And I’ve got some photos from these epic 4,000-mile journeys. This post is the second post in the series, covering each trip.
February 2001: Louisville, Kentucky to Anchorage, Alaska
I was working at a tiny Internet banking startup in 1999, survived the Y2K transition (I was at the bank the night of December 31, 1999), and watched as the dot-com boom went bust shortly thereafter. My boss said we would be laying low for a while, waiting for the economy to rebound, but he admitted that could take years. Our jobs were safe, but they weren’t going to be dynamic or interesting for a while.
I was young, hungry to learn more, looking for adventure, and sitting in a bank for the next 5-10 years didn’t sound appealing.
The Search
So by late 2000 I started to search for new options. I interviewed at Booz Allen Hamilton in DC and was offered a job, but I turned it down. I interviewed with security vendor WatchGuard in Seattle, but that didn’t pan out. I interviewed with other tech places in Portland, Oregon, too. But during my search out west, I saw a listing for a job in Anchorage, working in a large hospital setting. Having briefly lived in Alaska, I had a sense of the adventure that represented, but I didn’t think they’d actually talk to me. In early January 2001, I threw in a resume and didn’t think much of it.
I was called back the same day.
Within a couple weeks I was on a plane to Alaska, headed to an in-person interview (there was no Zoom back then) and I took my then-girlfriend with me. We stay a couple extra days, looked around, and figured if we were okay with seeing Anchorage at its worst—the dead of winter in January—we could make the move and definitely enjoy Alaska at its best.
The Choice
They made an offer, I accepted, and preparations began. We packed, terminated the lease, prepped the car, got everything ready for a trans-continental drive with 2 people, 1 cat, and 1 dog through the depths of Canada and onto the Last Frontier in late February 2001.
We would arrive just before the start of the 2001 Iditarod.
We said we would stay 2, maybe 3 years, then head back to the lower 48. Little did we know.
Thanks for reading! This was the second post in a five-part series covering all my north-south trips. Subscribe for future releases.