Recently, I was perusing the Travel section of this blog and noticed, for the first time, that there was a gap in blogs about my travel. The North America (USA, Canada and Alaska) trip in 2015 was missing. So now it’s 2023 and I’m adding it. (To be fair, I was checking out the information I had put in this section of my blog as I’m about to head away on my first overseas trip since 2019, but more about that later.)
This year, 2015, Jane and I are going to Las Vegas for a week so that Jane can get her fill of horses. The Jumping and Dressage World Cup is on then, and so I will end up seeing more horses than I’ve ever seen before in my entire life. From there, we’re going to wend our way to San Francisco (by road), then to Vancouver (by plane) for a drive around western Canada.
On May 16, we’re boarding a ship to cruise the Inside Passage to Alaska, and then after a few days wandering around Alaska (Denali Park in particular) we fly home from Fairbanks.
April 15
We finally arrived in Vegas about 7pm last night.
We’re with a group of horsey people – all here for the World Dressage event. Robyne, who’s booked all the tickets, had booked transport for us – it was a stretch limo WITH bubbles (for drinking not floating in) for the 11 of us. So it took a while to check in.
Jane and I were shattered, so we had room service (colossally expensive so we won’t do that again) and not very nice. I had forgotten how Americans put sugar in everything so the steak sandwiches (we both said ‘steak sandwich’ at the same time) were only tolerable because we’d had nothing to eat since breakfast on the plane at 5.15am.
Today, Jane went off to meet some people at the horse event at 10.30 and this afternoon we bussed to the North Outlet Mall with Marcia who is not only a ‘horsey’ person but a shopper.
However, there was a coffee shop and a Sketchers shop. I bought 2 pairs in 2013 on my last trip to the USA and they need replacing. We met all the ‘horse’ people for dinner, and then, Jane and I checked out the slot machines. Jane did not believe me when I said we would get free drinks while we were playing. She tried valiantly to get rid of $20, but 2 drinks later, she still has about the same amount left in a credit note.
AND we’ve booked some events:
Thursday night – Thunder from Down Under (I wanted to go to Zumanity, the Cirque de Soleil adult show, but they’re on holiday this week until after we leave next week)
Friday morning – helicopter flight all around, through the Grand Canyon and even landing at the bottom
Sunday night – dinner at the Stratosphere
Monday night – Rocking the Vault
And on Tuesday we collect our rental car and drive off into the wide blue yonder
April 16
Today was the Dressage Event. We walked to the MGM hotel to collect the shuttle to the arena. Had anyone asked me what I expected, I would have described an outdoor arena with maybe no more than 500 people. Wrong! The arena is huge – would easily hold 30,000 people at a guess and I guess once more that it was about half full today.
My day didn’t get off to a very good start. I’ve a small tear in the rotator cuff on my right shoulder and early this morning, I moved the wrong way which I suspect extended the tear. I’m not normally one to take pain killers – I’m much more a put-up and shut-up sort of person. But I’ve been taking them every 4 hours today.
Now, the first couple of horses were interesting as I didn’t understand what was going on. Each horse and rider has 8 minutes to complete a course consisting of a number of different exercises all performed in exactly the same sequence. So after the first couple of horses I’d figured out was happening, figured out when they were making mistakes, and then got bored with the repetition.
It’s the start of the Show Jumping tonight, and we were going to go for an hour or so, but Jane decided we didn’t need to. So after the Dressage finished – it was won by the rider from Britain who won the gold medal at the Olympics (I still can’t figure out what made her ride so much better than the others) – we got the shuttle back, and stopped off at Excalibur for a late lunch or early dinner.
I had been to Dick’s for dinner 8 years ago, when I was given a hat that said “in Vegas, looking for younger man”! There were people there with hats on (made out of paper) but we didn’t get them this time. Jane and I had a shot each – hers was a Wet Kitty and mine was Peach Fuzz! We then went for cocktails in boots which we got to bring with us. We figure they will be perfect for bringing booze onto the cruise ship in a month.
While we were having dinner, a man came over to us telling us he does all sorts of things with latex and proceeded to make a pterodactyl for Jane and a Kiwi for me. They are the strange things wrapped around the alcoholic boots. I was carrying both of them as we made our way back to the Luxor, and gave into temptation – to stick the long green tail of the pterodactyl between Jane’s legs. I damn near wet myself laughing – and so did the man walking towards us.
This evening, Jane and I sauntered next door to Excalibur to check out Thunder from Down Under. You really should check out the photo! It was very entertaining. I saw the show in 2007, and I’m delighted to say that Leigh who inspired the name change on the GPS on that trip is still part of the show. If you check out the photo, he’s the one on the left.
April 17
An earlyish pick-up this morning to go to the airport to get on an Airbus 130 helicopter (in case you’re interested in its origins which no one else on our trip was, but I like to know these things) and fly to the Grand Canyon.
Maverick’s Helicopters have at least 8 of these $3,300,000 helicopters and a number of jet planes too. There were 6 in our helicopter – Andrea who’s a horsey person and is in the ‘horse group’, a couple from Chile, and a man from Germany.
We flew over the Hoover Dam first and then over all four parts of Lake Mead before flying into the Grand Canyon. I took a video on my iPhone of the flight into the canyon, but it won’t upload so I’ll have to edit it and have another go.
Eventually all 4 helicopters landed in the canyon (apparently Mavericks are the only helicopter company with a concession to land in the canyon for which they pay $1,200,000 per annum). We disembarked, or in my case, clambered out, and were given bubbles – loosely called champagne and the most healthy snack anyone has ever been served in the US: carrots, celery, dip, grapes, cheese and crackers. We were probably down for 15 minutes and then we took off again to refuel (they have their own fuelling station out there in them thar hills) before heading back to fly along the strip in Vegas.
A fabulous experience and one to be recommended.
Robyne, who’s camp mother, decided that she’s had enough of horses and has rented a bus for us to cruise the strip tonight. “Do you think Madeleine would prefer to do that instead of going to round 2 of the show jumping?” she asked Jane. Stupid question! So we’re off to cruise the strip tonight.
We were picked up by a stretch Hummer – impossible to get into and out of. First stop the “Welcome to Vegas” sign (whoppdeedoo), and next was the Bellagio to watch the fountain. Then we headed straight to Fremont Street which was fabulous. It’s an open area under cover with a live band and stalls. All the bars and shops were open and it was really party central. It was a shame we could only be there for half an hour.
Wandering along the street we saw a stall offering fake tattoos. Jane has talked for a ages about getting a scorpion (her birth sign) tattoo. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity to test it out. The man put the stamp on her and then inked it having pinned her shirt back. Sadly she smudged it when removing the pin. But the situation enabled me to take a beautiful photo of her.
April 18
Let me tell you about the way this horsey stuff works.
The arena is only about 10 minutes drive from the Strip. It’s large, and the area around the actual arena is full of shops mainly selling ‘horsey’ stuff.
EVERY session starts with the American national anthem sung by someone different – but with one thing in common – a huge voice amplified so that it feels like my ear-drums are going to burst. Then there’s some ‘entertainment’ – an elderly, off- key, Elvis impersonator for example – before the business finally starts.
There are no rules for the spectators so they arrive and leave no matter what’s going on which was unacceptable to the purists. They have drinks, food – whatever, and it’s quite disconcerting wondering if you’re going to end up wearing it.
This morning was the final of the Dressage. All 18 competitors from yesterday got to choreograph the required movements to their chosen music. Some of them – for a non horse person – were set to music that I recognised.
My favourite was a horse called Legolas and he was ridden by an American called Steffen. The music started and there in the music was “I’m Legolas”. Towards the end of the routine, the music changed to rap and included “had enough of dressage, time now for a massage,” and ended with “Yo man, I’m out of here!” Charlotte Dujardin from the UK won, and Steffen came 3rd. But sadly he was disqualified. The roar of the crowd with the conclusion of the routine spooked Legolas, who jerked. Blood was found on his mouth and that is not allowed.
As we were thrown out of the stadium, and Jane went off to do some ‘horse’ smoozing! I got on the bus to MGM, and went in search of late lunch. I found the Rainforest Cafe, ordered a drink, and a platter to share and sat back and enjoyed the noises of the jungle. A group of 10 teenagers dressed to the nines came in for dinner – I’m guessing it was Prom Night one of the young men pulled the chair out for his date and it occurred to me to congratulate him, but I resisted the temptation. Jane arrived, consumed the rest of the platter, had her bourbon on the rocks and we went back to the event
Kate Laurie, from New Zealand, won the Show Jumping second tier riders on Saturday evening and that was pretty cool. Show jumping is more entertaining for a non-horse person and each horse only takes a minute to complete the circuit and it’s easy to see where they are losing points.
When we got back to the Luxor we met up with the other ‘horse’ people and went for dinner to an Irish pub in the Mandalay which is next door. Over cooked, cold food was awful made worse by a table charge for more than 6 people at the table AND a charge for the live music. My over cooked cold fish and vegetables for $17 which I didn’t eat came in at $34!!!! I do t usually get annoyed by these things, but I was not happy! We complained but in the end, we ended up paying – what else can you do?
April 19
Back to the arena – the finals of the horse jumping. Oh dear – there are 20 horses – twice. More screeching national anthems, more fireworks, more attempts to get the surprisingly (seeing it’s the final final) small crowd worked up into a frenzy,
The thing I’ve noticed about these events is that even though the large part of the spectators are from the USA and they yell loudest for American competitors, they also give their all for all the other competitors and I like that.
In the first round, 4 competitors had completely clear rounds – didn’t knock any bars off the jumps. In the second round, no one had a clear round and so it came down to points and the winner was from Switzerland.
Jane and I didn’t hang around for the prize giving, but – Jane insisted on checking out the stalls. Sigh! So by the time we went to get the bus back, the queue in the afternoon heat was LONG. Some guy in a pink shirt with an equally pink face queue jumped and stood adjacent to the line where Jane and I were standing and every time we moved, he moved. Eventually, I turned to him politely and suggested he should go back and join the queue. He said nothing and moved further back. He was still only about 5 people behind us so obviously someone else let him in.
About 6, Jane and I dressed in our ‘going-out’ clothes and queued up for a cab to get a ride up the strip to the Stratosphere. We had a table for 2 right by the window and sat back to watch the sunset over Las Vegas and watch the lights in this city come up. Jane had lamb (she said she’s had better) and I had fish which was excellent. We shared a bottle of red from Sonoma, and because Nick had insisted that we should go the whole hog (unfortunate expression), we did as we were told and had dessert too.
April 20
Robyne, the camp mother (who’s a travel agent and had booked all our tickets, and is a ‘horse’ person) is leaving today with a smaller group of horsey people to travel by mini-bus through the national parks, so we met her for breakfast.
