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Blog

Alaskan Motorbike Adventure: Part 1

July 5, 2018 Betsy Woods
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Alaskan Motorbike Adventure: Part 1 


This Monday Justin and his dad launched off on a 7,000+ motorbike trip from California/Washington up to the Arctic Circle in Alaska and back again. This trip has been a long time in the making. Justin and his dad love to ride and have been planning on doing an epic motorbike trip together for years. When they first started talking about it his parents were living in Africa and so they were going to ride Cape Town to Cairo. When they moved back to the US a few years ago, Justin and his dad decided to ride to Alaska instead due to logistics. Originally, I was supposed to do the entire trip with them (even back when the plan was Cape Town to Cairo) but as the trip became a reality I decided I didn't relish the thought of sitting behind Justin on a motorbike enough to commit to six weeks of riding (and I'm an ER nurse so I'm not terribly stoked about motorcycles in the first place) so I decided to stay behind and work until they reached Fairbanks and then fly up and join them for the jaunt up to the Arctic Circle + the trip back. Justin's mom is going to join us in Anchorage. How did I luck out with such awesome in-laws?! 

Packing for the trip. It got CRAZY in our van. 

Packing for the trip. It got CRAZY in our van. 

Preparing for this trip took quite a lot of time and effort and involved researching routes and places of interest, researching and purchasing head to toe riding gear, planning out light packable meals and shopping for food, figuring out how to keep camera batteries and other technology charged, purchasing a motorbike, working on that motorbike to get it ready for a long trip, and test packing everything.

Test packing food

Test packing food

Dried goods and seasonings

Dried goods and seasonings

Since Justin just finished residency and we'll be moving/in between jobs, we were lucky to be able to take off six weeks for this trip which means we can complete it in a pretty leisurely fashion. As such, we'll be stopping at a lot of national parks and other places of interest and are taking a different route back that will take us through Jasper, Banff, and Yoho. 

The route up. Coming back we'll take the route to the east. 

The route up. Coming back we'll take the route to the east. 

Justin's dad started the trip from Sacramento and met Justin in Washington at the beginning of this week. We spent Sunday evening finishing last minute tasks and got the motorbikes about halfway packed. From the get-go, we planned to camp the entire trip which obviously means taking more gear than if we were to stay at hotels. As such, they both added hitch mount racks to their motorbikes, especially since there will be two of us on each bike. Could we have gotten by without? Definitely, but one such a long trip it's sure going to be nice to have those little extras like camp chairs. Everything packed up pretty nicely and there's an empty rack waiting for me to strap my dry bag to when I arrive. We continued packing Monday morning and got a little frantic for a couple of hours when we couldn't find some of our camping gear. Come to find out, we'd stashed it in our riding gear bin in the back of the van and had promptly forgotten about it. All is well that ends well. Finally, just before noon, they hit the road and made it passed the border well before nightfall, but not before riding through a hailstorm. We've all decided that if nothing else, this trip is going to be an epic adventure and all epic adventures include a little misery, right? 

Tags Alaska, North America, Motorbike Touring
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@wandering.woods

Is it sad that one of my first thoughts upon waking is how happy I am that it's a new day so I can eat another gummy vitamin? 😂 That has nothing to do with this photo, just thought I'd put that out there.

This photo is yet another from Big Sur and documents the first time we've simultaneously had ocean and campfire views out the back of the van. It's something we could get pretty used to #parkedinparadise
Stormy sea views along Highway 1 from our Big Sur adventure last weekend. The first time Justin and I drove Highway 1 to Big Sur was a totally spontaneous trip. We were dating at the time and he was in med school and had a little time off for some sort of break or holiday. While we were hanging out that evening, Justin said that we should make the most of his freedom and take a road trip. We pulled out a map and after a few minutes decided six hours to Big Sur sounded pretty good. I went home and got some food and my sleeping bag while Justin packed the car and then off we went with no plans aside from finding a campground. When we got too tired to drive, we slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the wee hours of the morning. When we woke up, I found out I'd passed my nursing boards which I'd been pretty sure I'd failed leading to lots of tears and dramatic statements 😁 For that reason and many others, Big Sur will always be a memorable place for me. The moral of this long story is that you should never be afraid to go on spontaneous adventures! Sometimes they turn out to be the best ones.
When your jacket matches the ocean 😍 We stopped at this pullout overlooking the most amazing beach during our Big Sur adventure this weekend. It's hard to see in this photo, but there's actually a waterfall flowing onto the beach and the ocean was such a surreal color of blue. The beach appeared to be private property with a gated road leading down to the beach where a very neatly spaced row of palm trees made us wonder if there used to be a house there. Can you imagine? What would be the view from your dream house?
Ocean and campfire views out the back of the van = a perfect way to spend the weekend. When Justin and I were dating we took a spontaneous road trip to Big Sur and drove by the most incredible campground perched along the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was completely full so we weren't able to camp, but we've never forgotten about it. Well, this weekend, seven years later, our wish to camp there came true and it was every bit as amazing as we thought it would be 😊

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{all photographs copyright of Justin + Betsy unless explicitly stated}