Sigh.
Shae and I had been really excited about visiting Alaska this summer, but we made the hard decision this week to postpone our trip up there. Although it’s being replaced by a couple of other states that we’re excited about, it’s still disappointing.
Here’s why we made this decision.
We sat down a couple of days ago to plan out Alaska in more detail. We weren’t due to arrive there until June, but figured we needed to start booking accommodation and some activities ASAP to ensure they weren’t fully booked by the time we got around to doing it.
The process started off OK. Our plan was to travel up through Canada, hitting up a couple of their National Parks – Banff and Jasper – along the way. It would involve a few long driving days, but we’d have fun along the way and we were able to find Airbnb and hotel options on the route.
The problems started to arise when it came to planning where to stay and what to do in Alaska itself. We already knew that it was going to be expensive, but I hadn’t fully appreciated quite how expensive it would be.
Our budget is $100 per day which has to include everything – accommodation, food, gas, activities, etc. Accommodation in Alaska costs more. Food in Alaska costs more. Gas (presumably) costs more. Those factors alone would likely bust our $100 per day budget.
And then there’s everything we’d actually want to do there. Activities in Alaska cost waaaaaaaaay more, or certainly the kinds of once-in-a-lifetime activities we’d be looking to do anyway. We’d likely do a bunch of hiking which is free, but we also want to do helicopter trips, glacier tours, whale watching, see bears catching salmon, etc.
There were some ways we could’ve cut costs. One such option was to go wild camping; although this is something Shae was willing to do, I had no desire to do this. Spending days – or weeks – at a time without a proper toilet is something I have zero interest in.
The End Result
Ultimately, we decided to postpone our trip up to Alaska. We were either going to blast through our budget or not have any money to do anything fun, neither of which we were keen on. We’ve therefore scheduled Alaska for our final year and plan to increase our budget to $200-$250 per day for that portion of the trip to make sure we do it right.
One of my other sites – GC Galore – is starting to take off a little, so hopefully income from that will increase over the next couple of years. Shae is also teaching online with VIPKid and Outschool, so we can save that money up as well. By the time 2022 comes, our increased income and savings will hopefully mean we can splash out on activities in Alaska without worrying about the fact that it’s costing 100-150% more than we’d normally spend.
The Replacements
With Alaska off the table, we had to decide where to visit instead. Seeing as we’d been looking forward to Alaska so much, we wanted to pick locations that we were excited about rather than somewhere like Iowa (no offence Iowa!).
Barring any other changes, the plan now is to visit Colorado and Montana this summer. Both are beautiful states with lots of hiking and other outdoor activities available, so they’ll hopefully make up a little for missing out on Alaska for now.
You have chosen 2 beautiful states. Lee-Ann and her family were there last summer. I was there many years ago. The night sky in Montana is phenomenal. Enjoy!
I can’t wait!
Wild camping in Alaska is probably not something you would want to do with Truffles. When we were in Denali you had to get special containers to hold anything with food so that bears wouldn’t approach your camp site.
That’s a good point – bears attacking Truffles was something we were concerned about too!