The adventure starts today.

My wife and I will get in the car and start driving to Alaska. We’ll stop for a week to visit family and friends in Milwaukee, then head northwest to Fairbanks. We expect to arrive on Aug. 16.

Google Maps says we’ll be driving 4,633 miles. I wanted to compare that estimate with another map service, so I tried MSN. The response was not encouraging: “Sorry, but we can’t calculate a trip of this length.” Perhaps they know something we don’t.

We’ve made long road trips before — Seattle to Newport, R.I., for example — but this is different. We’ll be gone a year while I teach journalism at the University of Alaska. That means setting up a new home in a two-bedroom apartment on the campus. We’ve seen the outside of the faculty apartment complex, but we have no idea what to expect when we open the door.

I’m told the apartment is furnished, but that means a bed, a couch, some chairs, a table — just the basics. No dishes, pots and pans or linens.

No amount of squishing and squashing will let us jam all we’ll need into our 2002 Toyota RAV 4, even with the cartop carrier we bought. We’ll take what we can and buy the rest.

Being gone for a year poses special problems. We’ve rented our house; that means moving personal things out of the way to make room for the incoming family. Last week was filled with packing and storing things and with lots of cleaning.

I’ve been researching the trip. The most important finding — no surprise — is that the further north we go, the worse the roads will be. AAA suggests that we not plan to cover more than 300 to 400 miles a day as we head through northern Alberta and angle northwest through northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. The greatest resource for anyone planning to travel in northwestern Canada or Alaska is a wonderful thick book called “Mileposts” that provides details about every mile of every road.

Of course, we’ve been warned to watch out for moose (sound familiar?) and bears on the road.

The hardest part of getting ready has been deciding what to take, what to leave behind. The Cuisinart goes with us. It has become a vital part of our kitchen. So is our set of good, sharp knives. Our L.L. Bean parkas — of course — and some lined jeans I bought for a trip to Fairbanks last November. Left behind: all but one suit (Alaska is really informal), most dress shirts and ties (same reason) and my golf clubs (no room in the car, and a really short golf season.)

We’ve revised and signed new wills and advance medical directives. That’s a good idea even if you’re not making a long trip. For us, the trip was a prod to do something we should have done long ago.

My wife and I visited our doctors and obtained the prescriptions we’ll need in Alaska. I’ve packed a backup pair of eyeglasses.

I canceled the newspaper — a sad task for a former editor. I’ll read today’s column online. I’d better get used to that.

We’ve revised our insurance policies to deal with renting the house and reducing our personal fleet to one vehicle. We’ve dealt with utilities and businesses and paid our property taxes in advance. That hurt a bit.

I think we’ve sent change of address notices to everyone who should get them; time will tell if we’ve forgotten anyone.

We’re as ready as we’re going to get.

We’ll miss friends in Maine — and I will miss this weekly opportunity to share my views with readers of these newspapers.

For the next year, this column will be published once a month. I expect to write about things I see in Alaska that can be compared with Maine.
I’ll keep in touch with what’s going on here through the newspaper’s Web sites, and by telephone and e-mail and probably will have some things to say about local news as seen from away. And I’ll write about how journalism students view the changing craft they are preparing to enter.

I also plan to write a series of feature stories for these newspapers about people from Maine (not my wife and me) who are living in Alaska. I don’t know who they are but with your help, I think I can find them — and I expect they will have stories to share with folks back home. If you have friends or family from here who have moved to Alaska, please let me know how I can get in touch with them or tell them to contact me. My e-mail address is at the end of this column.

In addition, I plan to share my experiences about life in Alaska in a blog that will be carried on KJ and Morning Sentinel Web sites. I’m new to blogging, but I think it will be a good way to keep in touch with readers and the community.

I know there will be interesting stories to tell. We expect to see the Iditarod and to learn what life is like when it’s dark 21 hours a day and the temperature drops to 40 below. The editor of the Fairbanks News-Miner has invited me and my wife to go sledding; he has 26 sled dogs.  I’ll share that with you in the blog.

Watch the paper — and the Web — for details.

David B. Offer retired as executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel in 2006. He is spending the 2009-2010 academic year as a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. E-mail davidboffer@hotmail.com