Thursday 23 July 2015
Friday 10 April 2015
Friday 20 March 2015
Friday 14 November 2014
It's not over...
...though it is the last blog post for this trip. This last month-and-a-bit have been tinged throughout with a melancholy sense that things are drawing to a close, which has been true in many ways. After Cayucos we had just a couple more days in the continental USA, and that was the end of by far the biggest chunk of our travels. Then we had just a week more in the US as a whole, in Hawaii, before ending our stay in America and heading to Australia, which would be our last country.
However - while we have been sad to leave places, we didn't and don't, really want to stay. When we made the decision back in August that we were going to cut the trip short we had good reasons for doing so - and they remain true. Ever since, the relief of knowing that the logistics, planning and spending would come to an end in November has been a weight off our shoulders and has allowed us to enjoy our time a lot more!
Nonetheless, we've both felt this strange flip-flop of the desire to keep going versus the desire to stop and go home, which can alternate over days, hours, minutes or even seconds! It's a feeling I recognise from my previous trip when I had the same sensation in my last month or so. In my current case it's tempered by the fact that I'm not really 'going home' - my life when I get back will be in a new city, in a new flat, looking for a new job in a new career, so hardly back to the same old grind...
Back where the last entry finished off, we headed south down the last bit of the Pacific Coast Highway into LA, dropping in on Venice Beach to see what the fuss is about (a very sunny version of Camden Market, as far as we could tell) and then heading to our airport motel. The prospect of Hawaii was exciting, though we knew it wouldn't be the mythical paradise island of the postcards. Instead we found it was expensive, and it rained - a lot! To be fair the Iron Man triathlon World Championship was being held on Big Island, in Kona, just when we were there - a unfortunate bit of scheduling which meant hotels were booked up and prices high. I had only discovered this when I went to book a scuba dive with the manta rays on the one spare night we had arranged in Kona, only to find nothing would be happening because the triathlon shuts the streets! Fortunately I was still able to shuffle things around a bit, so we drove round Big Island to visit the volcanoes and admire the infernal glow that rises from the crater of Kilauea at night... very impressive. We couldn't see any of the active eruption, though if you've been following the news you will have seen that the current lava flows are slowly advancing on and demolishing one of the small towns on the south coast of the island. It was pretty weird listening to the radio and hearing, just after the daily weather forecast, the daily eruption and lava forecast, which is mostly safely ignored as it's confined to uninhabited areas.
Once back from there I did manage to get my manta ray dive, and it was truly spectacular - probably the visual highlight of the whole trip. We'd been lucky enough to see half a dozen manta rays in the earlier dive of the day, but for the night dive we saw more than twice as many, cruising, wheeling and looping directly above us, close enough to brush against us on many occasions. They were drawn in by a plankton swarm, which was in turn attracted by a mass of dive lights creating a glowing column in the dark water. The whole experience really was incredible even for a jaded old traveller like me! This isn't my video, but it exactly captures what it was like:
We then spent a day or two in Honolulu, which was mostly just a big city with a big mall and a beach, before it was time to jump the International Date Line, skip straight from October 17th to October 18th without having a night in between, and begin our Australian experience! I was keen to show off Sydney to Kate as I'd loved living there back in 2005. However it failed to endear itself to her from the start, beginning with a rail replacement bus service from the airport, poor station signage and then missing our ferry because the ticket machines weren't working and all but one of the booths were closed! Not what you need after an epic flight across the Pacific...
Fortunately our Airbnb apartment was another winner, and we settled in comfortably for a few days, but then the Australian spring weather decided to have its try at disappointing us and the skies remained resolutely grey after one sunny spell on our first day! We tried visiting the Blue Mountains but they were invisible in the mist! Still, it was great to be in a new country and we did like all the influences from the UK that are still detectable in Australia, particularly the aspects of London that still shine through in Sydney itself. We could tell straight away that it was a good plan to come here before returning home as it was a way of easing back in to things like driving on the left and using British English-isms instead of American.
