Is a drive to the beach for a dip in the ocean the ultimate road trip? Yes, when it’s 5,000-miles.

Yes, when the last 400 miles are a pot-holed dirt and gravel road.

Yes, when it’s the Arctic Ocean.

Mike Lizonitz, 67, and his wife Patricia, 66, made the trip from Pennsylvania in their Kia Sedona, modified for car camping with a memory foam mattress under a homemade shelf for gear storage.

It was, Mike said, “Our last great road trip. We’ve driven to 48 states. We cruised to Alaska from Vancouver, but we’d never driven there.”
Mike said they didn’t feel their trip really began until they reached Mile Zero of the Alaskan Highway, 2,700 miles from home.

The Alaskan Highway is a 1,387-mile, two-lane blacktop, from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska, near Fairbanks. Mike and Patricia car camped for $8 a night, stopped to visit Santa at the town of North Pole and left their mark at Watson Lake Signpost Forest in the Yukon.

At Fairbanks, they rented a 2017 Ford Escape specially equipped with full extra spare and donut, tool box, CB radio and medical kit for life on the Dawson Highway, the last leg. Dalton highway is a 414-mile dirt and gravel industrial road, riddled with potholes and without cell service. Facilities are spartan and spare, there are no gas stations or basic services on the last 240-mile stretch. The terminus is Deadhorse, an oil camp, at Prudhoe Bay.

Taking a day and one-half each way, Mike and Patricia spent the night, though never fully dark, at a self-serve campground sleeping in the rented Escape. The Dalton follows the Alaska Pipeline. Three quarters of the distance is forested, until the “Last Spruce. “Ahead was a vast grassland of the tundra.
Most of the traffic was semi trucks which kick up gravel, dinging windshields. They saw only two private vehicles in 400 miles. At Deadhorse they took a shuttle bus to the Arctic Ocean. Mike waded into the Arctic to his calves, while Patricia dipped her toes in.

It was a trip only 10 of 10,000 visitors who reach Fairbanks complete.

They gassed up at Deadhorse at an automated pump station, paying $5.49 a gallon. They spent $2,000 on gas for the entire trip.

They got back to Pennsylvania after traveling 9,997 miles in three weeks.

Jack Smiles is a feature correspondent for Times Shamrock Communications in Pennsylvania. He was born in 1947.

My dad used to tell me about growing up in the 1930’s when you could invite a passing stranger into your home for a meal and a night’s sleep without any concerns for your family’s safety. This same dad tried to dissuade me from going to Ecuador, warning me that there are plenty of people in the world who might be looking to hurt or kill an American woman of a certain age traveling alone.

The fact is I’ve always been a bit of a loner. I could blame that on my nomadic early life as an army brat, always the new girl in school, never really sure of where I came from or where I belonged and forever the outsider. Or perhaps it’s the selfish streak that won’t allow me to waste precious time accommodating others or compromising my agenda. It could be that it was just the practical thing to do: I wanted to go to Ecuador, so I did it.

As a new retiree, I had done a lot of reading and learned that I would get a lot of geographical and cultural bang for my buck in Ecuador as there was an amazing amount of diversity in a limited area. Several distinct indigenous peoples, the influence of Spanish colonialism, the volcanic mountains, the jungle, the beaches, Quito’s urban sprawl, and perhaps the last “undiscovered” places on earth. And the wildlife. Holy Capybara, the wildlife!

Most compelling of all was the strange cultural duality of the place. It was at once rich and poor. Straightforward and complex. Rigid and freewheeling. From the very first day, I knew I had placed myself directly in the path of some unnamed yearning that had existed for me all my life.

I’m still not sure why I wanted to go to Ecuador but what I found there was a genuine welcome by a proud people eager to show me their country and their cultures. I found insight and enlightenment. Above all, I found personal freedom and the amazing sense of peace that comes from being “off the grid” if only for a couple of weeks.

