I haven’t been commenting much on political things lately, partly because of the apathy I wrote about in an earlier blog but also because I haven’t been able to get a handle on our president. He is so remote and self-contained that he makes me realize that I have probably succumbed to the sports media form of public debate. I rather wanted to see him exert some muscle and act out in some way my own anger over the way the previous administration ran the country into the ground.
Of course he hasn’t done that—and he’s not going to. His methodical control has left me somewhat perplexed. I am forced to recognize that the shout and yell form of political discourse had infected even me. So I’ve been quiet. I had to regroup. Could all this needed and careful reform actually be boring? Could all the needed change he is bringing actually be tasting like medicine without the spoonful of sugar?
I’m very much of the school of we’ve brought this upon ourselves when things go wrong, as they certainly did with the presidency of George W. Bush. History may, of course, prove him right, but I don’t think so. Not many of us really wanted to see the super rich become the obscenely rich or for corporate America to remove the pretense of even liking the public let alone wanting to do right by us. But outside of voting in the Democrats we haven’t really had our pound of flesh. It’s coming in small doses—keeping lobbyists off government advisory panels and restricting former high military brass from serving as lobbyists and advisors—so we keep saying, hey, change is coming. But it’s coming without drama and without real satisfaction for the vengeful (yep—me) among us.
All this convinces me that it’s really difficult to come down to earth after an adrenaline rush. During WWII with its shortages and bombing and enlistments, people lived high—they could be killed at any moment, there was a ferocious thrill to the latest news, there was a sense of everyone being in something together. Then came peace. It could never compete.
My former boss, the president of the University of Hawaii, was a dynamic dynamo, bursting with ideas and thoroughly exhausting to anyone who worked with him. Everyone said they wanted calm and more emphasis on planning. The next president brought those qualities and lo and behold people started complaining about the lack of excitement. Yet the calm, quiet president laid the groundwork for the next burst of advancement.
I have the feeling that when Obama is through with his work, this nation will have been transformed. Very quietly and without fanfare he is rebuilding. We need this. I just hope that the country can get beyond its fascination with celebrity politicians and understand that the qualities making a politician charismatic are not the same qualities needed to run a complex bureaucratic government.
But what the hell, craven me, I’m looking forward to the fireworks when Ms. Palin tries for the presidency. It will be such fun to oppose her.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Snow Birds
I have a new appreciation for people who turn into snow birds when the weather turns cold. Until now, I thought all they had to do was shut up their house (if they had one) and drive south and enjoy the weather. I hadn’t realized all the logistical challenges that go with it.
For example, there’s the mail. The post office will hold it for only a month so if they’re going home periodically (as we are) travel has to be timed what the PO is willing to do. Otherwise, the mail has to be forwarded, with uncertainty built into the system or else some relative or friend must be delegated to retrieve and forward it.
Then there’s the banking. To take money out of home accounts entails using ATMs, which in turn incur charges from both banks. It can cost around $5 for a single transaction when both banks whet their whistle. I’ve got around this by opening an account with a local bank and writing checks (we do remember those, right?) on my home account. Still, it took thought and some scheming.
Then there’s the medical stuff. Prescriptions have to be transferred to the new location and then transferred back. Doctors and dentists have to be located or else one has to fly home for treatment. Everything otherwise has to be scheduled during the times one is home. It’s surprising how difficult it sometimes is to get an appointment with a regular practice. Unless prior arrangements have been made, standing in pain in a receptionist’s office doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.
Then there’s the internet. Many people pay for satellite service—these are the pros as it turns out. The RV parks provide some basic service, but it quickly gets clogged up by people who insisting on connecting to the towers, remaining on all day, and downloading movies. The alternative is connecting to the cable service (along with the TV) and buying a router, which is its own set of dark challenges to the uninitiated. The providers provide the service far faster than they provide the support. The free advice from Best Buy is just that—free, and unless you have the standard system they can only guess what you need.
Finally, there are the mysteries of the highways and road system, including the drivers. Arizona drivers seem to like blocking lanes and providing a laconic wave around the car rather than moving. It seems to be a state-wide thing as we encountered these blockages in various towns on the way down to Phoenix. Denver drivers would be leaning on the horn and throwing various digits. Down there, drivers just edge their way around the stopped vehicle. We also have learned to expect the unexpected. In Globe, Arizona, a police helicopter landed in the middle of the road with much waving of arms and parking of police cars to create a landing spot; nevertheless, it was quite diverting.
I think the biggest learning curve for us first-timers, though, has been the differences between the states. Arizona is not New Mexico and neither is Colorado. New Mexico drivers are very dexterous at changing lanes very rapidly and in very tight spaces. One can only drive straight there and let the cars weave their dance, hoping that one of them won’t hit you. Let a snowfall happen and they wind up in the median on their roofs. Colorado drivers are used to mountain driving and icy conditions. They gear down a lot and buy snow tires so they don’t hit the median (a pleasure left primarily to the California drivers trying to make a winter drive to the East Coast). You can always tell a novice driver in Colorado: they’re the ones using their brakes down the hills and ending up with smoke billowing from their wheels. I suppose somewhere someone is saying “Those Colorado drivers, those novices don’t know how to drive.”
Despite everything, it’s been an interesting experience and we’ve even participated in some of the RV resort’s activities—pretty good for a pair of non-joiners. Next year, though, we hope not to be novice snowbirds anymore.
