I hope you enjoyed the posts reviewing 2025. So what are our plans for 2026? Read on!
This year will be a bit different: we’ll be staying in one place for longer than we have since starting the RV lifestyle, then will do a trip through Canada to Alaska and back, followed by a cruise to a different part of Alaska.
In previous years, we spent one, two, or occasionally three weeks at each location, or only staying one or two nights if we were “sprinting” across the country. But now we are spending the first three months of the year in one place, in Phoenix, Arizona. For several reasons: to spend winter in a sunny warm area, to attend baseball spring training games, and for a change of pace.
In April, we will head over to Los Angeles, California, then “sprint” up the west coast to our home base in Shelton, Washington, where we’ll stay for about seven weeks — also longer than usual.
In June, we’ll head north through Canada to Alaska, where we’ll knock off our penultimate state, and seven of the eight National Parks — driving to two, a couple of flying day-trips to four parks, and taking a boat day-trip to one. Plus of course lots of other sightseeing, while continuing to work (yay for Starlink!). We’ll head south through Canada again towards the end of August, arriving home early September.
Astute readers will notice that I said we’d miss one of Alaska’s National Parks; that’s because one of them (Glacier Bay NP) can’t be easily reached from our travel route. There’s no road there, and would require both a plane and boat to reach (and an overnight stay). We read that the usual way to access it is via a cruise ship… so we decided why not, let’s go on a 7-night Alaska cruise a couple of weeks after getting back from our RV trip! That’ll be a fun experience; our second-ever cruise ship (the first was a very different 4-night cruise to Mexico in 2010).
That takes us to around the end of September. After that, we’ll probably head south again to spend the winter somewhere warm… probably with another Disneyland visit (since we’re Magic Key holders until November), and maybe back to Arizona again, or perhaps somewhere in California, Texas, or even Florida; we haven’t planned that far ahead yet.
A lot of this is still very tentative; we’ve currently booked some key campgrounds in Alaska, plus the National Park excursions and the cruise. But we haven’t yet booked stops along the way.
It’s a long way to Alaska, but this route should be a little shorter than last year, at around 10,000 miles total, depending on where we finish up for the year.
Here’s a map that shows the country and state outlines, colored time zones, our travel route, and pins for stops. Our route begins in Phoenix, heads north up the west coast, through Canada on the eastern route on the map (the Alcan Highway), up to Fairbanks at the northernmost point of our route in Alaska, then south to Seward, Homer, and Valdez, before returning through Canada on the western mapped route (the Cassiar Highway), and back home to Shelton, Washington. The map doesn’t show plans beyond that, but might be retracing our steps back to Phoenix or similar.
Another variation of the map, that shows a little more detail, but the borders are less visible:
And here’s the route of the cruise ship:
It’s going to be another busy year. I hope you’ll follow along via this blog and the YouTube channel.
