Remembering My Big Trip Of 1996

Just over ten years ago, my wife Lorna and I sold most of what we owned, shipped it back to her native Britain and spent the next four months traveling from California to Alaska to Western Canada and then down through the Western United States to where we started. We then said goodbye to our long suffering sub-compact Ford Festiva and headed out to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. I’d agreed to swap my native California to live in her country, and we both figured having a giant trip was in order, before we began our new life (and anticipated children) elsewhere.

I wrote a sort of travelogue for friends and family. If we’d had blogs then, I’d have been blogging about our trip. Instead, I emailed back to friends and also posted entries to my personal web site. People seemed to enjoy it, and I’d always wanted to put it online for others.

That’s what I’m doing now. I’d planned to post each entry exactly 10 years after I originally wrote it. I’m not quite there, though I might catch up if I have time. I’m also posting them back to the time they were written.

The first entry is fairly brief, then I started getting more into the writing, spending a bit more time talking about different places.

The photos aren’t the best. They’ve been sitting in a closet for about 10 years and have been handled a lot. I’m scanning from grungy prints, rather than clean negatives, and dust turns out hard to be eliminate. Worse, am I neither a scanning export nor a professional photographer! Still, I hope they give you a sense of the places we went, especially as how they looked then (I’m sure they’ve changed since then). Maybe some day I’ll do them over (or have someone do them) perfectly.

A key thing to the trip was that were were under an extremely tight budget. I counted every nickel, dime, dollar, loonie or whatever to make sure we’d have enough for the entire trip. So you’ll hear a lot about prices and figuring out how to safe on food and lodging.

The entire trip is listed below. I’ll also update this with links to post about each segment of the trip. All posts can also be found in my Big Trip 1996 category.