For example, there’s the mail. The post office will hold it for only a month so if they’re going home periodically (as we are) travel has to be timed what the PO is willing to do. Otherwise, the mail has to be forwarded, with uncertainty built into the system or else some relative or friend must be delegated to retrieve and forward it.
Then there’s the banking. To take money out of home accounts entails using ATMs, which in turn incur charges from both banks. It can cost around $5 for a single transaction when both banks whet their whistle. I’ve got around this by opening an account with a local bank and writing checks (we do remember those, right?) on my home account. Still, it took thought and some scheming.
Then there’s the medical stuff. Prescriptions have to be transferred to the new location and then transferred back. Doctors and dentists have to be located or else one has to fly home for treatment. Everything otherwise has to be scheduled during the times one is home. It’s surprising how difficult it sometimes is to get an appointment with a regular practice. Unless prior arrangements have been made, standing in pain in a receptionist’s office doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.
Then there’s the internet. Many people pay for satellite service—these are the pros as it turns out. The RV parks provide some basic service, but it quickly gets clogged up by people who insisting on connecting to the towers, remaining on all day, and downloading movies. The alternative is connecting to the cable service (along with the TV) and buying a router, which is its own set of dark challenges to the uninitiated. The providers provide the service far faster than they provide the support. The free advice from Best Buy is just that—free, and unless you have the standard system they can only guess what you need.
Finally, there are the mysteries of the highways and road system, including the drivers. Arizona drivers seem to like blocking lanes and providing a laconic wave around the car rather than moving. It seems to be a state-wide thing as we encountered these blockages in various towns on the way down to Phoenix. Denver drivers would be leaning on the horn and throwing various digits. Down there, drivers just edge their way around the stopped vehicle. We also have learned to expect the unexpected. In Globe, Arizona, a police helicopter landed in the middle of the road with much waving of arms and parking of police cars to create a landing spot; nevertheless, it was quite diverting.
I think the biggest learning curve for us first-timers, though, has been the differences between the states. Arizona is not New Mexico and neither is Colorado. New Mexico drivers are very dexterous at changing lanes very rapidly and in very tight spaces. One can only drive straight there and let the cars weave their dance, hoping that one of them won’t hit you. Let a snowfall happen and they wind up in the median on their roofs. Colorado drivers are used to mountain driving and icy conditions. They gear down a lot and buy snow tires so they don’t hit the median (a pleasure left primarily to the California drivers trying to make a winter drive to the East Coast). You can always tell a novice driver in Colorado: they’re the ones using their brakes down the hills and ending up with smoke billowing from their wheels. I suppose somewhere someone is saying “Those Colorado drivers, those novices don’t know how to drive.”
Despite everything, it’s been an interesting experience and we’ve even participated in some of the RV resort’s activities—pretty good for a pair of non-joiners. Next year, though, we hope not to be novice snowbirds anymore.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Living Small
Well, here we are in Arizona, the land where no one need apologize for being old and overweight since nearly everyone is. As we approached Apache Junction, site of the RV resort we left the trailer at last June, we made sheepish jokes about whether we would find a puddle of melted plastic where the trailer was since it was 114F when we left. How hot was it? I unwisely left some unopened wine in the car. The wine blew the corks out of the bottles (yes, plural) and emptied on the back floor. All I could say, stupidly, is that I didn’t know (until then) wine could do that.
In fact, the trailer was fine except that all the things attached to the walls with adhesive had fallen off. Think tie backs for the curtains, hooks for hotpads at the stove, and the inside thermometer. The resort was another matter since there had been a major rain storm (unheard of here) that flooded the grounds. Apparently the low spots went under several feet of water. All we experienced was some mud under the unit, which turned our folding chairs a romantic tan (they were white), and served us right for storing anything under there in the first place. Now we know.
It’s amazing how much learning curve there is when you move from using an RV just for camping to using it for living, as we plan to do over the next few months. Minor irritations with one another over trying to occupy the same space at the same time required major negotiations regarding priority, life style, and precedence. We had to relearn how to stake our space amicably and set up a timetable. We now take a walk around the one-mile perimeter of the park first thing in the morning, have breakfast, workout on the treadmill and bicycle in the fitness room, then take a dip in the pool. Of course, all this will be subject to yet more adjustment once all the other RVs return and things are much more crowded. But right now afternoons leave me free to write and Sid to read, although he’s already meeting contemporaries and I fully expect him to start playing bridge with them and joining them for coffee poolside.
I’ve written two chapters on the new book despite working on the trailer to get it comfortable—didn’t know that there’s a big industry here making blinds that fit over the outside of the trailer windows. It makes a huge difference for the inside temperature but I’d never seen it before. Of course, I’d never been in 114F before—well, maybe once at Palm Springs and I thought it was the closest thing possible to being in ring 5 of Dante’s inferno.
You gotta admire the human spirit, though. It’s amazing how creative one can be when necessity demands. We have made multiple runs on Walmart buying space-extending gadgetry. Sid’s idea of storing plates vertically suddenly made the cupboard over the stove seem capacious. We celebrated that achievement, as well as his suggestion that we store all the pots in the oven. Even a few extra inches makes a huge difference, something I would never think about much in the Denver house. We have been like kids at Christmas congratulating ourselves over organizing ourselves. He’s even used the fold-down television shelf in the bedroom to house his shirts. Not a single cranny is safe from being appropriated to other uses.
