I’ve been thinking about this post for quite some time. I’ve actually been writing it for about four
months, visiting it occasionally making changes…adding additional
thoughts. And now it is time to post. It’s a long one so sit back and enjoy the
read. To understand our journey, he best
part starts here!
We crossed into Alaska on May 26, 2000. Leaving Texas was emotional for a dozen
reasons, but we both wanted out of the south and there was an opportunity for a
quieter, gentler way of life. It was an
awesome adventure driving up from Texas, across the US and into Canada, and
entering the state at its north most crossing point. That was also the day I decided to quit
smoking. Other than a three week relapse
in China, I’ve held true to the course.
We were starting a new life together; moving 6,000 miles to
begin living together for the first time since we met a year earlier. Up until that time we had simply dated; every
two weeks we would take turns driving between Houston abnd Gulfport, MS. Trip was nine hours round and usually for
about three days. During a conversation
about living in Houston, Bobbie informed me that she owned a house in Anchorage
and would I be interested in moving there.
It took me a nanosecond to accept.
And so began our life together as a couple.
Now I call that a commitment. I had no preconceived notion. I did no research. I actually never saw a photo of the house. I wanted it all to be a mystery. Bobbie had purchased the property as an
investment when she was stationed at Elmendorf AFB and had been renting it to
an Alaskan musher for the past several years.
I wasn’t sure what to expect.
After a recovering from a breakdown that stranded us on the
Top of the World Highway in Chicken, we arrived in Anchorage a few days later;
we had already traveled over hundreds of miles of Alaskan terrain. It was breathtaking to say the least. As we climbed the mountain to get to the
house, paved road turned into dirt and there were plenty of logs popping
up. I soon learned that this would be
common as the years passed. And this has
been one of my most vivid memories of the our first days in Anchorage.
And there it was, a quaint cedar sided home with a balcony
overlooking Cook Inlet and the city far below.
I couldn’t believe I would be living here and those are exactly the
words that came out of my mouth.
Panoramic windows from floor to ceiling, water and mountains in the
distance, and in the middle of our own private Spruce forest…what a dream!
Over the next six months we tried out new jobs. I took on a running a telecommunications
company. It was a family owned business
and the board of directors consisted of a tyrannical matriarch, bigoted
husband, hair-brained and jealous daughter, and a narcissistic son with visions
of grandeur. After six months I doubled
the company in profit and resigned.
Bobbie starting flying bush trips, only getting paid for when she was in
the air, and working until her back and arms hurt from loading the plane…that
part without pay. She soon quit as well.
In February, now without jobs to keep us occupied and
already skied out for the winter, a conversation one night started on the
subject of running a bed and breakfast.
By morning we had plans drawn to renovate the lower floor, a business
marketing plan designed, and a budget developed. Work started two days later converting the
lower floor into three bedrooms and three bathrooms. We built a website, began marketing it and greeted
our first guest on May 10th.
They were a gay couple from Boston who enjoyed the lavish breakfast; although
they commented that there was too much furniture in the room. We had our first lesson in innkeeping that
day and developed an attitude of listening and paying strong attention to
comments. We sold out completely the
first season…every room, every night, albeit at below market rates…that
introduced us to certain members of the bed and breakfast association; we joined.
The second year was the same and we grew in both experience
and knowledge. Bobbie was still flying
for a smaller better run company that respected her time. I took on a part time teaching position. We thought we could handle it all! Our routine and jobs led to quite long and
interesting days! We learned quickly
that we needed to hire a housekeeper lest our relationship dissolve into the
toilet. It was a tough year of growth. This was also the year our son came to live
with us for a while. That was the best
part.
During this time I would visit the downtown tourism
providers monthly to gather brochures and maps from the convention bureau. On one occasion I noticed a historical
walking tour taking place. I signed at
how boring those often are and noticed that no one was really listening to the
guides drone. Somehow the word
“historical” got stuck in my head as “hysterical” and the concept of a walking
comedy routine began to brew. It would
hold until winter.
Now that our little B&B adventure had proven profitable,
our second winter came with upgrades to the rooms, menu, marketing plan, and
the design of the comedy tour business. Oh,
and also a marriage proposal that was accepted the prior Christmas. We deecided to get married this year at the
end of the season. By that point we had
also become heavily involved with the local B&B association…I was now the
Director of Publicity. We spend the
winter upgrading the B&B and I constructed the tour concept. Bobbie began volunteering at the local
museum. She gave them a lot of hours
that first year…she made some great friends as well…and she also quit flying.
Alaskan Leopard Comedy tours debuted in Spring 2002 with a script,
a route, marketing, reservations, hired actors, costumes, and a lot of really
bad jokes. I decided that telling bad
jokes was a lot easier than telling great jokes. The concept stuck. Our B&B was also booking solid. The tour launch went off without a hitch and
it was a blast walking around dressed in buckskins, telling really bad jokes in
character, all the while sharing historical knowledge in a hysterical way. It was a hit.
Over its run we had at one time six actors, each doing a tour a day, and
it lasted all summer long. We were pulling in a huge profit and were aligning
ourselves with several booking agents for more business. This was the year we met the current buyers
of our home.
By May, with the tours in full force and a staff to handle
most of the flow, we decided it was time to increase the size of our home. So we hired an architect to design the lower
floor guest lounge and decks addition.
