Canada/Alaska Itinerary.

May 20, 2016

Here we are 2 weeks from departure.  Reservations have been made for our nightly stays, flight reservations into Calgary and back home, rental car for the 23 day trip, and our ferry reservations in Alaska and Vancouver.  We have spent countless hours reading material we sent away for, blogs from many professional and non-professionals, and tourism websites. The internet is a wonderful thing!! One thing I am convinced of is that we will not be able to see everything there is to see while we are gone. But I am super excited about what we will see. Below is our schedule which will include traveling over 6000 miles through what looks like marvelous country side with beautiful vistas along with hopefully lots of animals along side the road.  Would like to say we will post daily but it will depend on how good the wifi is in the hotels.  We have heard it is not good , so we shall see.
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Day 1  -Fly to Calgary

Day 2-  Leave Calgory, Alberta and drive to Banff, Alberta then on to Golden BC.  

Day 3 – Leave Golden, BC then to Lake Louise then on the Jasper, BC via the Icefield Parkway

Day 4 - Join the AlCan Highway to Fort Nelson, BC

Day 5 - Travel AlCan Highway to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Day 6 - Travel to Delta Junction Alaska - end of the AlCan Highway

Day 7 - Travel to Fairbanks, Alaska then on to Talkeetna, Alaska

Day 8 - Travel to Anchorage then on to the Kenai Penisula

Day 9 & 10 - Travel to Homer Alaska and  Seward (where we will do a glacier tour) then on to Wasila, Alaska

Day 11 - Travel from Wasilia, Alaska to Destruction Bay, Yukon

Day 12 - Travel from Destruction Bay, Yukon to Haines, Alaska

Day 13 -  Board the Ferry from Haines to Skagway then on to Teslin Yukon

Day 14 - Travel from Teslin to the Stewart Cassier Highway into British Columbia

Day 15 - Travel from Stewart to Smithers 

Day 16 - Travel from Smithers BC to Prince George BC

Day 17 - Travel from Prince George to Whistler

Day 18 - Travel from Whistler down the Sea to Sky Highway to Vancouver Island

Day 19 - Investigate Vancouver Island and Pacific Rim National Park

Day 20  - Travel from Vancouver Island to Wine Country around Kelowna BC

Day 21 - Travel from Wine Country up into mountains around YoLo National Park

Day 22 - Travel down to edge of Glacier National Park and Radium Hot Springs

Day 23 - Travel back to Calgary to fly home the next morning.

St Louis Adventure

Matt managed to get a full weekend off and we schedule our next trip to spend the weekend with him.  It turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous weekend.  Sunny and not too hot.  Couldn't have asked for better weekend.  Of course the company helped make it great.

Fritango''s

We started the weekend off on Friday with Lunch at Gioia Deli.   The sandwiches were fantastic as is most food on The Hill (the Italian section of St Louis). Sandwiches were huge and delicious.    For dinner we meet Hannah and really stepped out of my comfort zone and went to a Nicaraguan restaurant, Frittango.  Oh my was it good.  We had plantains cooked several different ways.  They serve a lot of beef in Nicaragua, so most of the dishes were beef cooked and spiced in several ways,.  Served with rice.   


Day two started off with a trip to the St Louis Zoo It was beautiful and really crowded and I think all of St Louis was there.  Dave and Matt dropped Hannah and I off and it took them forever to find a place to park.  We had lunch at Guerrilla Street Food shop - awesome dishes with jasmine rice and different kind of meat.  Soooo good.  Then dinner was at Tuckers Steak House.  Steaks were cooked perfectly, service was great - nice end to a great day.


Sunday was just as beautiful and Saturday.  Nice breeze and sunny.  We decided to drive south to St Geneveve and tour some of the wineries and breweries there.  Upon the recommendation of someone we met at the Crown Valley Brewery we went to Chaumette Vineyard and Winery where we tasted some just okay wine but had a great lunch out on their deck looking out over the fields of grapes.  The food was great as was the company.

Looking out from dinning deck into the vineyard.

Matt and Hannah

St. Louis is a beautiful city with many things to do and filled with quaint little restaurants that are not chains.  Well worth the trip

Preparation for Alaska and Canada

Not only is this our first long trip during retirement but it is also my first attempt at doing a blog, This trip all started when a package arrived in the mail from Alaska that Dave had sent away from.  I looked at it and said when are we going.  Not expecting a concrete answer I was a little surprised when he said how about this summer.  So we began really talking seriously.


We have been talking, and talking about this trip for several months.  We finally decided that we would go in June and then began the preparation of deciding how long we would be gone, how we would go, where to start and finish.  We sent away for information from the various tourism boards in British Columbia and Alaska.  A lot of "stuff" came in the mail and I guess it is a real shame that we do not fish especially in Alaska.


We talked to our travel agent and she encourage us to go into Alberta Canada to the IceFields Parkway.  I spent some time looking at the beautiful pictures of this Parkway and decided I wanted to do this while we were there.  This changed the amount of time we would be gone and how we would go.  More later -- still trying to figure this out.