I have to admit it’s a huge adjustment from a 3,000 square foot house to a 30 foot trailer with one slide out. But I just looked at the national weather and it was 34 degrees in Denver with snow flurries. Today it was 86 degrees here and the pool was warm. I think I’ll take it although I suspect that learning to live small is likely to either be character-building or a quick trip to the loony bin. Time will tell.
In fact, the trailer was fine except that all the things attached to the walls with adhesive had fallen off. Think tie backs for the curtains, hooks for hotpads at the stove, and the inside thermometer. The resort was another matter since there had been a major rain storm (unheard of here) that flooded the grounds. Apparently the low spots went under several feet of water. All we experienced was some mud under the unit, which turned our folding chairs a romantic tan (they were white), and served us right for storing anything under there in the first place. Now we know.
It’s amazing how much learning curve there is when you move from using an RV just for camping to using it for living, as we plan to do over the next few months. Minor irritations with one another over trying to occupy the same space at the same time required major negotiations regarding priority, life style, and precedence. We had to relearn how to stake our space amicably and set up a timetable. We now take a walk around the one-mile perimeter of the park first thing in the morning, have breakfast, workout on the treadmill and bicycle in the fitness room, then take a dip in the pool. Of course, all this will be subject to yet more adjustment once all the other RVs return and things are much more crowded. But right now afternoons leave me free to write and Sid to read, although he’s already meeting contemporaries and I fully expect him to start playing bridge with them and joining them for coffee poolside.
I’ve written two chapters on the new book despite working on the trailer to get it comfortable—didn’t know that there’s a big industry here making blinds that fit over the outside of the trailer windows. It makes a huge difference for the inside temperature but I’d never seen it before. Of course, I’d never been in 114F before—well, maybe once at Palm Springs and I thought it was the closest thing possible to being in ring 5 of Dante’s inferno.
You gotta admire the human spirit, though. It’s amazing how creative one can be when necessity demands. We have made multiple runs on Walmart buying space-extending gadgetry. Sid’s idea of storing plates vertically suddenly made the cupboard over the stove seem capacious. We celebrated that achievement, as well as his suggestion that we store all the pots in the oven. Even a few extra inches makes a huge difference, something I would never think about much in the Denver house. We have been like kids at Christmas congratulating ourselves over organizing ourselves. He’s even used the fold-down television shelf in the bedroom to house his shirts. Not a single cranny is safe from being appropriated to other uses.
I have to admit it’s a huge adjustment from a 3,000 square foot house to a 30 foot trailer with one slide out. But I just looked at the national weather and it was 34 degrees in Denver with snow flurries. Today it was 86 degrees here and the pool was warm. I think I’ll take it although I suspect that learning to live small is likely to either be character-building or a quick trip to the loony bin. Time will tell.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Covered in Yellowstone Mud
The recent PBS special on the National Parks has left me feeling profoundly depressed. Given the fact that I love these parks, as do most other Americans, it strikes me as strange that I should not feel the uplift and “super” humanity that the six specials have argued I should. I’ve felt my share of wonder at the beauty of these parks--most recently Denali and ten or so others through the years--but not from this series of presentations.
Some of my discouragement may be my own misguided expectation of the series. For me, the National Parks are, as the series claims super frequently, a source of inspiration and beauty, an uplift to the human soul and part of what makes us human. If it’s part of a national park, I expect—I know—that certain things will be so. There will be rangers who love their work, there will be wise advice on where to hike, and there will be standards of care to preserve what I see for those who follow. I also know that what I will see will fit the standards of what I have come to expect from a park belonging to the nation.
Yet having now seen the series, I feel grubby and very small. I’ve never done anything to damage our parks and yet I feel coated with dirt and besplattered by the bubbling mud of the Yellowstone geysers.
Perhaps I deserve to feel this as the series earnestly seeks to raise our awareness of the tenuous way the parks came into being—we could so easily have lost them and still can for that matter. I guess my reaction is partly my surprise at the attack that came out of the television screen. I was expecting a celebration rather than a rather tawdry expose particularly when it was clear that I was part of what was being condemned. I am a human being and by definition I am as guilty of the desecration as anyone else.
Now, I am not saying that the expose was undeserved. Far from it. I was sickened by the Arizona senator who used his position to set up toll booths for people wanting to see the Grand Canyon even though it was national park land. I was likewise sickened by the lumber companies who clear-cut virgin forests in the Smokeys (with the blessing of the forest service), even after the land was not theirs—and nothing was done to them. I was sickened by the Wyoming ranchers who were prepared to shoot anyone who tried to stop them grazing their cattle on public land in the Tetons and then years later claimed the protected park as a Wyoming treasure and even put the mountain profile on the state automobile license plate.
These were the jackals, the carcass-strippers, the ones who looked at a landscape and saw only profit. Yet they weren’t alone. There were also the others—the ones who were photographed mugging for the cameras at scenic points, the ones who were taken back to the places where they had scratched their names and were required to removed the defacement, the ones who visited Mesa Verde and yodeled like the plains Indians even though they were visiting the ancestral homes of settled agrarian farmers, and the ones who took the forbidden lava rocks from Volcanoes National Park only to mail them back in guilty packages when the promised curse appeared to coming true.
