I spent the weekend puttering around with details for next summer's trip. I realized, yesterday, that some of our stops are very popular, and that reservations are going to be difficult / impossible to obtain.
I started by researching what may be the worst: one of the lodges at Glacier National Park. Our trip has two complicating factors; the first is that because Glacier National Park is on the return end of the trip (the Going to the Sun Road will most probably be closed when we come through Montana heading north), and the second is that our itinerary headed south is driven by the Alaska Marine Highway System schedule (which won't be published for several more months). So, finding a decent place around Glacier National Park will be a trick.
Since I spent a lot of time fussing with that, I thought about other tough locations, such as McCarthy, Alaska, and the area around Denali National Park. McCarthy has very limited lodging options, and Denali has a lot of tourists. The cruise ships provide their own hotels, but everyone else is staying somewhere between Healy and Cantwell. The combination of prices and reviews isn't good. I'll start to fuss with this again when the ferry schedule is published, and I can commit to specific dates.