From Sydney we drove to Melbourne - via Canberra, which was not as bad as everyone says, but not really a captivating place - to stay with my old friend Phil. I met him in 2004, on a minibus headed from Nairobi (Kenya) to Arusha (Tanzania), and we got talking (he's VERY good at talking) as we were both heading to Mt Kilimanjaro to climb it. He invited me to visit and stay when I came to Australia later that year, which I did, and we were invited again this year. It was a real pleasure to see him again, and his wife Ros, and they looked after us like champions, showing true Aussie hospitality. They drove us around, visiting wildlife sanctuaries (where we saw all the local superstar animals, including the duck-billed platypus which I'd never seen before) and also dropping in on his son Craig, who, with his wife Mel, run a fantastic brewery and distillery in the tiny town of Loch in the Victorian countryside. Craig gave us an inspiring guided tour of his operation and it definitely planted a seed - I'd love to have a place like his (an old brick-built bank from the 1900s) and to get stuck into the wonderful mixture of art and science that is brewing beer and distilling spirits. Maybe one day...
The weather was still rubbish though - we'd had a massive thunderstorm one night, and a good deal of cloud & rain. Soon we were headed to Alice Springs and the Red Centre - surely there we'd get good weather? You would think so, but the first day was very overcast and the 'sunset' view of Uluru (aka Ayers Rock) was a bust, and that night was a howling rainstorm! We were starting to get a little fed up with it, but over the next day or two it got better and better - only to keep getting sunnier and hotter and end up pushing well past 40C! We really weren't complaining though - after summer in the US we are well used to dealing with heat and we like it (as long as we can get a cool drink and occasionally retreat to air-conditioning!) Fortunately we had both those things with the excellent Wayoutback truck - and we had a great guide too, the effervescent Jodie, who handled everything extremely well.
Surprisingly we were the only Brits on the tour - there were a lot of Germans or Germanic people, presumably because their economy really is doing well and they can afford it! We banded together with some Belgians instead, while we toured Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon and other spots in the Bush, camping out in the wilds at times. I had a great time taking responsibility for the camp- and cook-fire. What's not to love? Collecting firewood, preparing and lighting the fire, giving it judicious prods and feeding it fuel... all good fun and everyone else thinks you're working so you don't have to cook, clean or wash up!
After a few days we were exhausted and happy to get back to Alice Springs, where we had a day off to recover and then it was onwards to the west coast and what really was our last bit of the trip. We had a couple of days in beautiful Margaret River, trying wines and local foods, then it was up to Fremantle where we are now. We'd decided to not really do much while we were here, and just chill out for the last few days, but we did still manage to visit Penguin Island (to see Kate's spirit animal relatives) and I took a one-night road-trip up to the Pinnacles - yet more exotic rocks to photograph, but I'd been thwarted by overcast weather last time I was there, and I wanted to fix that. I almost got thwarted again, as the sunset was yet another bust, but fortunately I was smiled on the next morning and had the whole place to myself for a couple of glorious hours before I drove back.
Now we are sat in our last Airbnb apartment, our bags half-packed with just tomorrow to go before we catch our plane out of Perth late in the evening. It's an overnight flight to Dubai and then a long day back to London, where we will stay briefly with my brother before Kate heads west to her mother and I head north to mine, before I come back to London and then out to join Kate and, soon after that, move into her recently-vacated-of-tenants flat. What happens after that, we're not quite sure... it's the beginning of a new adventure!
However - while we have been sad to leave places, we didn't and don't, really want to stay. When we made the decision back in August that we were going to cut the trip short we had good reasons for doing so - and they remain true. Ever since, the relief of knowing that the logistics, planning and spending would come to an end in November has been a weight off our shoulders and has allowed us to enjoy our time a lot more!
Nonetheless, we've both felt this strange flip-flop of the desire to keep going versus the desire to stop and go home, which can alternate over days, hours, minutes or even seconds! It's a feeling I recognise from my previous trip when I had the same sensation in my last month or so. In my current case it's tempered by the fact that I'm not really 'going home' - my life when I get back will be in a new city, in a new flat, looking for a new job in a new career, so hardly back to the same old grind...
