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Hi! Thanks for
joining us on our voyage to the land of the midnight sun. I will try to
update this site as often as possible during our 13 night voyage but
there may be times we have no internet access, so be patient. First, a little background on the how we picked this spot to visit. For a few years now we had been talking about how nice trip to Alaska would be. At first we were talking about a cruise but I not really crazy about a cruise and I had heard different stories about the Alaskan Cruises. Although everyone agrees that the scenery is unbelievable, some people I know said it was extra cold standing on the deck of a ship cruising in arctic cold waters. So instead, I had investigated a self drive package offered by Maxxim Vacations. They are an outfit out of St-John's Newfoundland that started offering self-drive, pre-booked tours of Newfoundland and Labrador. The eventually expanded to the Maritimes and lately they have added the Yukon-Alaska Self-Drive to their products. I was impressed on how they handled our friends' Newfie trip. One of the advantages of using their services other than they book everything for you, when you rent a car through their package, it offers unlimited mileage which is virtually impossible to get in Newfoundland or places like the Yukon. After renting a car a couple of years ago in NL, I know what the extra kilometers can do to your final bill. If you want more info on Maxxim's Yukon package click here. So this trip started at the Tartan Pub, where many trips are planned but few come to fruition. The difference this time is I was dealing with Stan Rose. I mentioned that I was looking into the Yukon deal and almost instantly he said, we're in. That's when the wheels started rolling. On January 18th, I called Maxxim and talked to Christina to find out the actual prices from Montreal. The price seemed a little high at first but when I researched the airfare to Whitehorse, I realized that much of the cost of the trip was due to this high airfare. That's when Vancouver came in the pictures. The price of the same package out of Vancouver was $730 less per person. Surely, we could get to Vancouver for less than that. Of course, it helps when you have 15,000 AirMiles and with the special Westjet Airmiles card the four of us can get there for 1600 points and $250 each (with insurance). It was a no brainer. We're saving $1800 and we get to bookend our Yukon trip with a day in Vancouver. The connections in Vancouver were too tight and that's why the extra days. This will give us the opportunity to visit our friends Diana and Ken Lyons in Whistler or Squamish. We are looking forward to this stop on the way up and back. On the banner, you can see the list of cities we are staying. We are actually going through many more places and travelling some mean 'highways'. One drive is supposed to take over 11 hours yet the mileage is only 430 kms. This means travelling at 40km/hr. That seems really slow but who knows? Anyway, when I have internet access, which won't be everywhere, I will either post some pictures or will try to update the text that you can read by pressing the Daily Update button. Enjoy the trip and thanks for virtually coming along. |