Linda Caradine is a Portland, Oregon based writer, traveler and animal lover.

You are the voice in my head

Here in Paris, John, you are with me in a new way. When I panic reading the stops as le Metro whizzes through darkness, you calm me. You tell me maybe I miscounted the number of stations before mine. And if I am going in the wrong direction, no problem, get off at the next stop and cross over to the opposite platform.

Paris was the first place we came when we began to travel “across the pond.” We never went anywhere that you didn’t figure out the public transportation from the trams and buses of Krakow to Berlin’s U-Bahn. How you loved studying maps and finding the way. I could not take this journey now had you not taught me how to travel.

You also learned the most economical way to buy tickets. I didn’t do this here in Paris and am spending twice what I should have. Forgive me. I saw the photo booths and knew they were for buying one-month passes, but I never have time. I am always hurrying from one destination to another. Life calls to me again.

I told our friends at home I was going to sit at outdoor cafes, drink lattes, and write, let Paris come to me. But you know I am not that laid-back. I have crammed in as many museums, monuments, and shops as possible. My favorite hours were spent with a new friend in a lush park off St. Germain de Pres. As a silver dusk gathered around us, we told each other the histories of our hearts, who we had loved and how we had lost them. Of course, I spoke of you.

In bed at night in a new place I long to put my face in your hair and send tiny kisses down your spine. You used to tell me to turn around so you could do the same for me. How wonderful your prickly face felt against my skin. Now you come to me in my sleep, and we are together, lovers and friends. Then I wake and lose you all over again.

Soon I will be off to Krakow, the city we discovered together, the place we loved so well. Come with me darling. Continue to be the voice in my head.

Ellen Herbert lives in Falls Church, Virginia

A man and woman from Nebraska celebrate the husband’s recent retirement by traveling to Spain. They think Spain is a unique choice over other possibilities—Caribbean cruise, tour of the Holy Land, National Parks by RV. They are somewhat surprised to arrive in Barcelona and find so many tourists and pseudo adventurers from so many parts of the world also visiting Spain. They form great herds of trudging pedestrians stampeding down Las Ramblas and shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow labyrinthine streets of the Gothic Quarter pushed along past shops of Moroccan leather bags, jewelry from India, textiles from Persia, pastry shops, tapas bars, and paella restaurants, not to mention the recent immigrants from Syria, Africa, and Romania squatting on sidewalks and streets, vending key chains, brushes, combs, wallets, and knives on tablecloths spread over cobblestones, some standing forlorn, destitute, and disappointed.

The couple from Nebraska hold hands for the first time in years as not to get separated from each other as though holding hands might keep them both from getting lost or falling prey to gypsy tricks or refugee desperation. They follow ever-moving crowds of tourists through the ancient streets of several medieval cities, through palaces, castles, churches, and cathedrals where they are not surprised to be charged ticket fees to enter.

In the inner gardens of the Royal Alcázar in Seville they deliberate over taking the time and energy to walk into the labyrinth of cypress hedge some sultan seven hundred years ago ordered built for meditation for the mind and exercise for the body. It remains intact, maintained, trimmed and pruned all these years even as the rulers and religions change. They waiver indecisive for long moments over whether to enter the labyrinth or not.

From outside the paths between the tall cypress hedge, the intricate course of walkways can’t be seen. They see curious expressions on the faces of tourists coming out of the labyrinth and don’t know how long they might have wandered or lingered inside. There is laughter from children chasing and hiding from each other inside, but the laughter eventually stops.

The man from Nebraska is already tired from the hour they stood in line before buying tickets to enter Seville’s spectacular cathedral where they roamed for two hours following audio explanations through headphones. There had been another line for an hour outside the Alcázar so the husband is weary of going inside the labyrinth, this maze whose meaning and purpose he neither cares to enter nor understands.