A number of people from the group had bought wireless headsets (buy one get one free) which bluetooth to a phone as well as solar panels (buy one get one free) which recharge their phones and as I like the sound of anything techy, we went to check them out. The guy selling them could sell sand to an Arab. He was good, BUT I chose an amount I thought we should pay, and in the end we walked away. He showed us a website which had them online for the price we were going to buy one – and then get one free – but two can play that game. We said we’d go and have coffee and come back.
I checked out the prices on Amazon and the headphones were $70. No wonder he could give away 2 for the price of one. We went back and told him it was too much, and started to walk away. He dropped another $40, but we’d agreed before we went back that his offer needed to be $80 less than the original suggestion. We walked away. Jane didn’t really want the headphones anyway and we can check out BestBuy or somewhere like that if I decide I can’t live without them.
Jane then decided we HAD to go and check out the shops in the Mandalay (oh no! Not more shopping)! We went into a shop called Lick! Now, in essence this is a sweet shop but I guess the option to play around with the stores’ name was too much to ignore and there were some fabulous t-shirts in terms of slogans. However the colour t-shirt I liked was blue and the slogan I wanted was on the green (frog coloured) one so I didn’t get it.
Oh. You want to know the slogan? “It ain’t going to lick itself!”
About 6, we headed off to the Tropicana by going through the Excalibur and across the walk-way to where the concert was. Jane and I have figured out how to get around most of the casinos on this part of the strip without having to go outside. That was good idea yesterday and today when the temperature was over 30.
April 21
It’s SO good to be out of Vegas and “Disneyland for adults”.
We got a cab to the Hertz pickup place with the most talkative cab driver in the world. He told us about all the things we should have seen or done, but we’re pretty happy with what we did:
- Horses – dressage x 2
- Horses – Show Jumping x 2
- Helicopter to Hoover Dame and Grand Canyon
- Bellagio fountain
- Fremont Street
- Thunder from down under
- Stratosphere
- Raiding the Rock Vault
We found a Walmart, and got some fresh food, water and wine and set off to Phoenix. I brought a GPS with me from work, but we were upgraded to a car with a boot – excellent for hiding stuff, and a GPS from Hertz even though we aren’t paying for it, so we decided to see if the navigator (Jane) could suss it out, and of course she did.
The GPS said we would arrive in Phoenix at 6.10, and we did even though we had a couple of stops. It’s a challenge you see. If the GPS tells me what time I should be arriving I HAVE to beat it!
We secured a room in Days Inn – better than the hotel room as it has coffee and tea making facilities, a fridge and a microwave. The bottle of wine posed a problem – how could it be that the Australians make wine in screw tops for the Pacific and corks for the USA? Jane borrowed a cork screw and we were soon eating raw veg, cheese and crackers and drinking an excellent Shiraz.
April 22 – 23
Before we set off for Flagstaff, we made a detour to the Wide World of Maps – a map store in Phoenix. Yah! It’s a large store and made me homesick for MapWorld pre 2011 and the destruction of the building.
We booked into another Days Inn late in the afternoon. The girl at reception asked what brought us to Flagstaff. I, of course, said “a car”. She asked if we’d been to the Grand Canyon, and I said we’d flown into it by helicopter. Quick as a wink, she replied that at least we survived. Good one!
On the way, we’d stopped for Mexican food for lunch and so decided not to embark on an evening excursion for dinner, but to finish off the wine, vegetables and cheese from the previous night.
Flagstaff is only a couple of hours’ drive from Phoenix, but it’s like being in another world. Flagstaff is in the San Francisco mountains at an elevation of 7,000 feet so it’s still cool to cold. The pre-dawn temperature this morning (not that we were awake and out of bed to feel it) was -1. It got to 15 today. The town has only about 69,000 people and has a large “old town” section which we checked out this morning. We found a wonderful store which had all sorts of wonderful things – I bought fake tampons for carrying booze on the cruise (evidently, they confiscate bottles and return them at the end of the cruise so we should be fine with plastic, so that you have to pay their exorbitant rates) and Jane bought a fake sunscreen bottle. Once we’d had our fill of shops – or rather, I should say I had my fill of shops because Jane could go on forever, we headed off to check out some sights.
Jane wanted to check out the Arboretum which is closed till next month – but she got to look at some trees. Then we headed to Sunset Crater thinking that we might be able to drive close enough to have a look. I’d forgotten that you have to pay $5 each to go into a National Park, and so we checked out the Visitor Centre where some dour old biddy gave us the once over and told us that she guessed it would be all right if we had a look around the centre – if you please – without paying. However, there appeared to be considerable climbing required so we carried onto the third destination on our busy schedule.
Walnut Canyon was indeed a canyon – for climbing down into, and back out of. We walked through the Visitor Centre (not paying again) which was overflowing with children on an outing – one of whom was told off by Jane for playing with the automatic door opener “shall I find your teacher and tell her?” – took some photos, checked out the store (sigh) and left.
The motel / inn is quite nice – good breakfast with eggs even, BUT it’s by the train track. In actual fact, the whole town is by the train track. The town is long and skinny and the railway line runs right through the middle. Anyway, the trains are really long with 3 or 4 engines and there’s a lot of noise. This afternoon we figured out that it’s not the trains making the noises, but the barriers warning people – it just goes on and on and on and on – all the time while the barrier arms are down. Bearing in mind that the trains are at least 100 carriages long, and they’re going uphill, it takes a while.
After dinner at a local diner – so much food that we have leftovers for tomorrow – we spread out the map, used both our iPads googling places to figure out where to go tomorrow night. We are going to Death Valley, but we wanted to stay somewhere on the way. There’s a place called Pahrump that looked just the right distance. Remembering that Nick stayed there a couple of years ago I sent him a text. His response was:
Total redneck Hicksville. We felt like we were going to be kidnapped because we weren’t from the gene pool. Really wasn’t a great place.
So we’ll give it a miss and head for Barstow instead.
April 24 – 25
Last night, after dinner, we spent hours trying to figure out how we were going to organise our trip to Death Valley. I called out names from the map, and Jane googled the accommodation. The reviews weren’t good. In the end, we decided to head along Route 66 to Barstow, which is really the long way around.
It probably was a good idea as it was cold, and very wet with hail as we packed up the car and headed west. I woke with a really sore throat (the prelude to a cold, methinks, and at home I would overdose on Vitamin C with Echinacea) so we agreed that eventually we would look for a Walmart to see what we could get. About 1pm we made a toilet and coffee stop, and that was when we should have – or rather I should have (as the driver) checked the fuel situation. The terrain was interesting for a start – climb, climb, climb, descend, descend, descend, drive across a long or a short valley, and then do the same thing all over again. It was on one of those seemingly interminable descends that I happened to glance at the fuel gauge and loudly said a very rude word. We had left a town called Needles some time before, and having Jane pour over the map AND query the GPS for the nearest fuel wasn’t encouraging. We were 68 miles from Ludlow to the west and 38 miles from Needles to the east. We were literally in the middle of the desert with no options. We figured that if we headed back to Needles, and didn’t make it, then at least we were closer, and so the call-out charge would be less.
Now I make NO bones about the fact that I’m a lead-foot and had totally enjoyed Arizona roads where the speed limit is 75 mph, and of course, beating the time on the GPS. But returning to Needles sort of with my tail between my legs, I let everything and everyone pass us. We have a Toyota Corolla which has a sport mode and this had been used for a power boost to get up the hills ahead of everyone else, but no more. I cruised so that the ‘Econ’ light was on all the time, and on the downhill runs, I let the car coast as well as any automatic car can. And I watched the fuel gauge. The gauge was reading half way between Empty and Quarter when the fuel light came on. Gulp! Still 11 miles to go.
We did make it to the service station – there are 2 in Needles, and the bikers (more about them later) had taken over the first one. After we refuelled – 10.5 gallons – Jane read the handbook and the tank holds 10.9 gallons. So we made it on fumes, I reckon. The most dreadful thing about this story is that I had told Jane we must refuel constantly because when Nick and Hayley were here 2 years ago they were in the same situation except the service station they pulled into was no more. Fortunately for them, the woman who lived close by had been supplying stranded motorists with fuel for years and was able to top their convertible up – for a price of course.
Back on the road again, I was able to resume my ‘bat out hell’ mode of driving and we got to Barstow (population 24,000) on Route 66. There is Route 66 stuff everywhere and we’ve been on the ‘mother road’ for quite some time now.
We’re once again in Days Inn – this time we got 2 nights for the price of one. Last night’s leftovers with bread from breakfast at the last motel for tea (barely edible) and another bottle of Yellowtail Shiraz with a cork again, a session with Criminal Minds, and sleep.
Today (April 25 – Happy Birthday again, Sharon) we were not decent in time to check out breakfast which comes with the motel, and went in search of the three things on our list to do here.
1. Route 66 Museum
2. Tanger outlets
3. The drive-in movies
The Museum is part of the railway station and because it’s blowing a howling gale, at that location away from any other buildings, we ended up with a microdermabrasion – sand blasting. Because Barstow is surrounded by the Mohave Desert, the howling wind ensures that there is sand in every possible orifice. The museum is full of old bikes and cars, pictures of old movie stars and all sorts of memorabilia.
Tanger Outlet mall – I had decided that 2 pairs of Skechers weren’t enough and so we went to the Skechers store where I bought 3 more pairs. I’ve got enough Skechers to last me for a few years to come. I then left Jane to wander through the Mall to her heart’s content – or so I thought. A couple of minutes later, I received a text telling me to get to the leather store straight away. There was Jane in a pink leather jacket looking awesome. Sadly, it was a size too small, and it was left on the shelf.
We never did find the drive-in movie place. We googled it and found that it’s not open tonight and so we stopped looking.
Jane did research for a bar and restaurant for dinner and found a place called Gusto’s with lots of great reviews. It was MILES away and when we got there looked like it had been closed for many years. So we ended up at a Mexican restaurant where Jane and I had chicken soup – but not just water with chicken flavouring. It had huge chunks of chicken, potatoes, capsicums, carrots, celery and corn cobs in it.
Tomorrow it’s Death Valley although the weather forecast doesn’t sound good for this whole area.
April 26
After 10 hours on the road today, and a bottle of bourbon later, it’s time to sleep. Tell you about our adventures soon – promise.
When we left Barstow, we headed to Death Valley. In Trona, on the way, we stopped for fuel, groceries and coffee at Albertsons. The vegetable selection was amazing and soon we were armed with a platter, some cheese and crackers for dinner and a smaller selection for lunch. We then went to look for wine and found a huge selection of Bourbon. I like honey bourbon and got a bottle of Red Stag for $13.99. It’s about $40 at home, and Jane chose a bottle of JD Black. And of course we also got a bottle of red as well as another slab of water. ($3 for 24 bottles).
