North to Alaska

My wife's parents, Luke and Helen, were planning on taking a month long trip to northwestern Canada and Alaska. They live on the eastern shore of Canada, in Nova Scotia. They planned to fly out to Alberta and either rent a car or do a tour bus package. But Sandra and I were newly retired, had just purchased a motorhome, and were looking for interesting places to visit. So we came up with The Plan. Sandra and I would drive the RV from California to Calgary, Alberta, and rendezvous there with Luke and Helen. We'd all travel to Alaska together in the RV and return to Calgary a month later. Luke and Helen would fly home, and we'd drive to the cottage in Ontario for the rest of the summer.

The motorhome we had just bought was a 1985 Dolphin. It's 21 feet from bumper to bumper and is based on a Toyota pickup chassis. It has a four cylinder engine and an automatic transmission. Acceleration could charitably be described as "leisurely." Despite being twelve years old, it had only 20,000 miles on it. Neither one of us had any experience with motorhomes so the intelligent thing to do would have been to take it for a few short trips first, to make sure everything was working before heading off for Alaska and not returning for four months. But we didn't. We just cleaned it up, made sure the various systems seemed to work in the driveway, and headed off for the Great White North. This is the story of that trip.

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This map shows our trip's route.
Table of Contents
[Week 1] [Week 2] [Week 3] [Week 4] [Week 5]