Yes, the series appears to be saying—the national parks have had to endure despite our careless indifference to the harm we inflict. And lest we forget we are capable of the worst—the series even reminds us of the infamous internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, even though a number of these people had worked hard to preserve our parks.
I’m not going to buy the DVDs of this series. I don’t need to as the message is clear: just by visiting the parks and riding over roads cut into the wilderness, I am part of the process of loving them to death. The parks are not our manifest destiny to destroy—any more than our planet is. I’m going to have to rethink my relation to the parks (maybe that was the idea), particularly since Congress has recently voted to allow people to carry guns into the national parks. I can see little benefit to this except to the poachers and pot growers and I fear that yet again our parks may be in danger.
When will we ever learn?
Some of my discouragement may be my own misguided expectation of the series. For me, the National Parks are, as the series claims super frequently, a source of inspiration and beauty, an uplift to the human soul and part of what makes us human. If it’s part of a national park, I expect—I know—that certain things will be so. There will be rangers who love their work, there will be wise advice on where to hike, and there will be standards of care to preserve what I see for those who follow. I also know that what I will see will fit the standards of what I have come to expect from a park belonging to the nation.
Yet having now seen the series, I feel grubby and very small. I’ve never done anything to damage our parks and yet I feel coated with dirt and besplattered by the bubbling mud of the Yellowstone geysers.
Perhaps I deserve to feel this as the series earnestly seeks to raise our awareness of the tenuous way the parks came into being—we could so easily have lost them and still can for that matter. I guess my reaction is partly my surprise at the attack that came out of the television screen. I was expecting a celebration rather than a rather tawdry expose particularly when it was clear that I was part of what was being condemned. I am a human being and by definition I am as guilty of the desecration as anyone else.
Now, I am not saying that the expose was undeserved. Far from it. I was sickened by the Arizona senator who used his position to set up toll booths for people wanting to see the Grand Canyon even though it was national park land. I was likewise sickened by the lumber companies who clear-cut virgin forests in the Smokeys (with the blessing of the forest service), even after the land was not theirs—and nothing was done to them. I was sickened by the Wyoming ranchers who were prepared to shoot anyone who tried to stop them grazing their cattle on public land in the Tetons and then years later claimed the protected park as a Wyoming treasure and even put the mountain profile on the state automobile license plate.
These were the jackals, the carcass-strippers, the ones who looked at a landscape and saw only profit. Yet they weren’t alone. There were also the others—the ones who were photographed mugging for the cameras at scenic points, the ones who were taken back to the places where they had scratched their names and were required to removed the defacement, the ones who visited Mesa Verde and yodeled like the plains Indians even though they were visiting the ancestral homes of settled agrarian farmers, and the ones who took the forbidden lava rocks from Volcanoes National Park only to mail them back in guilty packages when the promised curse appeared to coming true.
Yes, the series appears to be saying—the national parks have had to endure despite our careless indifference to the harm we inflict. And lest we forget we are capable of the worst—the series even reminds us of the infamous internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, even though a number of these people had worked hard to preserve our parks.
I’m not going to buy the DVDs of this series. I don’t need to as the message is clear: just by visiting the parks and riding over roads cut into the wilderness, I am part of the process of loving them to death. The parks are not our manifest destiny to destroy—any more than our planet is. I’m going to have to rethink my relation to the parks (maybe that was the idea), particularly since Congress has recently voted to allow people to carry guns into the national parks. I can see little benefit to this except to the poachers and pot growers and I fear that yet again our parks may be in danger.
When will we ever learn?
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Guilty Pleasure of Humor
The latest edition of The Atlantic, a magazine I don’t usually read unless confronted in the airport by a layover of three hours and a bookshop stuffed with paperbacks dealing with spies, politicians, murderers of the worst sort, and rapturous virgins wishing to be otherwise (you can learn a lot about a city’s intellectual climate and reading habits by checking out the airport bookshops), contains an article called “Cheap Laughs: The Smug Satire of Liberal Humorists Debases Our National Conversation” by a Mr. Christopher Hitchens.
This article, which I shall call hereafter as Cheap Laughs, reminded me somewhat of the Puritan take on the maypole and the achingly self-important banning of all forms of frivolity and pleasure lest anyone be happy. I know there are scholars who study humor in all forms and I don’t want to create a maelstrom of indignant accusations about whether I have any background to justify taking on the topic. But what the hell—I’ve got my own opinion and I value it as much as Mr. Hitchens does his. Cheap Laughs didn’t convince me that liberal humorists will bring down this country: what it did was convince me that we as a people are desperate to find some relief from the oppressive self-importance of politics and culture wars.
I’ve always thought of humor as the way we deal with things that perplex and oppress us. We can either take them as seriously as they do themselves and throw ourselves over the precipice with the lemmings, or we can find a way to laugh as a people, and by doing so cut the tension. It’s a bonding thing, in other words. Think Lenten ribaldry when people dressed up as bishops and wore pigs' head masks—misrule like this was allowed for a few special days but would have been blasphemy and punished anytime else. The church wisely knew that people had to let off steam even if meant mocking the very things they valued intensely during the rest of the year.