Suitably equipped for the desert we headed to Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley. I was there 10 years ago. The road to Stovepipe Wells was sealed but it wasn’t to Scotty’s Castle at the northern part. It is now. It wasn’t even all that hot – only 29. We wandered through the Trading Post where we made some purchases and then sat in the shade to eat our lunch.
I was looking at some ear-rings (as always) and the woman behind the counter started to tell me all about which tribe made the jewellery and where the stones came from – eventually I walked away with a pair of ear-rings in Buffalo Turquoise which aren’t blue but black and white. I think they are great.
Leaving Stovepipe Wells, Jane drove – her first time ever on the right side of the road. Death Valley is of course not dead at all, although the lowest point is 282 ft below sea level. Scotty’s Castle was just closing when we arrived so after a quick look around, we set off for Bishop. Now I was navigating and I decided that as the map indicated that there was a more direct route than the GPS was telling us to go, we would check it out. The first 500 feet of the road were sealed and then it was metal. The distance the way the GPS told us to go was about 180 miles. This road indicated 75 miles. However within a couple of miles, it deteriorated into ruts, boulders and corrugations. Reluctantly, we turned around and went the long way. Jane drove until we got back onto the main road, and we took off.
In keeping with all previous accomodation, we chose Days Inn. Bearing in mind we were out in the middle of nowhere, in a town of 2,000 people, we expected the cost to be around what we’d paid in Barstow – $50 – but it was $80.
The room was disgusting. The carpet was black with dirt. It stunk of piss, but the beds were the best we’ve had since we came to the U.S. We got out the vege platter, the cheese and the booze. Jane proceeded to drink me under the table – well I quit while I was able and left her to it.
I don’t recall drinking any more bourbon for a long time.
I was ok the next morning, but Jane wasn’t very well (understatement of the decade). It was a long, quiet trip all the way down the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, and up the west side. I’d originally thought we’d get to Fresno, but we ended up spending the night in Madera. It’s amazing the effect of a good night’s sleep. The car was back to being noisy again!
April 28
We were on the road early this morning and stopped in Mariposa for breakfast even before most of the stores were open.
Yosemite is one of my favourite places (it costs to go into a national park in the USA – maybe that’s a way to employ park rangers(?), and the charge at Yosemite was $30 per vehicle). I had hoped that we would be able to drive into the park from Tioga Pass but it’s not open yet. Tioga Pass is a fabulous way to drive into the park as the park appears beneath you. The thing I love about the park is the enormity and sheer verticality (?) of the rock faces. The waterfalls were in fine form too seeing it’s early spring. There’s been a huge landslide part way into the park on the river road which looks like it’s going to take months to remove.
Even this early in the year, the place was still crawling with tourists. We had a wander around The Awhanee which was where the movie The Shining was set. It’s a fabulous hotel and Jane and I have decided that when we find our millionaires we’re going to stay there.
Back in Merced, we found the Days Inn which wasn’t a Days Inn at all, but an America’s Suites and rooms, and went to Applebee’s for dinner.
April 29 – 30
Barbara, my American friend with whom I did a road trip across the USA in 2007, and another trip from LA to Vancouver and back in 2013, lives in Merced, and met us for breakfast at Black Bear. It was wonderful to see her looking as youthful and spritely as ever. Dana was our waitress and the most wonderful waitress I’ve ever had. She saw me rush to give Barbara a hug, and came over and told us how envious she was. She gave Jane a pile of menus and placemats for our ‘Bourbon and Burgher’ night, and when she brought the bill, I told her it was ours, and she put it in front of Jane. Barbara, quick as a whip, grabbed it. Dana, still at the table, asked Barbara if she could see it, and having been given it back, handed it to Jane. Yes!!
The temperature in Merced was 30, but as we drove over the hills to Monterey, it dropped to 15. We had plugged the Monterey Days Inn into the GPS, but as we were driving, we decided that we wanted to be within walking distance of Cannery Row, so we turned off the GPS (stupid woman kept on telling us to make a legal u-turn when possible) and winged it. We ended up at a Holiday Inn, where we asked for a room with 2 beds for 3 nights. The price for the first 2 nights was acceptable, but for Friday night it was almost twice that of Wednesday night, so we booked in for 2 nights. Jane went off to find a laundromat and I did some work on updating MapWorld’s website for the end of the month.
In the bathroom, I couldn’t see a hair dryer, so I started opening drawers and found it in a bag – along with a pair of male undies which I flicked onto the floor by the door. I drew them to Jane’s attention on her return with her washing. The initial words out of her mouth were not favourably received by me – she said she was going to call the front desk and tell them her elderly mother (yes that was me to whom she was referring) had damn near had a heart attack upon finding MEN’s underclothes. The withering look she received from me was enough to make her go to Plan B.
She was awesome! I would have just called the front desk and told them, but not Jane. She was INDIGNANT that there was not just underwear left in our room, but MALE underwear. There was a knock on the door about 30 seconds later, just as the phone rang. I opened the door for the person to collect the underpants – he even had a pair of plastic gloves with which to pick up the offending article of clothing. Jane answered the phone and the person on the front desk told her that $100 had been credited to our account. It will be interesting to see what happens when we check out. (There was indeed a $100 credit on our account on checkout.)
Last night, we walked a couple of blocks to Hula’s Grill for dinner – Hawaiian food. Delicious.
Breakfast in this motel is almost as good as the breakfast in Flagstaff – mind you it needs to be considering what we’re paying for the room. This morning I had decided that we would drive around the coast to Carmel and I didn’t want to use the GPS because it insisted on trying to take us on the Freeway. We had a lovely drive along 17 mile drive and then found a coastal drive around by Pacific Grove. I don’t think we managed to find Carmel but it was very pleasant.
About 3.30, we walked to the Monterey Aquarium where I got to visit the jellyfish again. They are so beautifully fragile and delicate. From there we walked to Bubba Gump’s for dinner. Jane has never seen the movie ‘Forest Gump’ so I had to quickly give her a brief summary of what I could remember of the movie and how Bubba came into it. Our waitress – Katy – came by and asked all sorts of trivia questions about the movie.
May 1
Jane has long talked about Lafayette and a yarn shop she visited there a few years ago, so our mission today was to find said yarn shop so she could shop to her hearts’ content. It wasn’t where she thought it was, and I did point out to her that it was a couple of years ago, and might very well have closed down. Eventually, we found another yarn shop – and I was right. The one she had remembered has closed down.
There was only one hotel in Lafayette – and nothing else. It was VERY posh, and when we enquired about a room for the night, the cost was $260, so we carried on to Walnut Creek which is where we are tonight.
We’re in a Motel 6 – about the same price as a top range Days Inn, but without the amenities. We had to pay for WiFi – each. There are no coffee/tea facilities in the room. There’s no hair dryer, and no breakfast tomorrow morning. So nowhere near as good as even the crappiest Days Inn.
May 2 – 5
I was surprised at how easy I found driving into San Francisco with Jane interpreting the directions from the GPS, and remembering to adjust for Jane’s not knowing left from right, we only took 2 wrong turns. On the second occasion, the GPS demanded “where possible, make a legal U-turn”. I don’t think so!
On finally parking at the Hertz return place, Jane went off to fight the good fight. A couple of days into our trip, Jane had noticed that the fender on the passenger side was loose and when she examined it, ascertained that it had been repaired with a clip that didn’t fit properly. She was rightly concerned that as we hadn’t been told about it when we picked up the car, we might get charged for it. About half an hour later, she returned to where I’d been standing minding all our stuff, and we went in search of a taxi. As it was only 10.45, we hadn’t expected to be able to get into our room, but we were able to dump and run to get breakfast before the kitchen closed at 11.
We are staying in a Holiday Inn about 2 blocks from Fishermans Wharf. As I’d spent much of the last couple of days coughing up a storm, Jane went off for a walk to investigate. That night she met up with a guy with whom she used to flat many years ago, and went out to dinner with him and his partner.
The hotel has been invaded by 100s of Girl Scouts who seem to be running riot all over the place. With best school teacher voices on, we became very adept at flinging open the room door and scaring the crap out of them.
On Sunday morning, we were out of the room early in order to get coffee and get on the Big Bus which is one of those hop on hop off scenarios. We decided to go for the option which includes the evening tour as well. It’s not warm in SF today – it would be tolerable if we were walking around, but on the top of a double decker bus, it was freezing especially going over the Golden Gate Bridge and back again. The tour guide, however was excellent. He told Jane and me he would be our escort – and then promptly wished he hadn’t used that word, but he had a great sense of humour, and told the story of SF with all the amusing bits and some slightly more seedy bits left in. (Sadly, I don’t remember any of the seedy bits because I didn’t note them down at the time.)
We drove around many parts of SF, but the one that impacted on me the most was the Tenderloins district. It was like being in another world. It’s the place with the cheapest rental – just shy of $1,000 per month. But what got me was all the ‘street’ people lying or sitting on the footpaths and in the parks, some with huge piles of stuff, and some with not much at all. I noticed this in Fisherman’s Wharf too, but there they took on a different hue – spaced out or drunk (probably the former) and talking to themselves, not in the way I do when I’m having a serious conversation with myself to tell myself off about something, but in a meaningless monologue of nonsense. I remember once being told this can be a sign of some serious vitamin deficiency (B maybe?).
The only flat areas in that part of SF are those which have been filled firstly with the ships abandoned after bringing men to the gold rush in them thar hills (on one street there’s actually the outline of the ship that is located beneath the street – a different take on the sewers underneath Paris) and then fill from the earthquake of 1906. Having come from Christchurch, it’s been interesting to hear and see how the earthquake of 1906 has defined San Francisco. It did make me wonder if that would be how Christchurch would be defined in 100 years from now when people talk about the earthquake of 2011 as being the most important point in the history of Christchurch.
After a very ordinary dinner at Applebee’s we were on the bus (with many additional layers to thwart the cold) and looking forward to seeing the sights at night. The layers we put on were inadequate. God only knows how we’re going to manage in Alaska. We HAD to sit on the top of the bus for the best view, but it was so cold . . . We did get to stop off on the Presidio side of the Golden Gate Bridge (to be honest, I’ve never seen what all the fuss re the Bridge is about) and take some photos. Then we drove over the Oakland Bridge to Treasure Island so we could look back at San Francisco. Brrrr.