The wife, however, insists, and pushes her husband, like she so often does, to do things he is reluctant to do and go places he is reluctant to go. This causes a begrudging silence between them as the wife takes her husband’s hand and leads him into the Sultan’s garden labyrinth; and the husband, once inside, releases his wife’s hand and all the accumulated dread and fear unfold.

James Miller Robinson is from from Huntsville, Alabama

Santa Justa Station, Seville, Spain: From a high ceiling glaring circles of light stare down at rectangles of dark tiles where an ant-bed bustle of jacketed men and women, young and old, push and pull rectangular cubes on wheels, some with backpacks or shoulder bags as well. They meander in and out of malformed lines, some with confident purpose and direction, others seemingly lost, blind mice feeling their way toward one ticket counter, snack shop, gift shop, bookstand, café, or advertisement display to the next, never satisfied.

A large group of reluctant gray hairs rumbles in, pausing, awaiting the command of some missing leader, searching out rest one by one on connected rows of metal seats. The women are wearing coats and scarves, the men in jackets and sweaters because the March mornings are still chilly in Seville. There is a muffled chatter full of guttural slurs and lisping aspirations. The women are asking the men if they are sure which train they are supposed to take; and the men, some silenced by uncertainty and doubt, search through bifocals toward black schedule boards where arrivals and departures are spelled out in orange pixeled letters and numbers if only the characters weren’t so small. It is clear that after years of patience and trust in the men they once reluctantly followed, the women have finally arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion of distrust.

They close their eyes in anxiety and fatigue and think of their sons in some distant place in whom there is still some faint glimmer of hope. Giant clocks on either side of the station nave glow with hands that crawl slowly through the sludge of persistent time. Dozens of passengers eventually herd out onto the platforms to be swallowed by trains and slithered away toward unimaginable destinies.

James Miller Robinson lives in Huntsville, Alabama

I had two big reservations about our Kenya Safari.

1. Could I stand all the air travel?
2. Could I stand the other tourists in our group?

Our itinerary from our home in southwest Florida was: Tampa, Philadelphia, London, Nairobi.  Two hours to the Tampa airport from our house, 24 hours on various airplanes and layovers in airports. A total of thirty hours of travel!

Nancy has no trouble sleeping on planes. She is often dozing before the plane leaves the gate.  I’m not so lucky. I’m 6′ 5″ and 250 lbs.  I just can’t get comfortable sitting in an “economy” seat.

I loaded up my phone with podcasts, bought an Amazon Fire tablet with audiobooks and games that didn’t require WiFi. I had battery backups to last 24 hours.

The plane from Tampa to Philadelphia was an Airbus 320. The seats were OK. I jinxed us by commenting: “If I have this much room all the way, I think I can make it.”  I had about three inches between my knees and the seat in front of me. Doable. Even if the seat was reclined.

Yeah, didn’t happen.

The British Airways segments were all Boeing 474’s. “Jumbo Jets” they used to be called. A plane that has been in the air 50 years. I suspect the planes we were on were among the first to fly. Now they are “Cattle Cars” for economy class passengers.

I wear hearing aids. I knew that putting earbuds in with aids probably wouldn’t work, so I packed some old headphones that lay on top of the ear. Not the fancy new over the ear headphones that everyone else had… so they didn’t block out the engine noise. Closed captioning was an option for the first run movies, but it was so small – I couldn’t read it!  ARGH.  The hearing problem kiboshed my audiobook and podcast options. With the volume set as high possible, I just couldn’t understand.

My entertainment for 30 hours +/- of flying consisted of — staring at things. Nancy dozing, the people around me dozing or watching movies/television programs, the back of the seat, the flight attendants.

We toyed with the idea of spending a day in London to break up the trip. We did – and it was excellent advice. I may not have made it from London to Nairobi otherwise.

After the thirty minutes into our first game drive on the third day in Kenya we looked at each other and said “It was worth it.”

The answer to Question 1 is “yes.” The answer to Question 2 is to be determined.

Mark Van Patten writes a blog called Going Like Sixty and has been married to the same woman since 1968.