So long story short, we decided that while we had not been together a really long time, there seemed to be something good happening there so we were going to try making it work since it was only a two year assignment.

A two year assignment you say? So why am I moving? Well, the entire point of the program is to train people to get them into state Public Health jobs. And after about 18 months with the CDC program she actually accepted a fulltime job with the State of Alaska. So now there was no longer an "deadline" for her time there and after many long conversations about us and our future, I decided to go so spent 6+ months getting rid of as much stuff as I could and started planning to move. The funny thing is, it would have probably happened sooner but in January we had purchased tickets to visit Vietnam and I thought it would be silly to fly across country just to fly back so did not move over the summer when it made more sense. Now, I am actually worried about snow on the trip so hopefully it will just stay away until the end of October.

Back to the trip. So this is a vacation/roadtrip/letterboxing opportunity for me. Yes, for those who don't know, letterboxing is a major hobby of mine so that is part of why I am taking such a bizarre route; I am on the hunt as well. If you don't know what it is, a little simple research will help you understand but the Cliff's Notes version is someone hides a rubber stamp, writes clues to direct you to the location. You follow the clues (some extremely simple, some damned near impossible) and find the stamp, take am imprint of it for your logbook and imprint your own personal stamp (your avatar is a good way to think about it; an image that is "you") the put it back and move on to the next one. It is similar in concept to the much newer geocaching (1854 versus 2000) for those of you who are familiar with it.

So I am taking a route that roughly is outlined below with "highlighted" stops for letterboxing and/or touristing.

Day 1: Suwanee, Georgia to Talladega, Alabama with stops in Cheaha Mountain State Park and the Talladega National Forest.

Day 2: Talladega, Alabama to Memphis, Tennesse with stops in Tupelo, Mississippi, Oxford Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee.

Day 3: Memphis, Tennesse to Murfreesboro, Arkansas with stops in Little Rock, Arkansas and Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Day 4: Murfreesboro, Arkansas to Denison ,Texas with stops at Crater of Diamonds State Park (because really, how cool is it to be able to dig for your own diamonds?!?), Texarkana, Arkansas/Texas and Eisenhower State Park.

Day 5: Denison, Texas to Ardmore, Oklahoma with most of the day spent at Lake Murray State Park, Oklahoma.

Day 6: Ardmore, Oklahoma to Glen Elder, Kansas with stops in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Wichita, Kansas.

Day 7: Glen Elder, Kansas to Kearney, Nebraska with stops at Smith Center, Kansas (middle of continental US) and Phillipsburg, Kansas (to visit a friend).

Day 8: Kearney, Nebraska to Laramie, Wyoming with a stop at the Nebraska State Highpoint and a dip into Colorado to find and plant a letterbox (yup, not much else of note happening this day).

Day 9: Laramie, Wyoming to Ogden, Utah with, well, no real stops along the way other than to get out of the car every couple hours. This is "Cross the Rockies, Round One" Day. The other one or two will be in Canada.

Day 10: Ogden, Utah to West Yellowstone, Montana with a stop at what sounds like one of the best rest areas I have ever heard of in Blackfoot, Idaho.

Day 11: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming with a side trip through Montana to find and plant letterboxes.

Day 12: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

Day 13: West Yellowstone, Montana to Twin Falls, Idaho with a stop at Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho.

Day 14: Twin Falls, Idaho to Pendleton, Oregon with stops at Shoshone Falls and Idaho, Boise, Idaho.

Day 15: Pendleton, Oregon to Seattle area, Washington with nothing planned. I am going to stay with friends in Alki Beach and pick Thao up at the airport on Day 17; this is just my buffer in case I get behind schedule for some reason.

Day 16: Seattle area, Washington

Day 17: Seattle area, Washington to Vancouver, British Columbia with stops at SEATAC Airport to pick up a certain girl... then we are spending half a day in Vancouver just being tourists.

Day 18: Vancouver, British Columbia to Prince Georgie, British Columbia

Day 19 through 21: now it gets interesting; there are two routes and the option will depend on the weather. One is to cut back over the Rockies to Dawson Creek, British Columbia and take the Alaska Highway. The other is to head up the Cassiar Highway through British Columbia which meets back up with the Alaska Highway at about mile 650. These are mostly driving days as there are not a lot of things to stop at see. To give folks an idea, it is approximately 2200 miles from Seattle to Anchorage so that is still a VERY long way to go.

Day 22: Arrive in Anchorage, Alaska and start my new life.

Pictures will be posted on Facebook in this album (and the link will be included in all future posts for this trip):

Moving to Alaska Photos