The next day, Jane decided that she absolutely totally had to visit Macy’s. So we used our Big Bus tickets, but sat downstairs this time, and alighted from the bus right outside. I went and sat in Starbuck’s and Jane agreed to meet me there at 12.30. She turned up a lot earlier than that, and after she’d had a cup of tea, we left. I suggested we get a cable car back to Fisherman’s Wharf and we duly joined a queue of people waiting for a tram with room for extras. In the meantime, we warded off a large number of people who deemed their need to get on the cable car more important than ours, and were stupid enough to put themselves at the front of the queue. Needless to say, they were soon pointed to the back of the line. Three cable cars later, we were onboard for the up, over, down ride that is a San Francisco cable car ride.
Jane had booked to go on the Alcatraz tour which I’m sure she will write about on her blog. I’ve been to San Francisco three or four times now, and still have no interest in going to Alcatraz so we agreed to meet for dinner on Pier 39.
May 5 – 7
Our flight to Vancouver was supposed to leave at 11.05, so we had to be at the airport 3 hours before that. Gulp! That meant we had to leave the hotel at 7am. I’d almost forgotten that hour even existed in the morning. We got to the airport, and checked in (had to pay $35 each to put 1 suitcase on the plane) and found out that our flight was then leaving at 12.05.
By the time we had deplaned AND collected our luggage which took more than half an hour because there was a snarl-up in the works somewhere, and collected the car (a Nissan Versa) it was already 3pm. Vancouver was in the throes of a huge thunder storm, and when eventually the GPS figured out where we were (I’d already figured we needed to be heading east and so didn’t have to back-track at all), and got us onto the right road, we were not only in the midst of this massive storm, but also a traffic jam of immense proportions. It was 5.30 before we broke free and headed to Kamloops. We’re on the way to Banff where we are booked into a hotel from Thursday till Tuesday next week.
It’s 354kms from Vancouver to Kamloops, but the road is 4 lanes wide and eventually the speed limit was 120kph so I was able to rocket down the highway. I did catch Jane putting her foot on the brake once. There were a huge number of trucks on the road, but on the whole it was easy driving. We went over at least 3 high passes where there was fresh snow on the hills on the sides of the road.
We stopped at Hope about 6.30 for a late lunch / dinner in a truckers’ cafe and arrived at Kamloops about 8.40 (10 minutes faster than the GPS had said we would arrive) and booked into a Super 8.
Jane had researched and discovered that there’s a horsey store – Horse Barn – and an animal park that she wanted to visit, as well as an art cum coffee shop. So after a visit to the Horse Barn (sigh), where Jane checked out cowboy boots, and cowboy shirts, and saddles and all sorts of paraphernalia, we passed a stand that was full of toy animals. She told me I could have one seeing I’d been such a good girl. Well I would have taken her up on the offer if I could have found what I’ve been saying I want to see for days – a beaver! But there wasn’t one, so she was off the hook.
The BC Wildlife Park was a sad mediocre replica of Orana Park. There were brown bears, grey wolves, a black bear, some eagles and a badger, but no beaver. Jane went off to check out the long-horned sheep, and I waited for her, and waited, and then I recived a text asking me where I was. Indignantly, I replied I was where she’d left me freezing my tits off. She was in the Gift Shop checking out the t-shirts. There were lots of stuffed animals, so I decided to look for a beaver. Alas! There were none – until Jane drew out of a bag a beaver with a hole up her bum so she can be a finger puppet. Talk about laugh! Check out the photo.
(About 6 weeks after we arrived home from this trip, I received a postcard in the mail, all written in French. The gist of it was that I had stolen Mumma’s baby beaver and threatened hellfire and damnation. Jane had had so much fun writing in and then posting it before we left Canada.)
May 7 – 12
We were awakened early this morning by some very loud shouting in the corridor from a very angry man. After much door slamming the noise eventually stopped but it was too late. We were awake. Breakfasted and the car refuelled, we were on our way to Banff with the GPS telling us we would arrive at 4.35. Crossing over into Alberta means we change time-zones and have to put our watches forward an hour.
Sadly the road from Kamloops east is not as favourable to lead-foots (or should that be lead-feet?) as that from the west. Much of the road is 2 lane and so the speed limit was only 90!! There were lots of road works too because the road east to Banff will eventually be 4 lanes. As we drove up into and through the Rockies, there was a lot of snow alongside the road. For dozens of kilometres, the road marking were non-existent. They had simply worn away. This meant taking on the trucks and slower traffic was tricky, but I managed. Bearing in mind we stopped for about half an hour, I still managed to get us there before the GPS said we would. Jane tells me she only closed her eyes and clutched the door handle once.
It was about 2.30 when we stopped for lunch in a town called Golden. We were so hungry we went into the first place we came to which happened to be a Dairy Queen. The hamburger was actually ok, although I don’t really want to think about what was in it.
It was late afternoon when we drove up to the Best Western, Banff where I had booked us in for 5 days when we were in Monterey using my credit card. Two days ago, I received confirmation that my card had been charged, so I was alarmed when the receptionist said they didn’t have a booking. Imagine my feeling of stupidity when I got out my iPhone to show him the booking only to realise that we had a booking for the Best Western in Canmore, not Banff.
Canmore has a population of around 12,000. It came into existence in 1884 because of the Canadian Pacific Railway, coal mining and logging. It was named after Malcom 111 of Scotland whose nickname was Canmore (Gaelic for “Big Head”).
We’ve got a lovely room looking towards the mountains and it has its own fireplace – which we probably won’t get to use because it’s not very cold. Although the temperature is low relatively speaking (I put on jeans, shoes and sox as well as a jacket to go out today (Friday May 8) I and I was too warm) there is no wind. It did however snow last night. The cars were all covered, but by the time we went out, it had all thawed.
After a late breakfast this morning, we spent a couple of hours catching up on washing. It was good to be able to use 2 washing machines (1 for whites and 1 for coloureds) instead of the basin and having clothes drip everywhere till eventually they dry.
Last night, we wandered down the street and stopped in at a very posh wine bar where we were the only customers. We had a glass of Canadian red wine each, and shared some cheese. When we were given the bill, we understood why there were no other people there. Even on holiday where you expect to spend, $38 was a bit steep for 2 glasses of average plonk, one square of blue cheese and a few crackers.
Tonight, we’re going to have a proper meal with real meat (as opposed to reconstituted fat in burgers) and vegetables. Jane has chosen the Iron Goat. She sure has a thing for goats – especially old ones.
The meal was good, and there was plenty of eye candy. I had bison ribs which came with sweet potato covered in marshmallows and candied pecans. The ribs were good, but the sweet potato was so sweet that I didn’t eat more than a mouthful. We had decided on cheese, but that restaurant didn’t do that. So we went to the place where we’d had coffee this afternoon, but they were playing Gaelic music with a full house.
We ended up in a newly established a bar where we had another drink. A local man sat beside us at the bar and I engaged him in conversation. Jane has been really slack about getting points from talking to random men, so as soon as I started talking to him she called me “bitch”. How rude!! Anyway, he wanted to buy us another drink, but I had to decline as I was driving.
May 9 – 11
As the forecast claims it’s going to rain tomorrow, we decided to make the most of the beautiful day and go to Banff.
Banff is a resort town within Banff National Park. The peaks of Mt. Rundle and Mt. Cascade, part of the Rocky Mountains, dominate its skyline. On Banff Avenue, the main thoroughfare, boutiques and restaurants mix with château-style hotels and souvenir shops. The surrounding 6,500 kilometres of parkland is home to wildlife including elk and grizzly bears.
Driving towards Banff, we came to a toll booth and entry cost $19.60 – for 30 hours but we thought it was a bit steep.
We’d decided that we were going to head straight to the gondola to make the most of the clear blue skies, and so $39.90 and 800 metres later we were at the top of Sulphur Mountain at a height of 7,500 ft above sea level. The views all around were fabulous as you can see from the photos. I especially like the photo of the valley that includes Banff.
From there, we drove to Lake Louise. We had wanted to go to Moraine Lake too which is supposed to be even more beautiful than Louise, but the road (like so many of the sites in the Rockies) is still closed. I had expected Lake Louise to be stunningly beautiful, but I hadn’t expected it to still be covered in ice! I also hadn’t expected there to be so many people there.
On the way back to Canmore, we decided to visit Lake Minniewanka (pronounced wonka). A very helpful young man on the staff at the Best Western had suggested it as a great place to view some wild life because despite there being signs all over the place warning of Wild Animals, we’ve yet to see any. This lake is another of the glacial lakes that abound in this area. It had a jetty with lots of fishing boats a noise, so, despite the fact that it was late in the afternoon, there was no wild life around.
As we were existing the car park, there was a young man standing on the side of the road with his back pack looking for a ride. Jane put her window down and asked him where he was going. This young Frenchman from Normandy was looking for a ride to Banff. So Thelma and Louise had Brad Pitt in the back of the car. Jane plied him with questions. He’d sailed to Nova Scotia from the Mediterranean, and is due back there in July to go home.
Yesterday (Sunday) the weather forecast for Canmore and around this area, was for rain. So we decided to go to Calgary for the day. Jane checked out what there was to do, and found a farmers’ market as well as the address for it.
Calgary, a cosmopolitan Alberta city with numerous skyscrapers, owes its rapid growth to its status as the centre of Canada’s oil industry. However, it’s still steeped in the western culture that earned it the nickname “Cowtown,” evident in the Calgary Stampede, its massive July rodeo and festival that grew out of the farming exhibitions once presented here.
We arrived at the market about 11.30 (it’s only about 120 kms away) and it was interesting/strange to be out of the mountains and back on the flat. In fact, on the drive back I pointed out to Jane as we were driving back towards the mountains, it was very much like driving across the Canterbury plains towards the Southern Alps.
The market was great and the best thing about it was that although it was full of people, they were all locals. They were ‘real’ people, not tourists like us. We spent a couple of hours wandering around the stalls: jewellery, old books, crockery, clothes, fruit, veges, food – an eclectic collection of junk and stuff. We bought some Caribbean food which we ended up having for tea (nowhere near as spicy as I expected), some fruit, two flavours of popcorn and an ice cream each and left.
As we drove back, we could see that the weather forecasters had got it right. It was bucketing down, the mountains had vanished from view, and the streets were awash. What a good decision we’d made!
Today (Monday) we’d decided to spend at least part of the day in Banff – er – shopping. Actually, it was pretty good. There are LOTS of tourists shop, and we had presents to buy. On the way back to Canmore, we decided to check out the Three Sisters – we’d noticed a sign which we went to investigate thinking we might get closer to the three peaks that dominate the skyline. Sadly, it was a ‘suburb’ – lots of very expensive looking houses and nothing else.
Tomorrow, we have to head back west to Vancouver. We’ve decided to be kinder to ourselves going back and take shorter days than we did heading east. So we’re stopping tomorrow night in Revelstoke and Wednesday night in Hope.