What we choose to laugh at says mountains about what is important to us—just as the airport bookstores show what entertains us and passes the time—and humor can run from very crude to highly sophisticated and ambiguous. It can be gentle, as Will Rogers showed, or more pointed like that of Mark Twain, or over the top like Archie Bunker, who by providing something we could agree was ridiculous, provided an escape valve. The best humor I have heard has been self-deprecating, as when Ronald Reagan and even George Bush talked to the Press Club in Washington or when someone like George Clooney deflected personal attack with good humor and grace. These responses give us hope that some form of good manners and civilty can exist.
In the end, I can’t imagine why Mr. Hitchens, limited himself to the liberal humorists when there is so much “humor” in every spectrum of political and social thought these days (watermelons on the White House lawn, anyone?), but I also think he’s missed the point. We need humorists on all sides of all issues and we need to see the vital role they have to play for us. Somehow, I think the national conversation will survive humor from either side—and I shudder to think what will happen if we ever muzzle it.
This article, which I shall call hereafter as Cheap Laughs, reminded me somewhat of the Puritan take on the maypole and the achingly self-important banning of all forms of frivolity and pleasure lest anyone be happy. I know there are scholars who study humor in all forms and I don’t want to create a maelstrom of indignant accusations about whether I have any background to justify taking on the topic. But what the hell—I’ve got my own opinion and I value it as much as Mr. Hitchens does his. Cheap Laughs didn’t convince me that liberal humorists will bring down this country: what it did was convince me that we as a people are desperate to find some relief from the oppressive self-importance of politics and culture wars.
I’ve always thought of humor as the way we deal with things that perplex and oppress us. We can either take them as seriously as they do themselves and throw ourselves over the precipice with the lemmings, or we can find a way to laugh as a people, and by doing so cut the tension. It’s a bonding thing, in other words. Think Lenten ribaldry when people dressed up as bishops and wore pigs' head masks—misrule like this was allowed for a few special days but would have been blasphemy and punished anytime else. The church wisely knew that people had to let off steam even if meant mocking the very things they valued intensely during the rest of the year.
What we choose to laugh at says mountains about what is important to us—just as the airport bookstores show what entertains us and passes the time—and humor can run from very crude to highly sophisticated and ambiguous. It can be gentle, as Will Rogers showed, or more pointed like that of Mark Twain, or over the top like Archie Bunker, who by providing something we could agree was ridiculous, provided an escape valve. The best humor I have heard has been self-deprecating, as when Ronald Reagan and even George Bush talked to the Press Club in Washington or when someone like George Clooney deflected personal attack with good humor and grace. These responses give us hope that some form of good manners and civilty can exist.
In the end, I can’t imagine why Mr. Hitchens, limited himself to the liberal humorists when there is so much “humor” in every spectrum of political and social thought these days (watermelons on the White House lawn, anyone?), but I also think he’s missed the point. We need humorists on all sides of all issues and we need to see the vital role they have to play for us. Somehow, I think the national conversation will survive humor from either side—and I shudder to think what will happen if we ever muzzle it.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Cruise Control
Well, we’re back, and now they tell me there are books about the best way to take cruises. I had no idea. I imagined you sat on deck chairs, sipped rum drinks, and enjoyed being waited on. Silly me. Our Alaska cruise and land tour met all the superlatives, but after it was over, it dumped us on the wharf in Vancouver, British Columbia, exhausted and cranky. Worst part of it was that it was entirely our own fault.
What did we do wrong? Let me start at the beginning.
The first overly ambitious thing we did was drive from Denver to Vancouver.
Now, in the four days it took us (not to mention the four back), we saw some wonderful things: Montana and Wyoming are beautiful states (when the wind and the snow aren’t blowing). The B.C. lake town of Osoyoos where we crossed into Canada from Spokane looks like the Italian lake district. We saw neat “historical down towns” (see previous blog), ski resorts we’d never heard of before made into downhill bicycle meccas, and wineries we didn’t have time to stop to explore. We bought blankets at the mills and saw saddles being made at Hamleys in Pendleton, Oregon. This cross-country jaunt, in fact, could have been a vacation trip in itself. But, as might be expected, at the end of it, we arrived in Vancouver already tired before we had even begun the main trip.
The second mistake was not checking out beforehand what could be brought into Canada when we returned.
After two days of visiting family in Port Moody, we flew up to Anchorage. We’d planned to arrive a day ahead of time in case of any delays as we didn’t want to miss the land tour. That’s when we learned that Alaska makes the most of a brief tourist season by charging heroically for hotels. Anchorage is the state’s main business city and looks much like any similar mid-West city for that matter. Much of what must have been the historical section of town was washed away by the tsunami in the 60s so we spent most of our time in the historical museum and visiting the gift shops, which were lined up almost five to a block on the main streets. I bought some souvenirs, including a walrus tooth and some Alaska curved chopping knives called ulus with bone handles. Nobody told me that Canada severely restricts animal parts, particularly ivory, from entering the country. Or that ulus are considered weapons even though they are sold as kitchen implements. More on that later.
The third msitake was not realizing how much endurance parts of the land tour were going to require.
We started the tour at the Anchorage hotel and went by train (via Wasilla of certain fame and where jokes were surprisingly prevalent) to Talkeetna, the original setting of the tv show “Northern Exposure.” This is the jumping off point for climbers on Mount Mckinley (known as Denali locally) and Sid wanted to see where he’d climbed, so we signed up with Talkeetna Air Taxi. We were very lucky because the weather permitted us to fly around the mountain, but one of us had tried reindeer sausage that morning and the result was a very sick passenger when the plane landed. I will say no more, but the moral is not to try reindeer sausage unless you are absolutely sure your stomach will welcome it.
