Carl Rohne — Writer & Travel Adventurer

Carl Rohne with Smokey the Chihuahua in Valdez, Alaska

About the Author

From the seminar room to the Dempster Highway.

Carl Rohne began with a triple major at Washington University in St. Louis, took a Master's degree at Stanford, and finished a PhD in History at the University of Southern California. His doctoral research carried him to Barcelona for a year — a city he has been returning to, in love with it, ever since.

After a turn teaching at the university level, he came home to St. Louis to run marketing support for a large healthcare data-processing firm. From there he moved into real-estate brokerage, where his clients included local sports celebrities, young doctors, and academics. When the deals were done, he hung it up.

Then he met Sandra. And Smokey, her senior Chihuahua. Together the three of them climbed into a forty-foot diesel pusher, hitched a long-suffering Jeep behind it, and pointed the rig north — determined to go as far as the road would take them. "It gets HOW cold here?" they asked. They found the answer in Inuvik, on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

Washington UniversityTriple major, undergraduate
Stanford UniversityMaster's degree
USCPhD, History
30,000 milesSt. Louis → Inuvik → home

The Book

I Can Do This!

…RVing Where the Moose and the Caribou Play

The RV adventures of two newly-married seniors and their world-traveler Chihuahua — from St. Louis through Canada to the Arctic, then Alaska, and home again along the West Coast.

Traces a ten-month odyssey of a newly-married older couple on a classic road adventure: out of St. Louis, up the Trans-Canadian Highway, onto the Can-Am route through Whitehorse, north on the Dempster Highway all the way to Inuvik. Then into Alaska by way of the Top of the World Highway, and the long way home along the West Coast back into the continental U.S.

It's a book about marriage, travel, new adventures, food, and (when the engine bay called for it) diesel mechanics 101 — narrated with the warmth and curiosity of a writer who learned, somewhere north of 60°, that love really is lovelier the second time around.