May 12
A useless piece of information for all trivia buffs: the $1 coin in Canada is commonly called a “loonie”. The first time someone told me this, I asked them WHY. That person was a Canadian, but didn’t know the answer. But the answer is simple – a loonie is so called because there’s an image of a ‘loon’ on the reverse of the coin.
Another leisurely start to the day, mainly because the navigating bitch (can’t call her the kitchen bitch any longer because she’s sadly been neglecting her chores in that department) didn’t wake up till 8.30. I, on the other hand, had been awake for HOURS!
We checked out and hit the road – not literally of course, and less than 2 minutes later, Jane decided she needed to put her sunglasses on because it was very sunny! But, they were nowhere to be found. By that time we were on the freeway from where it’s not easy to get off. I of course managed to negotiate our departure admirably, and having ascertained that the sunnies were nowhere to be found in the car, we returned to the Best Western so Jane could get back into our room and see if she could find them – which she did, cunningly disguised as a light switch.
Back on the road again, I resisted the temptation to make up for lost time. We had of course forgotten all about the plethora of road works.
In one instance, we came to a part of the road that was being hot sealed, and there were men and pieces of large equipment everywhere. I slowed down to the required speed, but as I was at the front – the very front – of a long line of traffic, and because the placement of the cones with which the road was littered was very confusing, at one part, I got on the wrong side of the cones.
A VERY rude man lept out in front of me with a STOP sign which he changed to SLOW, and abused me for being on the wrong part of the road. I put the window down, and calling him a “rude wanker” and suggested he sort out the cones so they made sense – and drove on, carefully sticking to the speed limit – just in case . . .
We stopped in Golden to refuel, and carried on for a few kilometres to visit a Wolf establishment. Not dancing with Wolves – we tried but they were too busy eating a dead calf. In enclosures, there were half a dozen neutered wolves which all looked really well cared for and healthy, unlike the BC Wild Life park we went to in Kamloops. I was unimpressed. Whoopdeedoo!
But then the young woman who had taken our $12 entry fee came out and talked to us (and 6 other people) about wolves in general, and the wolves in the enclosures. The part I found most interesting was about Yellowstone National Park, and how the wolves in the park were all hunted and exterminated to allow the elk to prosper. By the 1990s the park was dying because there were no predators to eliminate the weak elk and so the wolves were reintroduced and the natural balance was restored.
While we were listening to the young woman, the wolf with dibs on the dead calf (a still born calf which had been donated by a local farmer) was subject to a two- pronged manoeuvre from the other two wolves. It was highly entertaining to watch and the successful wolf dragged the calf away to gnaw on it for a while. They eat everything – literally. The other interesting (?) thing we found out was that the road kill that supplies about 50% of the wolf food intake has to be paid for – the Rangers collect the fee. ROAD KILL HAS TO BE PAID FOR!!
A while later, Jane decided we should have the last orange that we had purchased in Calgary on Sunday. She peeled it and handed me a segment which had been depithed, and told me to clap my hands when I was ready for a another piece. Guess who nearly crapped herself when I did exactly that. Granted I was driving at about 120 kph and clapping, of course, required me to remove both hands from the steering wheel, but it was for only a couple of seconds.
Climbing up through what we now know to be the last of the Rocky Mountains, we once more drove through 5 tunnels in rapid succession all of which were open on the downward side to the mountains. I hadn’t noticed when we were driving East that there were glaciers all the way along the mountainside – there must have been at least 6 or 7 of them just sliding down. It was an amazing sight, but not one that was possible to photograph as there was simply nowhere to stop.
The mountains in western BC which is where we are now are called the Columbian mountains and are not considered to be part of the Rockies although they were all created the same way – uplifting of the tectonic plates followed by glacial erosion.
We arrived in Revelstoke about 2.30 and drove straight into town to have coffee and a sandwich (which became soup for both of us). We then went and booked into Days Inn for the night. Dinner tonight was at The Village Idiot. Highly recommended by TripAdvisor and now also by us.
May 13
We were out of Revelstoke by 9am this morning. Jane had researched a small diversion for us to check out – this small diversion involved us in driving along Highway 1 instead of 5 which is the way we’d driven to this part of the world. We stopped in Kamloops for lunch and made it to Hell’s Gate at 2.30.
Hell’s Gate is an abrupt narrowing of British Columbia’s Fraser River, located immediately downstream of Boston Bar in the southern Fraser Canyon. The Canadian National Railway hewed its way through the Rockies and the treacherous Fraser Canyon. While blasting for the passage of the railway, a rock slide was triggered which partially blocked the Fraser River at Hell’s Gate. A dramatic drop in the salmon run resulted. Thirty years of work by dedicated scientists and several years’ construction were required to repair man’s damage.
Today Hell’s Gate fishways, built by a joint Canadian – United States Commission and completed in 1966, stand as monument to man’s dedication and ingenuity.
We crossed over in the ‘tram’ which is really like a gondola and wandered around all the information rooms, as well as the gift store!
We arrived in Hope about 4pm, and began the search for somewhere to stay – none of our regular haunts were available, but we’ve got a huge room in Canada’s Best Value Inn.
May 12 – 14
We arrived in Vancouver about 11.30 – after a few wrong turns. Our hotel is in the central part of the city within walking distance of almost everything.
Barbara and Bill arrived yesterday. Jane and I picked a restaurant called Chewies Steam and Oyster Bar because it’s only about 2 blocks from where they’re staying and 6 from us. We were there at 7, but Barbara and Bill went to the wrong end of the street. However this gave us time to chat to the staff – Ryan, who served us most often, comes from Dunedin, and has been in Canada for 7 years. We had a great evening with much laughter.
Friday – yesterday – was mainly spent (sigh) in a Mall (sigh). We dropped the rental car off first thing, (the Hertz address for dropping off cars is a lie. It’s not even possible to park in front of the office, but serendipitously, we had decided – deliberately this time, and not by accident – to approach the address from the rear, where we spied the sign for Hertz returns. Jane tried to get the woman behind the counter to at least acknowledge that the drop-off address was a fabrication, but her “tell someone who gives a shit” countenance eventually sunk in, and Jane gave up, and walked all the way into the central part of the city, stopping off for breakfast on the way.
One of the things that was very noticeable about our walk down Granville Street today was the plethora of people – mainly men – sleeping on the footpath (even at 10.30).
May 16 – 23
Saturday May 16
After breakfast across the road, we packed up, checked out and got a cab to the Pan Pacific. We’d arranged to meet Barbara and Bill there so that we could leave our suitcases in their hotel, and explore Vancouver some more. Barbara had already talked to the bellhop who said that if we left our bags with him, he would ensure our bags were delivered to the cruise ship, thereby relieving us of the problem of having to cart them around.
We four then got on the skytrain to Chinatown where Bill “had” to buy t-shirts. Back on the skytrain, we got off at the same stop and then, using the seabus, we went to North Vancouver where Jane, Bill and Barbara went shopping while I sat in the sun listening to a street musician. We sat in the sun having lunch and then went back to the Pan Pacific, where the Princess Star had docked and was being loaded. It was interesting watching all the food being loaded on.
We were supposed to be boarded at 5.45 but we were queued up long before that – queue after queue after queue – Jane did point out that it really didn’t take any longer than queuing for a plane. We’d gone through all the checks, and were in the last holding area when Barbara decided that she’d had enough and went off and demanded the “preferred” status that someone with her level of stateroom was entitled too – and of course she dragged her friends along with her. And suddenly we found ourselves being photographed to enable the crew to ensure that our room key and credit card details match!
Whilst the cruise ship provides lots and lots and lots of food, we have to pay for water, coffee (special ones like lattes and capuchinos) and alcohol as well as the laundromat. We have to use our room key for everything – not just getting into our room. And – get this – an automatic $15 per day tip is added to each account. And of course, there are tips automatically added to the drink purchases.
When Jane and I finally found our room right up at the front of the boat (starboard side) our suitcases had already arrived. But wait! Something’s wrong. There’s only one bed. Jane called the purser to let him know that although we like each other, it’s not in THAT kind of way. Eventually, Lowell, our room attendant came, and converted the bed into 2 narrow singles. About 7.45 we went off in search of dinner, only to be reminded that seeing there’s a compulsory emergency drill at 8.30, and we must take our life-jackets with us, so we abandoned the idea of dinner just then and returned to our stateroom to await the call to drill. We even got to try our life-jackets on.
From the drill, we decided to go straight to dinner with our life-jackets. Jane’s knee has been giving her considerable pain, and she was not at all happy to be told that we could not take our life-jackets to dinner with us. I could tell she was about to lose it totally, so I told her to go and get us a table whilst I returned the life-jackets to our room.
Our cabin is smaller than the photos showed on the Princess website. It has a bathroom with a basin toilet and shower which is functional but very small. We have two single beds with concrete mattresses (we asked for an additional duvet each so that we could have one to lie on and one to cover, but we got a blanket each). We have a cabinet with a fridge in it, and a television on a shelf above it, a desk and chair, and, best of all, we have a balcony with 2 chairs and a small table.
Sunday May 17
Today is a cruise day – going flat tack up the coast with the land covered in cloud and/or fog.
Every evening we get a ‘newsletter’ telling us what’s going on. Jane read about the talk today by a lumberjack in the theatre. So Jane had us there in time to spend half an hour listening to the nature lecturer talk about Ketchikan (Monday’s stop) and Juneau (Tuesday’s stop). She had some interesting information, but the presentation was boring and tedious.
The lumberjack on the other hand was a showman. He’d been winning competitions since he was 6 – a world champion something or other, and his show was entertaining. He had purloined some audience participation, and held an axe throwing competition. He was, of course, perfect. The audience participants were useless. After 3 attempts from each member of each team only a couple managed to hit the target.
Later that night when we were all dressed up, in one of the bars after a good few drinks, I spied him wandering around still with his axe hanging off his belt, I stopped him and asked him how it was that he was allowed to wander around with an lethal weapon. He wasn’t quick enough or bright enough with his retort. He just said that people trusted him. Very disappointing as there were so many better replies he could have given.
Dinner was dress-up. We met up with Barbara and Bill for a cocktail, and then some free champagne provided because the captain organised it. There was supposedly a ‘champagne fountain’ but the drinks waiter with whom I’d been chatting decided that we should have lots of champagne and at one time there were 8 full glasses of bubbles on our table.
Barbara and Bill took us to their favourite restaurant as their guests – there are 2 restaurants that our state room doesn’t give us access to unless we pay an extra $25 each. But Barbara instructed the maitre d’ that we were their special guests. Bill ordered a bottle of Pinot noir, and when we’d finished that, I ordered another. The food at that restaurant was better than we’d had anywhere else because it was HOT. It’s the main thing I’ve noticed in all the places where we’ve eaten on the boat – the food is luke warm so even if it’s good food, it’s barely palatable when it’s not hot.