By June we were building that addition…by ourselves. The $65,000 in materials was well spent and
we learned a lot about pre-marital arguments, compromise (me mostly), and the
rewards of hard work. Rick joined in and
he soon learned how to swing a hammer with the best of them. We also started to plan our nuptials for
September 21st. We were fully
booked that year and had guests right up to the week before the big day. Our construction project was done, our
friends and family arriving daily, and we were at our wit’s end. We were married on Flattop Mountain on a
bright, sunny, warm fall day with about 100 folks to witness me yelling at the
top of my lungs and directly to Mt. Denali that “I loved Bobbie Hougland.” Bobbie was a bit more subtle. The reception that followed was at our now
good friend’s place, Alaska’s Natural Wonders B&B. We were starting to collect a nice assortment
of friends by that time and there were lots of parties and get-togethers. We were beginning to blend into the community
and contribute.
Winter settled in and it was planning time once again. After a season of walking tours and paying
attention to our guest comments, we decided that we should convert the walking
tour to a riding tour. The walking tour was
four hours long and covered a lot of ground.
Lots of folks told us that they would gladly pay more to ride from spot
to spot. Bobbie did some research and we
purchased a 15 year-old, 29-passenger tour bus from a local transfer
company. Over the winter we renovated
that bus installing a stage, log paneling inside. May 2003 saw the debut of the comedy tour by
foot and by bus. We advertised the bus
tour as a comedy revue on wheels. Bobbie
drove and I sat in the actor’s seat telling jokes and handing out stuffed moose
dolls. The bus tour was four hours long,
included lunch on Flattop Mountain, and was a huge hit. At $69 a person we sold a lot of
tickets. It was a mad dash each morning,
preparing and serving up to ten custom ordered breakfasts, and then turning
everything over to Madeliene and heading out to begin the tours. All the while our acting troupe wandered the
streets, and our businesses grew. By the
end of our third season we had won Best Breakfast in Alaska, Best B&B in
Alaska, and a few other awards. Our tour
business was starting the gather some attention as well from local media. Rachel Gregory, as “Sourdough Sue,” got us a
front page piece in the local papers.
Over the course of the next year our B&B made it to the
top of Trip Advisor, our tour business was booming and it was time to develop
something new. Leopard Consulting and
Design was born and I started traveling throughout the state giving seminars on
how to open and bed and breakfast, create marketing plans for businesses, and
our web design company also started taking on customers. During that time we also acquired the vendor
database of a large Alaska travel company and Leopard Trax Alaska Travel and Vacations
was created. We opened offices in San
Jose and Phoenix and with seven employees, we were pretty darn busy. Bobbie was by now working at the museum
instead of volunteering, I was still teaching at Alaska Career Academy, and we
had fifteen or so employees running the various aspects of our enterprise.
We treated ourselves in the fall to a seven week vacation
staring in Washington, D.C., then on to Italy, Kenya and Tanzania. This was our reward for working really hard
for the last four years! It had also
been a dream of mine since I was a kid, wander the plains of the
Serengeti. When we got back many of our
friends said they wanted to go along on the next trip. Using our newly acquired travel agency
status, we began building Dik Dik Tours and Travel with a fellow we had met in
Africa. Over the course of the next year
we were not only selling travel in Alaska, but also in Kenya and Tanzania. We planned to take our first group of friends
with us to Kenya again next year. Our
concept of building a group trip full of discounts and then splitting the net
cost among all of us caught on. There
was no profit to be had, just an amazing time with a great group of avid
adventures. The concept grew.
During that same year we also noticed that there were a lot
of tour busses hauling folks to and from the cruise port in Seward. By the end of the season it was announced
that Princess would start coming into Whittier the following season. We took advantage of that news and converted
the daily comedy bus tours of Anchorage to a comedy transfer to and from
Whittie and Seward. The first year we
sold out just about every seat on every day.
I drove five days a week, 12 hours a day, with hired talent doing the
comedy on stage behind me. Over the next
eight years our fleet grew adding rented busses with reservations
overflowed. In 2009 we started hiring
full time drivers. In 2011 we sold our
tour business to one of those drivers and kicked back a bit. We started concentrated on our five year
retirement plan. By then our travel club
had gone on trips to Ecuador, the Galapagos, Peru, Chile, Patagonia, Argentina,
Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Antarctica, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Germany,
Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Jordan. Our
membership was up to 75 folks with an average of 15 on each tour. A core group had developed and it had become
a very private traveling club that occasionally accepted a new traveler.
We closed our B&B in May 2011 and began a long term
professional traveler accommodation model.
We wound down the travel agency, closed the consulting company, and
settled back into a much gentler flow.
We bought a boat and we spent a lot of time on the water. We also began to talk a lot about world
travel and a nomadic lifestyle. We
started doing research and making lists of the countries we wanted to visit. I began following a blog of a similar couple
already on the road, and we started to investigate the actual reality of living
abroad for an extended period of time.
We also bought two motorcycles to add to our toy
collection-a new hobby. In the next two
years our club visited Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Taiwan, New Zealand and
Australia. I went alone for a five month
trek by overland truck starting in Turkey and ending in Mongolia. In route I visited Georgia, Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (came within a mile of Iran, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan), then on to Kyrgyzstan, China, and South Korea. Along the way I made friends would have
lasted to this day…and we will see many again as we depart Alaska.
Those five years were so full and yet, in retrospect, they
went by so fast! With all our planning,
our five year plan will complete itself almost to the day this month. Pretty amazing, even for me! So dear, dear Alaska, thank you so much for the
dozens of really true friends we have made and will keep , the thousands of
guests, customers, clients, and the money we have earned. It’s been an amazing 17 years so far…and the
best is yet to come.