When we reached Denali Park, we found that the park requires all visitors to enter the park on the park’s buses, school buses with small seats. We spotted bears, caribou, moose, fox, wolf, and ptarmigan, but when we did, everyone on the other side crammed over to the other to take pictures. It was fun, but very intimate at times. When we got off the bus at the end, my knee was so stiff I had to hop down the stairs and my back was demanding naproxin.
The most challenging part, though, was at the end of our land tour when we were getting ready to fly to Anchorage and join the ship at Seward. That night we learned that Fairbanks airport was closed due to smoke from forest fires and we had to leave the hotel in the wee hours next day to be driven to Seward, which was going to take about eleven hours. I’m not sure we would have made it as well as we did had it not been for our tour guide, Debbie, who played games with us and even sang the Alaska state song. We couldn’t stop more than once if we were going to make the ship deadline so the night before, we trekked out to the supermarket to get something to take with us.
We fell off the bus at Seward and went directly on to the ship. Naturally we were late since we didn’t get there until around five and boarding had started at 1:00 p.m. There was a vigorous raffle going on in the main entry hall as we found our cabin and collapsed. We didn’t even eat dinner that night. It was now that the ulus I had bought caused me trouble. My suitcase went missing until I received notice quite late that it was being held in security. I had to go down to the second deck and hand over the ulus to be held until we reached Vancouver. Incidentally, we didn’t find out about the Canada restrictions on animal parts until the second night on board when the newsletter announced it. If I’d known, I would have mailed the stuff from Anchorage and saved myself having to post them in Skagway.
The fourth mistake was booking shore excursions in advance.
The cruise line, for the obvious reason that they were receiving commissions and actually owned many of the gift shops and tour companies, encouraged us to book early on shore excursions if we were not to miss out. So we did. They were expensive and we hated to miss them but we were tired and they became one more grueling thing we had to get up early to get off the ship at the appointed time. Actually, Sid passed up on the last one and I went alone. The tours were great and worth it (or most of them anyway), but we soon discovered that these same tours were available on the pier once we got off the ship and we could have taken them at any time we wanted. In other words, we could have waited and seen what we wanted to do.
Would I do this cruise again? Oh yes. The Hubbard Glazier was amazing and we got a close-up when the ship navigated to within five hundred yards of it. I saw the animals and eagles I wanted to see and watched sled dogs running. I saw the magnificence of Denali, mountain and park. The Royal Caribbean ship was wonderful, even if I was too tired to appreciate much of it.
But I would do it differently.
First, I would FLY to the starting point of the tour. Second, I would do the cruise first, before any organized land tour. If I was tired after the land part, I could just sleep on the plane home. Third, I would book only a couple of land tours from the ship and only those where my heart would be broken if I didn’t do them. Fourth, I would not over-plan my land activities, leaving some of them to be spur of the moment as I felt like it. Fifth, I would understand that while seeing Alaska is important, so is the experience of cruising. And, fifth and finally, I would research the advice and experience of others who had done it before me.
I guess you can say I will have the next cruise under control.
What did we do wrong? Let me start at the beginning.
The first overly ambitious thing we did was drive from Denver to Vancouver.
Now, in the four days it took us (not to mention the four back), we saw some wonderful things: Montana and Wyoming are beautiful states (when the wind and the snow aren’t blowing). The B.C. lake town of Osoyoos where we crossed into Canada from Spokane looks like the Italian lake district. We saw neat “historical down towns” (see previous blog), ski resorts we’d never heard of before made into downhill bicycle meccas, and wineries we didn’t have time to stop to explore. We bought blankets at the mills and saw saddles being made at Hamleys in Pendleton, Oregon. This cross-country jaunt, in fact, could have been a vacation trip in itself. But, as might be expected, at the end of it, we arrived in Vancouver already tired before we had even begun the main trip.
The second mistake was not checking out beforehand what could be brought into Canada when we returned.
After two days of visiting family in Port Moody, we flew up to Anchorage. We’d planned to arrive a day ahead of time in case of any delays as we didn’t want to miss the land tour. That’s when we learned that Alaska makes the most of a brief tourist season by charging heroically for hotels. Anchorage is the state’s main business city and looks much like any similar mid-West city for that matter. Much of what must have been the historical section of town was washed away by the tsunami in the 60s so we spent most of our time in the historical museum and visiting the gift shops, which were lined up almost five to a block on the main streets. I bought some souvenirs, including a walrus tooth and some Alaska curved chopping knives called ulus with bone handles. Nobody told me that Canada severely restricts animal parts, particularly ivory, from entering the country. Or that ulus are considered weapons even though they are sold as kitchen implements. More on that later.
The third msitake was not realizing how much endurance parts of the land tour were going to require.
We started the tour at the Anchorage hotel and went by train (via Wasilla of certain fame and where jokes were surprisingly prevalent) to Talkeetna, the original setting of the tv show “Northern Exposure.” This is the jumping off point for climbers on Mount Mckinley (known as Denali locally) and Sid wanted to see where he’d climbed, so we signed up with Talkeetna Air Taxi. We were very lucky because the weather permitted us to fly around the mountain, but one of us had tried reindeer sausage that morning and the result was a very sick passenger when the plane landed. I will say no more, but the moral is not to try reindeer sausage unless you are absolutely sure your stomach will welcome it.