By the time we finished dinner, the nightclub was open, so we went right to the back of the boat to check it out. The music was just piped music but it was all right. Then Barbara decided she had to go gambling and vanished. Because of the location of the nightclub, right at the back of the boat and right at the top -almost like an add-on as a large sort of bubble, it was gently swaying – or maybe it was all that alcohol. It was a LONG way to walk from there to our room which is right at the front of the boat.
Monday May 18
Today is our first ‘shore’ visit. We spent 6 hours tied up at the wharf along with 4 other cruise ships. That meant that the population of Ketchican went from 6,000 to 20,000 for a few hours. Fortunately for us, we (the 4 of us) didn’t go ashore till about 10, and there were no queues to leave. We walked into the town, and along to Creek Street which used to be the town’s red light district and is now full of tourist shops. As we were walking there, we spied an electric machine which was a cross between a small car and a motorbike with seats for 4. Barbara and Bill went and hired one, came back to Creek Street where we had been sitting in the sun listening to an old man telling his story and the story of the area to anyone who would listen. He talked about delivering newspapers as a boy to the girls of ill repute without realising what they did for a living.
Off we went in the electric motor thing – no idea what to call it – with Bill driving and trying to stick to the route that we were supposed to stay on, but encouraged by his back seat drivers to stray off the straight and narrow. We had a look around the town – twice. Once going the wrong way around the suggested (read allowed) route and once the correct way.
Eventually we ended up back at the dock, and Bill, the dear man, dropped us off there and went off to return the vehicle. The queue to get back onto the ship was about 4 kms long! (slight exaggeration). Jane and I decided to sit in the sun near the end of the line and wait until the end of the line caught up with us. The security man who was standing there allowing the infirm onto the ship without queuing and offered for us to go with the crippled and infirm a couple of times, but Jane, not wanting to be classed as a cripple, said we would wait our turn. We waited, and waited and waited, and just as we thought the line was going to get close to us, another bus load of ship inhabitants was dropped off and joined the queue. Bill was in the queue and – silly boy – saw us sitting there and left the queue to join us. I had said to Jane that we should wait till Bill got to us, and join him! In all, I think we waited more than 2 hours.
Tuesday May 19
Today we’re in Juneau which is the capital of Alaska – it’s only possible to visit Juneau by boat or plane as there are no roads to this town. Barbara had organised a taxi and driver for us before leaving New Zealand, and we have him for 4 hours to show us the sights of Juneau. We were supposed to meet him at 8am and we would have, too – except the queue to get off the boat this morning zigzagged around the ship about 3 times and so it was almost 9 by the time we alighted from the ship. There was Denis – our driver for the day – standing there with a sign saying “Barbara Waters”.
Not only did Dennis take us all over Juneau and into the surrounding areas, but he talked all the time about Juneau, its people and what life is like there. He had many anecdotes as well. Our 4 hours was almost up, and we were heading back into town, when Barbara spied a black bear up above the road. Dennis stopped, and realising that in actual fact our 4 hours was up, told us he was turning off the clock, as there were still a number of things he wanted to show us. We sat and watched the bear for some time – Barbara got some great photos of it too with the zoom lens on her camera. The bear was just ambling down the track on the side of the road eating dandelions.
So it was about 5 hours after he collected us, that Dennis finally dropped us off back at the ship. We had certainly had a good look around Juneau. Barbara and Bill went for a lie-down – they seemed to do that quite a lot (hmmm!) and we went in search of coffee and someone to annoy. Getting back onto the ship was nowhere as bad as it had been getting off – minutes rather than hours.
I guess it’s time for some information about the Star Princess.
Our room is a room with a balcony on the starboard side of the ship (so that we can look out at the land). We have 2 single beds with concrete mattresses, a television, a bathroom with a toilet, basin and shower, a large open wardrobe and a small desk and chair. On the balcony, we have two desk chairs, but the perspex that forms part of the rail is covered in a dark blue film. Because of this, it’s not possible to actually sit on the deck chairs and look out from our balcony. We have to stand and lean on the rail to do so. In addition, there’s an outdoor walkway slightly below the floor level of our balcony. This means that there is a constant flow of people walking past whose heads we can see (unless they are really short), but who we can certainly hear. And they walk past at all hours of the day and night. It’s quite disconcerting to be standing out there in one’s night attire watching the world go by, to have all these people invading one’s privacy. Neverthelss, we overcome the invasion by simply ignoring it.
We’re on Deck 8 – right at the front of the boat, in fact ours is the first cabin with a balcony. The nightclub mentioned previously is on Deck 15. On Deck 12, there is a buffet restaurant which has food almost all day and night. So there’s breakfast from 6 to 11, then lunch from 11 to 4, and dinner from 4 to 11. We breakfasted there a few times because we never figured out anywhere else to go, although sometimes, we just went to the coffee shop (paid for the coffee – filter coffee was freely and readily available all the time, but any special coffee had to be purchased) and had coffee and tea (for Jane) and whatever was in the food cabinet. The thing about the food at the buffet was that although there was a large variety of food, it was always the same from one day to the next, and (the worst crime of all) it was only ever luke-warm. So even had the food been tasty, it was barely edible because of the lack of heat in it.
There were also a number of restaurants on the ship. With our “anytime” dining option, we could choose to go to anyone of 4 different restaurants, but we quickly realised that the menus were basically the same in all of them. However, there were two other restaurants which we could go to, but we had to pay $25 (US) each for the privilege. They were silver service restaurants, and so not only was the food better, but it was HOT. Barbara and Bill had a specific dining time, and as we’re not snobs, we dined with them at their table a couple of times.
There were a couple of bars on the ship too – the one we frequented was called the Crooner’s Bar. But the entertainment left a lot to be desired. It took us a while to figure out why there was so little entertainment. I had expected in advance of going on a cruise that there would be a show on every night with different acts providing all sorts of entertainment. But it appeared to me, that because there were SO MANY REALLY OLD people on the ship who vanished about 8 (I overheard a number of people one day making a “date” to meet for dinner at 5 pm because their bed-time was 8), there was no need for any decent entertainment.
Jane and I went to one of the other bars one night because we’d seen that this was the hangout for a band called (must remember to ask Jane if she can remember what it was called – never did) and so about 9pm we went to check the band out. When we got there, it appeared as if a man from the audience had joined the band, and he was singing really well. He did a couple of numbers and left along with his female friend, and that left 5 people other than Jane and me in the bar. The band was really quite good too. However, they made a mistake. They asked for requests, and I called out “anything by the Eagles”. The response wasn’t quite what I expected. In the end I called out “well you did ask”, and so they proceeded to murder an Eagles song (and I can’t remember which one it was), and didn’t ask for any more requests – no surprises there. They carried on playing some reggae music (they were all black musicians), and that gets a bit repetitious after a while, so we left.
Wednesday May 20
We’re in Skagway, the last of our onshore visits, and as we’re here for a lot longer today (from 8am to 6pm), there was no need to rush to get off the ship. So we had a leisurely breakfast, and left the hordes to it, and disembarked about 10 for stroll through the town. In actual fact, the town was so far away from the dock (only 3 other ships this time) that there were shuttle buses available for the commute. Jane and I walked.
I LOVED Skagway. It was my favourite of all the little towns in Alaska that we visited. I had to think about why this was because in essence the towns are very similar ie full of tourists and tourist shops with no real feel for what the towns are actually like.
Skagway is located on the Alaskan “panhandle” 130 km north of Juneau. The panhandle is a narrow strip of the Alaskan state adjacent to Canada. It currently has a population of around 900.
In 1896, the Klondike Gold Rush changed everything. A steamer called “Queen” docked at the wharf in July 1897 with the first boat load of prospectors and the town boomed as prospectors came to make the 800 km journey to the gold fields of Canada. Between 1897-1898, Skagway was a lawless town, described by one member of the North-west Mounted Police as “little better than a hell on earth.” Fights, prostitutes and liquor were ever-present on Skagway’s streets, and con man “Soapy” Smith, who had risen to considerable power, did little to stop it. Smith was a sophisticated swindler who liked to think of himself as a kind and generous benefactor to the needy.
Skagway is one of three Alaskan communities that is connected to the road system; Skagway’s connection is via the Klondike Highway completed in 1978. This allows access to the rest of North America, but more especially to what the Alaskans called “the lower 48”. This also makes Skagway an important port-of-call for the Alaska Marine Highway — Alaska’s ferry system — and serves as the northern terminus of the Lynn Canal corridor which receives about a million tourists every year, most of whom come on cruise ships.
Skagway was my favourite because it was so small, but it was so untouched. It was like stepping back into the late 19th century as there were still boardwalks where the footpaths would be, and the store facades looked exactly the same as they would have more then 100 years ago. Even though the town was full of tourists (only 3 ships in port this time), it was still possible to get a really nice vibe off the location.
Bill and Barbara went off on a train trip, and Jane and I made our way into town. As we were perambulating long the boardwalk, we heard sounds of entertainment and laughter coming from one of the buildings so we went to investigate. In the small “theatre” which was a bit like an old hall from a small rural town anywhere in New Zealand with bench seats, was a 30 minute Vaudeville show called “Days of ’98” running every hour featuring a reenactment of the quarrel between two of the leaders of the community. Jane and I purchased tickets for the 1.30 show and went to have lunch while we were waiting.
All of the events depicted in original play were taken from the Skagway historical record and centre on Soapy Smith’s reign over the town during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and 1898. Jefferson Randolph Smith was born in Georgia in 1860 and ventured west as a young man. He learned his trade as a con man during the silver and gold rushes of Colorado and eventually made it to Skagway in the fall of 1897. Here, he and Colorado cohort “Rev.” John Bowers assembled what was reputed to be the largest band of thieves in North America. Skagway was described by Canadian Mountie Sam Steele as “a little better than hell on earth,” and Smith’s gang reigned supreme for nine months. Smith had a wife and family in St. Louis but he befriended Miss Belle Davenport and her “soiled doves,” Alice and Mollie in Seattle before heading North.
In 1923, Princess steamships started bringing tourists to Skagway. The local residents decided to put on a show for them to raise money for their local hockey team. The team needed new uniforms so that they could compete in the White Pass Athletic League against their rival team in Whitehorse, Yukon. The show became an instant tradition and has been running ever since. It was very entertaining, and we commented a number of times on how good it would have been to have had something like that for entertainment on the ship.
That night we dined at Sabatini’s which was the second of the two up-market restaurants on the ship – which meant we had to pay $25 each for the privilege of dining there. Bearing that in mind, I decided to have something for dinner that I would never have had anywhere else, simply because I think it’s usually over-rated and overpriced. I had lobster three ways . . . . and it’s still over-rated, but because I didn’t have to pay anything more than $25 for dinner, I didn’t care. I won’t need to or want to do that again.
