We are scheduled to leave two weeks from today for our Alaska Adventure. Unfortunately, we are still not 100% sure we will be going at all due to Stephanie’s mom’s health. We hope to have a better idea in a few days, but as of today, we are probably sitting around 50/50 on a go/no go decision.
Stephanie’s mom has been discharged from the hospital and is now a rehab patient at Stephanie’s work facility. She seems to be slowly getting a little stronger, but is still a little confused mentally, sometimes worse than others, and that even changes throughout a single day.
We have been busy getting legal items done such as getting additional Power Of Attorney (POA) forms completed to be able to control Stephanie’s mom’s investment funds if need be in the future. It is amazing that although we have a perfectly legal Durable Power of Attorney already, banks are notorious for not accepting them, and Wells Fargo was no different. We had to execute additional POA’s that were specifically written by Wells Fargo, and even though we used their forms, they still have to be reviewed by their legal department and approved, go figure.
We are also trying to open Stephanie’s mom’s Long Term Care Insurance Policy, and that is also fraught with difficulties, apparently nothing is easy unless it involves getting free money from the government……
We hope to be able to make a call this coming week on the decision to go on the trip, but have also been pulling together specific information and costs in case we have to file against our travel insurance policy. We have settled up with our travel partners, Ashley and Bryan on all of the costs paid to date, many of which they had paid the initial deposits on, and we were going to pay the subsequent payments as our portion, as well as some other costs we will not incur until we are there, such as the car rental. We had all agreed that in the end, we would just settle up for any discrepancies, but now with the possibility of having to file a claim for many of the non-refundable costs, I put together a spread sheet to help to determine what we owed now them so we could settle up on our half of the costs already incurred. Hopefully this will provide us with better cost documentation if we need to make a travel insurance claim.
Other than that, we have not really done anything to prepare for this trip, other than to check some historical temperatures for last July for the places we will be visiting to give us some idea on what types of clothing we need to pack, if and when we need to get that task completed.
We did check into the availability of taking a flight from Talkeetna to Denali with Talkeetna Air, including a glacier landing. There are still spots available, but we have not made a reservation, which includes paying 100% of the costs in advance, roughly $1,100 for both of us. They have a great return/refund policy, so other than tying up some funds, there is no reason we should wait to make our reservation, but we just have not done it yet, maybe in the next few days as we move closer to a decision about the trip.
Maybe by next weeks update, with only one week to go, we will have more of an idea on what our plans will really be.