Finally, Photos of Valdez

I have managed to load down the missing Valdez photos...

Eagles feeding

The town from my walks

The museum

Even More Totem Poles

The hotel told me where the local laundromat is, and their van took me there (it will take me anywhere I want within the downtown/harbour area). While my washing was drying, I went past the old legislative buildings

to the Museum. However, the museum was going to shut in twenty minutes, so I went to Thunderbird park, where they have a long house and a number of totem poles. The museum also must have quite a number of totem poles inside (I saw some as I went around to the park).

The houses here are all early 1900s or late 1800s I guess, with pretty gardens.

I spent most of the day resting, and I think I may stay in Victoria for the entire week. This is the view from my window. The second picture includes four pickle boats and a seaplane. They take off from here all day, and sometimes there are four in the water in front of my balcony.

Victoria

I decided to go to Victoria - Vancouver - Seattle for the week I had nothing planned. I want to laze about a bit, because the cold is still running me down.

At least I booked the right ferry, and got to Victoria! I read the bus schedule wrong and decided I needed to get a taxi to the Clipper terminal, when the light rail would have got me there on time. I booked the wrong hotel, so where I am staying isn't close to downtown or the ferry, doesn't have breakfast included, doesn't have guest laundry facilities and is much more expensive than the one I had decided to book. It is a very nice corner room, overlooking the harbour, with a balcony on one wall and a bay window on another.

Leaving Seattle we saw Mount Rainer overlooking the whole of Seattle - sorry that it is yet another crummy picture.

When we reached Victoria, the customs guy took one look at the large box of tissues and the couple of used ones I had and declared that I was infectious, and he wasn't processing me, so I was sent to another room. The guy I got wanted to know how much alcohol I had (as I was Australian he assumed I had some), and asked me how I could be Australian with none. He couldn't work out why I seemed to be going round and round in circles.

Fishermans wharf is nearby, and is made up of floating houses. One of them was an ice cream shop with an enormous queue. I had fish and chips from a highly rated fish and chip shop, which had some of the best fish and chips I have had in a long time.

On the way to Fishermans Wharf I saw this church.

Victoria has a lot of pickle boats that look like a combination of a bathtub and a W class tram. These are the yellow ones used as taxis. Others are green and are ferries, but they are all about the same size.

Camp Mustashe

I was at the camp from Friday afternoon to Monday lunchtime, and it was great. However, I had a bad cold, and so didn't take many pictures, and those I did take were awful. I even took an awful picture of the group. Fortunately someone else took another for me. It would have been even better if I hadn't been debilitated. Ah well, maybe I can go again next year and use it as a launch pad for seeing the rest of Canada!

Everyone was nice, the accomodation was lovely, and the sessions were good. Hopefully I didn't make too much of a pest of myself.

Mount Si

I am here for a few days, and I really need to decide what I am doing next. 

Last night, the trip to Seattle was over Yukon and parts of the panhandle. It was raining, so there was a lot of cloud around, So I didn't expect to see anything from the plane, but the cloud cleared in one spot and I saw an enormous glacier, a real river of ice. It went much further than the picture.

Today, Kevin and Cassie picked me up to take me to Mount Si. We went to downtown, and visited Pike Place Market and the library, and walked down the entire book spiral (five floors are tilted, so they make a long spiral for all the non fiction collection). Doug commented that he would never have expected to visit a library as an important part of seeing a city, but he took a lot of pictures.

Where we are staying is a beautiful retreat in the woods with mountains behind it. Shortly before we reached Rainbow Lodge we saw a black bear in the undergrowth. And the Americans are all scared of Australia because it has snakes!

Farewell Alaska

Today I return to Seattle, and the Marine Ferry trips will be in the panhandle, so this is the last day in the main part of Alaska. 

I went on a paddle boat, and saw a dog mushing place. The dogs really all wanted to be pulling that sled!

We saw a bush pilot take off and land

Then we went to a replica Indian village. This house was an original, moved here.

Then I visited the cultural centre.

Arctic Circle

Ever wondered what it looked like at the Arctic Circle? The Barrier Mountains are in the background.

This is the Yukon

Finger Mountain

Still no Denali

I took the bus to Savage River, and then went for a walk to a good view of the bridge.

There were lupins and

Bluebells practically covering the hillside.

There was moss and lichen on the ground under the spruce.

There was another bridge (there were more but no photos of them) on the train trip. This was a valley of surposedly great scenic beauty.

And moose.

Tundra

On the Denali park tour today we saw a lot of animals. Grizzly bears.

Dahl sheep.

Caribou.

Bird emblem of Alaska.

Marmot.

And tundra...

Slow Train to Denali

In some ways I'm very happy that I've visited Alaska before the season started. There were very few people on the roads, I could decide on a whim where I would stay the night. But some things have been closed. I was originally going to visit Denali while I had the RV, but the 51 mile tour was truncated to 31 miles until the day after I gave my RV back, so I decided to do it this way. And I explained to the tour company why I wanted to do it this way, and that if the tour was still 31 miles, I would do it while I had the RV. Anyway, the tour I will be doing is the one I could have done while I had the RV!

The train goes at a sedate pace, and when anyone sees something interesting, it slows down even further, so everyone can see it. At first the cloud was reasonably all encompassing, and it rained. The scenery looked uninteresting and rather flat and soggy. People who dislike mud shouldn't go near Alaska or Canada. But toward the end of the trip it became much better, and blue sky appeared.

People saw a black bear, but I didn't. There were moose, but they were solitary and far away. But there were lots of trumpeter swans.

And old beaver dams.

And the scenery was beautiful.

Talkeetna station wasn't near the town, but it did have a picture of a Moose (this town is known for its moose dropping festival). This is also where people live archaically in the woods.

I took a picture of Wasilla, but like its most prominent citizen, it had few redeeming features, so it didn't make the cut.