On the day’s events, we had noticed that there was a quiz match. “Are you smarter than the crew?” Now, I would never turn down a chance like that, and Barbara and Jane being equally competitive in those sorts of situations (well Barbara more than Jane) so we went an secured a front row table.
The quiz was a bit different from a normal pub quiz in that we got to choose which of the team members should attempt on behalf of the crew to answer the questions. We chose the Australian to participate in the Geography question, and that was a very good choice. The question she was asked was in which country is Mt Cook the highest mountain. She, bless, said Australia. (I actually think she was taking one for the team, because surely no Australian would think that, but who knows!) In the end, Team Kiwi won . . . and that would have been that, except that Jane and Barbara decided there should have been a prize, and went off to ask – or was that demand? – a prize. We were given little pocket torches and a bottle of bubbles (which we drank the next day).
Thursday May 21
We’re not off the ship again until it docks at Whittier on Saturday, so we were stuck with very little to do. No WiFi. No “real” television as the ship is now in the wrong location to get any satellite coverage and so we’re stuck with reruns of reruns. Reading, annoying Bill and Barbara, annoying each other, and looking at the view.
But in terms of location, today is quite a big day, as we sail into Glacier Bay to view wildlife and glaciers. Late in the morning, a couple of National Park Rangers came on board, and there was continuous chatter over the intercom being transmitted to all parts of the ship telling us about the formation of the glaciers, and where to look for wildlife. Jane and I went up on the front deck to see what all the commotion was about, and the Rangers were being swamped by people who were asking them very intelligent questions. For example, one woman pushed her way through the crowd surrounding the male Ranger in order to ask an earth-shattering question: IS THAT A GLACIER? Oh dear!
The most impressive of the glaciers in this bay (and there are a number of glaciers: Muir, Reid, Lamplugh, Gilman, Tarr, Margerie, Grand Pacific, Fairweather) is the Johns Hopkins Glacier. Its rock, ice and snow depict a variety of impressive colours such as grey, blue and white. It was named in 1893 by H F Reid after the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, which sponsored an expedition to this glacier. It is the only advancing tidewater glacier now (its advance started in 1924) and is combined with Gilman Glacier. Both are advancing as one single ice block, and at the waterfront, has a width of 1.6 km with a depth of 76 m, rising to a height of 76 m and stretches to about 19 km upstream.
Jane and I spent quite a bit of the day with Bill and Barbara in their state-room, even ordering in room service for lunch so we could check out the glaciers from the comfort of their balcony at the very back of the ship. We saw some wildlife too – seals, sea otters (which I was surprised to see so far out into the bay), and in the distance, water spouts from whales. Jane saw some flukes too, but my distance eye-sight isn’t good enough. However, we were pleased to confirm that there were whales in the area.
Friday May 22
Our last day on the ship – yah!
The weather has been so good, and so kind, that I had forgotten (except for the purposes of confinement, view etc) that we were actually on a moving, wallowing vehicle that could very easily make me sea-sick. Late yesterday afternoon, the ship started to behave in such a way as to remind me of this fact. Bearing in mind the position of our room at the front of the ship, it had a real sway on with the increasing swell. Before I got into bed last night, I took some of the sea-sick pills I brought with me – just in case.
This morning, the swell continues, and it’s very foggy outside. This doesn’t bode well for the rest of the day on two counts: firstly the state of my stomach, and secondly the views of the last lot of glaciers. I remained in bed this morning. Jane went off to organise washing (apparently along with at least half the ship including a number of ministers and their congregations – her words not mine), and then went to get breakfast. I had decided that I wouldn’t move.
Jane, however, had other ideas. She went to the buffet, and demanded that the person making toast, make some fresh toast for her friend, and along with fresh toast, butter and marmalade, returned to our room with my breakfast. Then she went back to get her own! What a friend.
When she came back from her breakfast, she looked at the plate of food (consumed) and my colour (glowing pink and healthy) and deemed me not sick, told me to stop thinking about it, and get out of bed. So I did.
Jane had also returned with a couple of boxes of Fruit loops from the breakfast buffet. When her son was young, he had made a necklace out of Fruit Loops which he wore to school for later consumption. Jane had decided that we should manufacture a necklace of Fruit Loops and deliver it to Barbara. She had some nylon twine brought to ensure that should her suitcase need mending (which it did) she would be able to carry out the necessary repairs, and so onto a length of this nylon twine, we threaded the Fruit Loops. They were actually quite sticky seeing as how they aren’t much other than sugar.
Once we’d created the necklace, we then composed a letter for Barbara. I dictated and Jane wrote a letter in French pertaining to come from Barbara and Bill’s room person, John, along the lines that “Jean” thought Barbara was very beautiful and he just had to give her a gift that would enhance her beauty. We put the necklace and the letter in an envelope and made our way 500 rooms to the back of the boat, and put the envelope in the letterbox arrangement that all rooms have outside their doors. And we waited! We were SURE that Barbara would instantly guess where the necklace had come from, and we would get a suitably abusive phone call.
Well we waited. And nothing happened. We waited HOURS, and there was no call.
As the fog had lifted and there were views to be had, and the views would be better from Barbara and Bill’s cabin than from ours, we made our way to their room in the early afternoon. Still nothing from Barbara. In the end, I couldn’t contain myself, and asked if she liked the necklace. Barbara had thought it odd that the person tending their room would leave her a gift, but hadn’t realised what the necklace was made out of. So I guess we got her! Somehow, I felt a little let down though, as Jane and I had almost wet ourselves laughing as we created it, and wrote the letter, and thought about Barbara’s reaction. Ah well!
College Fjord is a fjord located in the northern sector of Prince William Sound in the US state of Alaska. The fjord contains five tidewater glaciers (glaciers that terminate in water), five large valley glaciers, and dozens of smaller glaciers, most named after renowned East Coast colleges (women’s colleges for the NW side, and men’s colleges for the SE side). College Fjord was discovered in 1899 during the Harriman Expedition, at which time the glaciers were named. The expedition included a Harvard and an Amherst professor, and they named many of the glaciers after elite colleges. According to Bruce Molina, author of Alaska’s Glaciers, “They took great delight in ignoring Princeton.”
Saturday May 23
Alaska at this time of the year is really light. The sun sets about midnight with an hour’s twilight after than, and then the sun rises about 3am with an hour’s twilight before that, so it’s never really dark. Last night, Jane and I had realised that the ship was going to dock in Whittier about 12.30 and as we knew it would make a hell of a noise, we sat outside on our “wonderful” balcony and watched it bang and bash against the wharf.
We were supposed to be in the Capri Room for disembarkation (having put our suitcases outside our door by 9pm last night) at 6.30 am . . . . we were up and organised in time (well sort of) but I didn’t check the location of the disembarkation and we went to the wrong spot where people who weren’t doing the land part of the cruise were calmly sitting eating breakfast (not on offer for us), and so we were the last to arrive at the train which was located on tracks right alongside the wharf.
By the time we arrived at our allocated seats, the forward-facing seats had been taken by someone else, and Jane went into low orbit because she hates traveling backwards (I remember the same situation from the train from Moscow to St Petersburg last year). We were only 15 minutes late, but we still had to wait for another three quarters of an hour before the train finally left.
That was one of the myriad things I hated about traveling with Princess – it was always hurry up and WAIT!!!
We were in our seats in the nice warm carriage, but as soon as the guide said there was a bistro car adjacent which we could visit anytime we wanted, Jane was off . . . and to take care of her in her somewhat grumpy mood, I followed. Her sense of humour returned once I put some food into her. It was one of the things I discovered about Jane on this trip – she can get a little feral if she’s hungry.
We actually had a good view in this carriage although the seats were less than comfortable and the carriage wasn’t all that warm. However, the lady running the concession was really good to us – let us run up a tab, and supplied us with frequent hot drinks, and also pointed out the highlights.
Near Girdwood, there was a huge estuary that we chugged past. This was created in 1964 by the 9.2 scale earthquake which generated a tsunami that rushed in 2 miles and dropped the land by 12 feet. This huge estuary is so full of silt that you could take the adjacent mountains (which were quite high) and tip them upside down, and they would vanish in the silt. However, the estuary “hosts” an event twice a year with an equinox tide, that doesn’t deter the surfers. As the tide surges in at that time of the year, it creates a wave – a single solitary wave, which the surfers come in the hundreds to ride. And we were lucky enough to be chugging past as that event occurred. We could see the surge moving up the estuary, and the surfers all lined up waiting for the wave to arrive. It was an amazing sight.
Entering Anchorage, there were about 50 houses on the side of the railroad tracks, and between train tracks and houses was an air strip. The houses all had planes lined up and all planes had tundra tyres for short landings and take offs. The planes were mainly Cessna 4 seaters, but there were a few Super Cubs as well.
There was some interesting scenery on this train trip – especially the estuary mentioned above, but on the whole, what we really got to see were trees followed by more trees. Then there would be a short break to remind you of what the view was like behind the trees, and then more trees. For many years, the Trans-Siberian rail trip was on my list of things I wanted to do – until I met some people in Africa who had taken this train trip. Their overwhelming impression of the views from the train was of trees. So that combined with the fact that they had not been able to shower for the week they were on the train was sufficient for me to remove that trip from my list.
By mid afternoon we had arrived in the little township of Mt Mckinley and were transported from there to the Mt McKinley Lodge for our overnight stay by bus – which took more than an hour to reach. We hadn’t realised it at the time, but the train, buses and lodges that we stayed in on the “land” part of this cruise were all owned by Princess. There was a “sameness” about the treatment, the accomodation, the food (except in the lodges of course, we have to pay for everything).
Finally I got phone coverage which I haven’t had for a week, and then even WiFi. There were dozens of emails waiting for me to get coverage, but nothing that couldn’t have waited a month.
Bill and Barbara had stayed in town to do some shopping (did I say how much I hate shopping?) and so we met up with them for dinner in the 20230 restaurant. It’s called that because that’s the height of Mt McKinley in feet. The restaurant was really busy, but we had the most awesome waiter ever – so much so that we exchanged email addresses. His name was Caleb and he just got our sense of humour. We had so much fun with him and we had such great service from him that we left huge tips (and I NEVER tip because it’s expected – as it always is in the USA). When it came time for us to leave, he hugged us all even Bill. I’ve NEVER had that from a waiter in a restaurant before. (Since then, I’ve had a few emails from him, and he’s still keen to come to NZ.)
