About Harrison Smith

Harrison Smith was born with an insatiable need to learn. His wife Nancy often refers to him as "Johnny 5" in reference to the robot in the movie "Short Circuit" who was obsessed with learning. Today after 38 years of working and overseeing Research and Development at a major software company he pursues topics of his own choosing. His thrust for knowledge spans a wide variety topics including traveling, history and a deep fascination for how and why things works the way they do.

The Alaska Ferry Inner Passage to Juneau – Our 6-month Alaska Road Trip Part 3

  Overview Our 6-month adventure continues with our journey from Bellingham north to Juneau on the Alaska Ferry. Part 1 - The trip to Key West is located  here. Part 2 - Cross Country to Bellingham Washington is located  here. The third part of our trip involves finally arriving in Alaska and a few days of exploring Juneau.   When we leave Bellingham, we travel northward for about 38 hours between Victoria Island and Canada before [...]

By |2023-08-03T15:17:19-05:00June 14, 2022|Alaska, USA Travel|10 Comments
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Our 6 Month Key West to Deadhorse Alaska Road Trip Part 2

In our part one post we covered the first leg of our Key West to Deadhorse Adventure which took us from our home in Virginia down to Key West and Back. The second leg of this adventure covered in this post takes us from Virginia out to Bellingham Washington where we will catch the Alaska Ferry up to Alaska. Normally, we don't travel cross country at this pace, but the wedding described in first post [...]

By |2023-08-03T15:11:57-05:00June 3, 2022|Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, MIssouri, Montana, North Dakota, Road Trips, USA Travel, Washington|0 Comments
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Our 6 Month Key West to Deadhorse Alaska Road Trip Part 1

We are finally off and running on our six month adventure that takes us from the southernmost tip of the continental US in Key West all the way to the Artic Ocean in Alaska. This post covers the first leg of the journey which takes us down to sunny Key West and back home - where we retrieved the Brown Beast for the remainder of the journey.  It was packed for Alaska  sitting in the [...]

By |2022-07-19T13:49:02-05:00May 25, 2022|Florida, South Carolina, USA Travel|3 Comments
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Our Packing List for Long Road Trips

Nancy and I love long road trips and we spend a lot of time planning out the details of where we are going. To quickly launch one of our journeys and to make living on the road as hassle free as possible, we have devoted a lot of time to honing what items to pack and how to organize them. Getting these items sorted and grouped helps us to transition from location to location as [...]

By |2022-02-22T14:28:54-05:00February 22, 2022|Tips and Advice, Travel Tips|0 Comments
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Our Upcoming 6 Month Key West to Alaska Road Trip

Background We have always dreamed of an Alaska road trip but given its distance from our home and the geographic size of this destination, we intentionally left this off the plate until we had time to do it right. So now that we're both retired and have more flexibility, it was time and as a result, we have put a travel framework in place where we will leave in the spring and return home just [...]

By |2023-05-25T07:49:21-05:00February 9, 2022|Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, MIssouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Road Trips, South Carolina, South Dakota, USA Travel, Utah, Washington|22 Comments
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A Whirlwind 2 week Oregon Road Trip Adventure Part 2

Overview of the Oregon Road Trip Part Two This is part two of our 3,248-mile 13-day road trip we did in Oregon in 2013 that covers a great deal of the state and really gave us a flavor for its diversity of geography and culture the state has to offer.  This post picks up in Burns Oregon and continues all the back to Portland. Part one can be found here. Oregon Road Trip Overview [...]

By |2023-12-19T08:26:48-05:00January 1, 2022|Oregon, Road Trips, USA Travel|1 Comment
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A Whirlwind 2 Week Oregon Road Trip Adventure Part 1

Overview of the Oregon Road Trip Part One. There have been times when we only had 2-3 weeks to travel. My Wife Nancy and I like to pick a state / area of North America and do what we jokingly call a "reconnaissance" trip where we spend our time moving rapidly from area to area. This gives us a good feel for what we might want to do when we come back and revisit an [...]

By |2023-12-19T08:28:29-05:00January 1, 2022|Oregon, Road Trips, USA Travel|0 Comments
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Stop 7 – Fredericksburg Texas (The 2021 10 Week Road Trip)

This is STOP 7, the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th days of our ten week cross country fall adventure in 2021!  Here is a link to our previous stop in Jefferson, TX The Drive from Jefferson, TX to Fredericksburg, TX Jefferson to Fredericksburg This drive is probably the longest "jump" of the entire trip and today we will cross the 2000 mile driving mark.  We purposely do a route that will take us through historic [...]

By |2021-12-08T13:37:22-05:00October 5, 2021|Texas, USA Travel|1 Comment
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How we decided our approach to retirement road tripping

We often get asked the question " Where are you going on your next trip?".  When we describe an upcoming road trip, almost without fail, given the length of our trips, the next question we hear is "Do you have an RV?".  We must have answered this questions at least 50 times in the last few months. The short answer to this is, of course, "no".  However, the journey behind how we settled into our [...]

By |2021-10-23T13:19:25-05:00September 10, 2021|Tips and Advice|4 Comments
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An Epic 10 Week Southern and Southwest Road Trip

We originally planned to fly into Rome and road trip over a few weeks up to Venice where we were going to catch an 8 country Mediterranean cruise. We waited until the first week of August before bailing out of this trip (too many Covid restrictions in place). This left us trying to figure out what travel we wanted to do this fall. On Monday, we cancelled out of our European vacation and started the [...]

By |2022-04-08T09:48:46-05:00September 3, 2021|Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Road Trips, Tennessee, Texas, USA Travel, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming|10 Comments
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