When we reached Denali Park, we found that the park requires all visitors to enter the park on the park’s buses, school buses with small seats. We spotted bears, caribou, moose, fox, wolf, and ptarmigan, but when we did, everyone on the other side crammed over to the other to take pictures. It was fun, but very intimate at times. When we got off the bus at the end, my knee was so stiff I had to hop down the stairs and my back was demanding naproxin.
The most challenging part, though, was at the end of our land tour when we were getting ready to fly to Anchorage and join the ship at Seward. That night we learned that Fairbanks airport was closed due to smoke from forest fires and we had to leave the hotel in the wee hours next day to be driven to Seward, which was going to take about eleven hours. I’m not sure we would have made it as well as we did had it not been for our tour guide, Debbie, who played games with us and even sang the Alaska state song. We couldn’t stop more than once if we were going to make the ship deadline so the night before, we trekked out to the supermarket to get something to take with us.
We fell off the bus at Seward and went directly on to the ship. Naturally we were late since we didn’t get there until around five and boarding had started at 1:00 p.m. There was a vigorous raffle going on in the main entry hall as we found our cabin and collapsed. We didn’t even eat dinner that night. It was now that the ulus I had bought caused me trouble. My suitcase went missing until I received notice quite late that it was being held in security. I had to go down to the second deck and hand over the ulus to be held until we reached Vancouver. Incidentally, we didn’t find out about the Canada restrictions on animal parts until the second night on board when the newsletter announced it. If I’d known, I would have mailed the stuff from Anchorage and saved myself having to post them in Skagway.
The fourth mistake was booking shore excursions in advance.
The cruise line, for the obvious reason that they were receiving commissions and actually owned many of the gift shops and tour companies, encouraged us to book early on shore excursions if we were not to miss out. So we did. They were expensive and we hated to miss them but we were tired and they became one more grueling thing we had to get up early to get off the ship at the appointed time. Actually, Sid passed up on the last one and I went alone. The tours were great and worth it (or most of them anyway), but we soon discovered that these same tours were available on the pier once we got off the ship and we could have taken them at any time we wanted. In other words, we could have waited and seen what we wanted to do.
Would I do this cruise again? Oh yes. The Hubbard Glazier was amazing and we got a close-up when the ship navigated to within five hundred yards of it. I saw the animals and eagles I wanted to see and watched sled dogs running. I saw the magnificence of Denali, mountain and park. The Royal Caribbean ship was wonderful, even if I was too tired to appreciate much of it.
But I would do it differently.
First, I would FLY to the starting point of the tour. Second, I would do the cruise first, before any organized land tour. If I was tired after the land part, I could just sleep on the plane home. Third, I would book only a couple of land tours from the ship and only those where my heart would be broken if I didn’t do them. Fourth, I would not over-plan my land activities, leaving some of them to be spur of the moment as I felt like it. Fifth, I would understand that while seeing Alaska is important, so is the experience of cruising. And, fifth and finally, I would research the advice and experience of others who had done it before me.
I guess you can say I will have the next cruise under control.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
On the Road
Having just returned from a series of cross-country jaunts, one from Denver to Phoenix and the most recent from Denver to British Columbia where we took a tour to Alaska (more on that in another blog), I’ve come to the conclusion that our entire nation is one large gift shop. It seems that every little town along any road that boasts continuous traffic towards a destination relies on some gimmick to tempt travelers to stop and spend money.
Of course, 16 days of driving over the last six weeks doesn’t make me an expert on roadside attractions, but having also driven all the Western states and down to Florida, I will claim some experience. I’ve found these “ploys for a pause,” as I call them, if not informative and entertaining then at least diverting. To quote Shakespeare, I’d call most of them much ado about nothing.
My favorite is what I call the “make a joyful noise” category, where a town has to invent freely, as in Arizona. Beside rest stops, there’s not a lot to see in vast stretches of desert, so Arizona has been very creative. If you want to see the world’s largest petrified tree, it’s here waiting for you. It probably had to be trucked in for your pleasure, but then so was London Bridge, another Arizona transplant. You can also see a meteor indentation and a real-fake replica of an Indian pueblo along with the casinos with names about wild horses and thunder that clearly cater to truckers, judging from the lines of parked rigs. Everyone can get in the act. Rest stops have prominent signs saying that vending is not allowed, so entrepreneurs from the reservation have built shop fronts along the rest stop fence and people trade money and jewelry over it.
Next is the “let’s-gussy-it-up” attraction that I saw all across Montana and Wyoming. My gosh—how many jails did Butch Cassidy find himself in? How did he ever have time to be an outlaw? It seems that every town with any claim to anything has “a historic downtown.” These downtowns are more or less impressive depending on how rich the town was to begin with. In some, there is a row of brick buildings now housing gift shops, sometimes augmented with some kind of tram ride up a mountain with a sign saying “Welcome, bikers.” In others, there is a row of run-down, fading wood buildings, some of them leaning precariously but at least showing their age. In the end, all the historic downtowns tend to look the same and all have converted their passenger railway stations into restaurants.