Sunday May 24
We met for breakfast in the same location this morning and what a difference. Caleb had told us it was his day off and so we knew not to expect his level of service. But what a contrast. The service was SO BAD, that we ended up getting our breakfasts for free as we watched people who came into the restaurant after us get fed and leave and we still hadn’t received our food. No one seemed to be actually waiting on us – we would stop someone as they rushed past and they would promise to return to take our orders, but that never eventuated. Eventually we did get fed, and the manager came to our table and apologised for the poor service and said there would be no charge. There were 4 of us, and Barbara, Jane and I are not the sort of women to take poor service without complaining. They were probably pleased to see us go.
We spent the rest of the morning sitting waiting . . . . . again. We had to be out of our rooms by 10, but the bus to Denali – our next point of call – didn’t leave till 2pm. So it was hurry up to wait once again.
We waited in the reception area of the lodge along with hundreds of other people who were trying to do what we were trying to do – access the WiFi which wasn’t going to happen. It was the sort of WiFi that pretends it’s obliging, but actually doesn’t have the strength to do anything. Barbara was desperate to send an email to her accountant who hadn’t done something he was supposed to do, and she became agitated at her inability to connect. Gone are the days when we leave home and send postcards only to those we leave behind.
Eventually we arrived in Denali. The strip town/village of Denali (the Denali National Park is a custom built town just for the tourists as it’s only open during the summer season. The lodge was another Princess delight, and once again, no one knew what was going on. Jane and Barbara tried valiantly to find out what was on our schedule for the next 2 days (as we have 2 nights here), but no one seemed to know. That was something else that was typically Princess.
Denali National Park encompasses more than 6 million acres of which most is owned by the state. It’s centred on Denali – the mountain more commonly called Mt McKinley (after the American president), but Denali is the Athabascan (the original inhabitants of the area) name for the mountain, and there’s a move to have the mountain double-named like Aoraki-Mt Cook.
Monday May 25
Today we are due to spend much of the day on school buses in the park.
Breakfast not good, but German lunch (bacon sandwich) was. (This is named – by Jane – after the habit of German tourists (her story not mine) collecting enough food from the breakfast buffet so that you take lunch with you.) We have to use school buses apparently because they have no toilets, and so we won’t befoul the tracks in the national park by flushing the contents of the loo on the road. (There were toilets provided at a number of the stops we made – of the smelly long drop variety.)
Our first stop (along with the inhabitants of 4 other buses) was at a log cabin in the woods. When the fur traders, and then the miners, and then the men building the roads through this area were in this area, in order to stop the bears from pulling their tents to pieces looking for food, they would make a log cabin at strategic locations in order to use as a cook house where the food would be stored. The log cabin was demonstrated to us by the park ranger who was there to talk with us about it with its bear proof doors – double doors with the hinges set in such a way that the bears couldn’t get them open. Sadly I remember very little about the excursion because I was overwhelmed by a feeling of awe at the stupidity of some of the people with whom I was traveling.
One of the Americans – a male – having examined the log cabin stuck out in the wilderness which would be surrounded and covered by snow for many months of the year asked what they did for a shower! Glory be! Did he have no idea at all about what level of personal hygiene people 100 years ago had?
Not to be outdone, and woman then asked quite innocently I assure you, where the bears go in the winter.
But wait. It gets better. I kid you not.
How dark does it get?
But my favourite really was from the woman who wanted to know:
When do they turn on the Northern Lights?
Yikes.
From the log cabin, we drove further into the park, where we were met by a young Athabascan woman who talked to us about her ancestors, about their traditions, about the tools they used and how her ancestors used to live. It was quite interesting. Fortunately, the “stupid” people from the log cabin kept their months shut.
Back at the Lodge, we had the previous night noted there was a Dinner/Theatre occasion on, and had booked in for our evening meal. We met earlier for a couple of drinks at the bar, and then at the appointed time, went to queue up so we were first in the door thereby assuring we had the best seats in the house.
The dinner was edible and there was lots of it, but the entertainment made it a great evening. The young men and women who were waiting tables were also the participants in the show to come, and they were instrumental in “warming” up the occupants of their tables by getting them to wave their serviettes and participating in an action song.
Eventually dinner was cleared away and the show began. The premise of the story was about the creating and naming of the Denali National Park with lots of humour and song. It was very well done. Part way into the show, one of the actors chose a man from the audience to go and sit on the stage. The man that had been chosen was quite bald, and so they made a fuss about his baldness in a very humorous way, and eventually put a large wig on him before releasing him back to his seat.
Further on, into the show, one of the actors extracted a woman from the audience for some participation, and the woman was me. The actress who selected me was playing a sort of chorus girl/tart role and she was wonderful. Maybe that’s what inspired me. She told me my name was “Fanny” and I explained loudly that I couldn’t possibly be called Fanny because of what that means where I come from – I even said “the front bottom” not the “back bottom” as in the US. That got the audience started. Then she told me there was a bear coming and I should take my gun (we’d been making pretend guns with our fingers during dinner – on instruction of course) and shoot it. First of all, I attempted to do an “Annie Oakley” with my gun over my shoulder much to the on-going amusement of the audience. My “trainer” suggested I turn around and confront the bear, and I then took the entire play into an area it’s never been before and never likely to go again I suspect.
Instead of shooting the bear as I was supposed to, I beckoned the bear towards me (bearing in mind that the “bear” was of course one of the fine young men who was part of the theatre group). My companions were by that time almost wetting themselves, and the rest of the people in the hall were shrieking with laughter. Not to be deterred by my unwillingness to cooperate and actually do what I was asked, my “trainer” said we needed to run away from the bear and lead me in and around the tables. Meanwhile the “bear” didn’t move – he was doubled up with laughter. About half way around the hall, my “trainer” had me stop and yell out “You keep your paws off my fanny” which of course I over-dramatised. Then she led me into the arms of my rescuer. But in true Madeleine style, I had to have the last word. I called out to the “bear” and said “yippee, now I’ve got two!!”
I returned to my seat and the play finished . . to be honest, I don’t remember how it finished. As we left the hall, the producer came over to me and asked if I wanted a job for the summer as a plant! He said that I had taken the play to places it had never been before (I suspect every other woman they dragged out of the audience had done what they were asked.) Outside there was a “fan” club waiting – seriously. There were people from the audience waiting outside until I came out so they could tell me how much they had enjoyed my performance! Somewhere in amongst all of that, I got a cuddle from both the “bear” and the “rescuer” as well.
Ah what a night. (It’s a story that’s been retold many times and still is highly amusing.)
Tuesday May 26
Getting on the bus next morning to travel to our final destination in Fairbanks, there was a chant from a number of people of “Fanny, Fanny” as I got on the bus. The people sitting around Jane and me on the bus were really lovely, and had all been on the same boat. What a pity we hadn’t met them earlier as they were so much fun and our impression of the cruise would be improved exponentially. Even at the airport the following morning whilst we were waiting for our flight to Seattle (and thence to Vancouver, Auckland and home) came up and talked to “Fanny” and a couple of them ended up giving Jane and me their business cards with the comments that if we’re ever in their part of the world (Texas I think it was) we should look them up.
The driver we had on the bus for the final leg of the trip to Fairbanks was highly entertaining:
- What coffee is a moose whose given birth? De-calfinated
- What sound to pteragins (the state bird of Alaska) make when they tinkle? They don’t. The “p” is silent.
Admittedly, I didn’t hear half of what he was saying because there was what I assumed to be a Japanese mother and daughter on the seats behind us and the mother insisted in talking loudly in Japanese all the time, ignoring the pleas of those around her to be quiet. I guess she didn’t understand the driver and saw no reason to not talk.
Because it gets so cold in that part of Alaska in the winter, it’s necessary to plug the vehicles into electricity so the motors etc don’t freeze. And so we saw lots of vehicles with electric plugs dangling just below the bonnet. The temperature in winter gets to 40 to 50 below. So Alaskans attitude to “global warming” is BRING IT ON!
One of the “highlights” (brought to us at no expense spared by the people who own the Princess line) was a paddle boat ride up a river till it was no longer navigable, and then back again. Once again there were the ubiquitous tourist shops with overpriced nasty coffee and cheap trinkets. When it was time to board the boat, Jane decided that we should sit outside (as opposed to inside) right up the front. I had drawn her attention to the storm clouds bearing down us in opposition to the way the wind was blowing, but she was adamant. In actual fact, the storm passed us by, and it was hot sitting out there – getting our noses burnt.
There was a demonstration of a SuperCub float plane taking off and landing on the river, and also a demonstration of huskies and dog sledding. Susan Butcher is the only woman to ever win the Iditarod the first time in 1986 and subsequently a number of times after that. There’s now a “Susan Butcher Day” commemorated in Alaska. She died from cancer in 2006. But her husband carries on with the dogs and “mushed” them around.
Back at the dock, and back on the bus, we arrived in Fairbanks about 6pm. We never did get to see Fairbanks because Jane and I had to be at the airport the following morning at 4.30 for a flight to Seattle, then to Vancouver, then to Auckland and eventually to Christchurch.
Thoughts on cruising:
- There was no other way I was going to get to see the places I wanted to see in Alaska other than by cruising. Juneau, the capital city of Alaska is accessible only by boat or plane.
- I still think I want to go to Antarctica and that too is inaccessible to me unless by boat.
- It would be horrendous to do a cruise like this one on your own. Not only did I have Jane, but Barbara and Bill as well!
- All the people on this boat are couples.
- There are lots more Asians than I would ever have expected there to be. They talk REALLY loudly and they have no manners. They push into a queue (or at least try to) .
- The average age of the people on the cruise would be 70 (but mentally they’re at least 90) – yeah I know. Now I’m being picky.
- QUEUES, QUEUES, QUEUES. I HATE QUEUES!
- All the visits to shore in this part of the world occur when the ship is tied up to the dock – the alternative is to be tendered ie. Stuck in a boat and carted to shore.
- The weather was great. Cool to start with and then 20 degrees – hotter than normal. Clear skies – and certainly not cold – not as cold as San Francisco.
- I did not enjoy the cruise. I felt we were treated like sheep. For example, when it was time to leave the ship, we were told to have our suitcases outside our rooms by 9pm the night before, yet my suitcase was still outside my door at 4am.
- I think the worst part was the trips AFTER the cruise all organised, run, and controlled by Princess. We travelled on a Princess train, and Princess buses; we stayed in 3 Princess lodges all run in the same way as the ship EXCEPT we had to pay for everything apart from the bed.
- No one knew what was going on. So in Mt McKinley we asked what the plan was for the next 2 days, and no matter who we asked, the answer was “I don’t know” and no one offered to even try to find out.
So there’s another box ticked on my list. One of our friends asked Jane what was the best thing about our most recent trip, and Jane said “traveling with Madeleine”. The feeling is quite mutual.
Film & Food 