North to Alaska

 I just discovered that I hadn’t posted the final installment from the amazing Europe trip as I was about to start writing about the next trip. 

The cast of characters includes David (yes, he gets to go this time, and I couldn’t be more thrilled), Alison (sister long legs, sometimes abbreviated SLL), and Derek (brother-in-law long legs, sometimes abbreviated BILL), and yours truly. We have adjoining rooms on a cruise that goes from Vancouver, BC (note, those of us from Portland who are across the Columbia River from Vancouver, Washington, always need to clarify which Vancouver) to Whittier, Alaska. This will be my fourth trip to Alaska (and second time into Yukon Territory), but it’s the first time for everyone else. We stop in Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway, then spend a couple of days in Anchorage before returning home. For the geocachers in the crowd, we are hosting GCACT5N. 

David and I did an experiment as we traveled to Vancouver. We took the train to Seattle then a bus from there. The scientist in me says it was a worthwhile experiment in that it gave us data. The pragmatist says never again. Let us say that (almost) nothing about Amtrak (the US train system) compares at all favorably to any European trains…the one exception being that we did not need to worry about strikes. The trains are slow, run late, lose time, and are less than clean;  the bus was schedule for 3.5 hours and took nearly 5.5 hours. It took Alison and Derek less time to fly from Ottawa to Vancouver than it took us to go by train and bus from Portland. 

Eventually we arrived and shared a tasty Friday night Japanese dinner — I had a delicious shrimp tempura, shared fried bacon with David, ate edamame, and finished with a few pieces of nigiri. After buying breakfast food, we went to Alison’s father’s home for the night. Saturday we explored Stanley Park, found a few caches — including BC’s oldest and a challenge Alison, Derek and I had all worked on in Europe this spring — had delicious burgers for “linner,” then took a walk (cachers: we did an adventure lab) during which we stopped at Purdy’s Chocolates where we spent way too much money, then decided to call it a day and went back to the house to relax and sample our bounty. 

Today we boarded the ship, took care of a few chores that somehow had fallen through the cracks, settled in and began relaxing. Alison and I were mistaken for (actual) sisters by no fewer than 4 different people/groups….much to our amusement. Perhaps we are biologically related, something like 7th cousins twice removed, who knows. We met our dinner companions, after making sure we’re all at the same table (oops, got that fixed), we find ourselves at a table for 6. Our dinner companions are a couple from Iowa who seem to be interesting and appropriately irreverent. 

Tomorrow is a ship day. David and I just looked at the schedule and there are several interesting-sounding things on the schedule. Current thinking is that we may actually go to the dining room for breakfast as apparently crab Benedict is on the menu, and it would be wrong not to sample it.