Now I have to be fair. Many of these same states have genuinely wonderful things to see that are worth the stop. Route 66 is a case in point and I learned that people actually drive what remains of it as a summer vacation. There are signs along the side of the interstate indicating that at the next exit, one may see some remnant of “Historic Route 66.” Going off on these exits invariably takes one through towns (Gallup, New Mexico, is one example), where the highway is also the town’s main street. Invariably, this road is four lanes wide and the shops and stores along it have 1940’s architecture, what can be seen of it that is behind hanging t-shirts bearing the highway marker. One town has turned itself into a celebration of the ‘50s, with diners, big-finned cars on display, and more kitsch than I have ever seen in my life. I even spotted a plush bear wearing motorcycle goggles and a Route 66 t-shirt. People are proud of their piece of history and it probably is the main reason they still have a livelihood.
Despite my cynicism—how many times did I ask ‘do you suppose it has a historic down town?’ as we approached some small town barely on the map—I have to admit I’m a sucker for these things. Route 66 was part of my generation, as was Highway 40 across Wyoming and the other roads that pioneered touring. During those days, Chevy sold thousands of cars with its slogan made famous by Dinah Shore: “See the USA/ in your Chevrolet” and travelers were assured that “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.”
These were the years when Jack Kerouac channeled national restlessness into a form of self-discovery and everyone tried (or wanted ) to take to the road. Without Route 66 there could have been no Kerouac—or interstates, or strange little mom and pop motels that still cling to their shabby existence in the shadow of the big hotel chains, or even the free ice water and 5 cent coffee that are still offered as a bit of nostalgia (providing, of course, you stop to see their animated dinosaur and buy a few souvenirs at the same time).
Ah the open road. Despite all the commercialism though, some things are still the same. Montana and Wyoming are still beautiful although there is far too much of them, kids still demand to know how much further it is, and the dog still throws up on the back seat.
Of course, 16 days of driving over the last six weeks doesn’t make me an expert on roadside attractions, but having also driven all the Western states and down to Florida, I will claim some experience. I’ve found these “ploys for a pause,” as I call them, if not informative and entertaining then at least diverting. To quote Shakespeare, I’d call most of them much ado about nothing.
My favorite is what I call the “make a joyful noise” category, where a town has to invent freely, as in Arizona. Beside rest stops, there’s not a lot to see in vast stretches of desert, so Arizona has been very creative. If you want to see the world’s largest petrified tree, it’s here waiting for you. It probably had to be trucked in for your pleasure, but then so was London Bridge, another Arizona transplant. You can also see a meteor indentation and a real-fake replica of an Indian pueblo along with the casinos with names about wild horses and thunder that clearly cater to truckers, judging from the lines of parked rigs. Everyone can get in the act. Rest stops have prominent signs saying that vending is not allowed, so entrepreneurs from the reservation have built shop fronts along the rest stop fence and people trade money and jewelry over it.
Next is the “let’s-gussy-it-up” attraction that I saw all across Montana and Wyoming. My gosh—how many jails did Butch Cassidy find himself in? How did he ever have time to be an outlaw? It seems that every town with any claim to anything has “a historic downtown.” These downtowns are more or less impressive depending on how rich the town was to begin with. In some, there is a row of brick buildings now housing gift shops, sometimes augmented with some kind of tram ride up a mountain with a sign saying “Welcome, bikers.” In others, there is a row of run-down, fading wood buildings, some of them leaning precariously but at least showing their age. In the end, all the historic downtowns tend to look the same and all have converted their passenger railway stations into restaurants.
Now I have to be fair. Many of these same states have genuinely wonderful things to see that are worth the stop. Route 66 is a case in point and I learned that people actually drive what remains of it as a summer vacation. There are signs along the side of the interstate indicating that at the next exit, one may see some remnant of “Historic Route 66.” Going off on these exits invariably takes one through towns (Gallup, New Mexico, is one example), where the highway is also the town’s main street. Invariably, this road is four lanes wide and the shops and stores along it have 1940’s architecture, what can be seen of it that is behind hanging t-shirts bearing the highway marker. One town has turned itself into a celebration of the ‘50s, with diners, big-finned cars on display, and more kitsch than I have ever seen in my life. I even spotted a plush bear wearing motorcycle goggles and a Route 66 t-shirt. People are proud of their piece of history and it probably is the main reason they still have a livelihood.
Despite my cynicism—how many times did I ask ‘do you suppose it has a historic down town?’ as we approached some small town barely on the map—I have to admit I’m a sucker for these things. Route 66 was part of my generation, as was Highway 40 across Wyoming and the other roads that pioneered touring. During those days, Chevy sold thousands of cars with its slogan made famous by Dinah Shore: “See the USA/ in your Chevrolet” and travelers were assured that “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.”
These were the years when Jack Kerouac channeled national restlessness into a form of self-discovery and everyone tried (or wanted ) to take to the road. Without Route 66 there could have been no Kerouac—or interstates, or strange little mom and pop motels that still cling to their shabby existence in the shadow of the big hotel chains, or even the free ice water and 5 cent coffee that are still offered as a bit of nostalgia (providing, of course, you stop to see their animated dinosaur and buy a few souvenirs at the same time).
Ah the open road. Despite all the commercialism though, some things are still the same. Montana and Wyoming are still beautiful although there is far too much of them, kids still demand to know how much further it is, and the dog still throws up on the back seat.
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