Fellow Travelers
2005-2006
During our year long trip around North America, we were fortunate to have a chance to share and enrich our experiences with a wide range of interesting people from all over the world who we met along the way and/or who joined us for awhile. Here is a glimpse of a few of these wonderrful folks.
While on a day-long cruise amongst the islands and glaciers of Prince William Sound from Valdez, Alaska, we spent much of our time with John and Kathy from Wisconsin.
In Talkeetna, Alaska, we took a train out into the wilderness. The train stops wherever anyone needs to get on or off. We rode with this couple for awhile. They have a cabin some two hours by foot from where the train dropped them off and they were headed there for the weekend. Note their rifle on the right. This is grizzly country!
This German couple is one of several we encountered in RV parks along the way. We spent an enjoyable evening chatting with each of them; in this case just outside Denali National Park in Alaska.
We camped next to this young man at Moon Lake State Park in Alaska. He is from Japan, and is on a two-year solo bicycle trip through North and South America!
Just outside Dawson City, in Canada's Yukon Territory, we picked up Nina from Australia and Melissa from British Columbia. They were off on a weekend jaunt to Inuvik, 500 miles further north in the Northwest Territories. We traveled with them for the day and they reminded us of our carefree hitch-hiking days together many years ago in the Middle East.
We had a midnight ferry boat reservation in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to take us six hours across to Newfoundland. Arriving early, we decided to check out the town. These two gals were out for a walk. We asked them for directions and they then took us under their wings and showed us all the (or more correctly, the very few) hot spots of North Sydney.
Ray's college roommate, Ted, and his wife, Cheryl, were headed north to Boston from their home in Florida just as we were heading south to Charlotte. Thanks to cell phones we managed to meet up and camp together for two nights in northern North Carolina.
We first met Swiss travelers, Carole and Markus, in Skagway, Alaska. They were touring North America for a year in a 1982 Land Rover. We encountered them again by chance as we were leaving the Carlsbad Caverns and camped with them for a night, trading road trip stories. (Web page)
In February Ray's mother joined us for a week in our trailer in Florida ...
... and then we were also joined by our daughter, Suzanne, her husband, Tim, and our grandson, Tristan, for a long weekend (they elected to stay in a motel) ...
... so we had a wonderful family reunion!
In early March Hannelore's brother, Ede, and his wife, Hannah, joined us for a week in our trailer and together we covered much ground in Florida ... here at the Coral Castle in Homestead ...
... and later, celebrating Hannelore's birthday near Key West.
This is the couple mentioned in the main section of our reports who we pulled out of a ditch in a snowbank, and who, in return the next morning, helped us turn our 42-foot long rig around on a 19-foot wide Forest Service road in Colorado.
Evelyn & Michael from Switzerland spent an evening and morning with us on their 18-month trip from the far end of South America to Eastern Canada in their very efficient 4WD Volkswagen camper. (Web page and many photos)
After the basketball season in Spain ended for the year, our son Peter joined us in Boise, Idaho, for the last 10 days of our trip ...