Back where the last entry finished off, we headed south down the last bit of the Pacific Coast Highway into LA, dropping in on Venice Beach to see what the fuss is about (a very sunny version of Camden Market, as far as we could tell) and then heading to our airport motel. The prospect of Hawaii was exciting, though we knew it wouldn't be the mythical paradise island of the postcards. Instead we found it was expensive, and it rained - a lot! To be fair the Iron Man triathlon World Championship was being held on Big Island, in Kona, just when we were there - a unfortunate bit of scheduling which meant hotels were booked up and prices high. I had only discovered this when I went to book a scuba dive with the manta rays on the one spare night we had arranged in Kona, only to find nothing would be happening because the triathlon shuts the streets! Fortunately I was still able to shuffle things around a bit, so we drove round Big Island to visit the volcanoes and admire the infernal glow that rises from the crater of Kilauea at night... very impressive. We couldn't see any of the active eruption, though if you've been following the news you will have seen that the current lava flows are slowly advancing on and demolishing one of the small towns on the south coast of the island. It was pretty weird listening to the radio and hearing, just after the daily weather forecast, the daily eruption and lava forecast, which is mostly safely ignored as it's confined to uninhabited areas.
Once back from there I did manage to get my manta ray dive, and it was truly spectacular - probably the visual highlight of the whole trip. We'd been lucky enough to see half a dozen manta rays in the earlier dive of the day, but for the night dive we saw more than twice as many, cruising, wheeling and looping directly above us, close enough to brush against us on many occasions. They were drawn in by a plankton swarm, which was in turn attracted by a mass of dive lights creating a glowing column in the dark water. The whole experience really was incredible even for a jaded old traveller like me! This isn't my video, but it exactly captures what it was like:
We then spent a day or two in Honolulu, which was mostly just a big city with a big mall and a beach, before it was time to jump the International Date Line, skip straight from October 17th to October 18th without having a night in between, and begin our Australian experience! I was keen to show off Sydney to Kate as I'd loved living there back in 2005. However it failed to endear itself to her from the start, beginning with a rail replacement bus service from the airport, poor station signage and then missing our ferry because the ticket machines weren't working and all but one of the booths were closed! Not what you need after an epic flight across the Pacific...
Fortunately our Airbnb apartment was another winner, and we settled in comfortably for a few days, but then the Australian spring weather decided to have its try at disappointing us and the skies remained resolutely grey after one sunny spell on our first day! We tried visiting the Blue Mountains but they were invisible in the mist! Still, it was great to be in a new country and we did like all the influences from the UK that are still detectable in Australia, particularly the aspects of London that still shine through in Sydney itself. We could tell straight away that it was a good plan to come here before returning home as it was a way of easing back in to things like driving on the left and using British English-isms instead of American.
From Sydney we drove to Melbourne - via Canberra, which was not as bad as everyone says, but not really a captivating place - to stay with my old friend Phil. I met him in 2004, on a minibus headed from Nairobi (Kenya) to Arusha (Tanzania), and we got talking (he's VERY good at talking) as we were both heading to Mt Kilimanjaro to climb it. He invited me to visit and stay when I came to Australia later that year, which I did, and we were invited again this year. It was a real pleasure to see him again, and his wife Ros, and they looked after us like champions, showing true Aussie hospitality. They drove us around, visiting wildlife sanctuaries (where we saw all the local superstar animals, including the duck-billed platypus which I'd never seen before) and also dropping in on his son Craig, who, with his wife Mel, run a fantastic brewery and distillery in the tiny town of Loch in the Victorian countryside. Craig gave us an inspiring guided tour of his operation and it definitely planted a seed - I'd love to have a place like his (an old brick-built bank from the 1900s) and to get stuck into the wonderful mixture of art and science that is brewing beer and distilling spirits. Maybe one day...
The weather was still rubbish though - we'd had a massive thunderstorm one night, and a good deal of cloud & rain. Soon we were headed to Alice Springs and the Red Centre - surely there we'd get good weather? You would think so, but the first day was very overcast and the 'sunset' view of Uluru (aka Ayers Rock) was a bust, and that night was a howling rainstorm! We were starting to get a little fed up with it, but over the next day or two it got better and better - only to keep getting sunnier and hotter and end up pushing well past 40C! We really weren't complaining though - after summer in the US we are well used to dealing with heat and we like it (as long as we can get a cool drink and occasionally retreat to air-conditioning!) Fortunately we had both those things with the excellent Wayoutback truck - and we had a great guide too, the effervescent Jodie, who handled everything extremely well.
Surprisingly we were the only Brits on the tour - there were a lot of Germans or Germanic people, presumably because their economy really is doing well and they can afford it! We banded together with some Belgians instead, while we toured Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon and other spots in the Bush, camping out in the wilds at times. I had a great time taking responsibility for the camp- and cook-fire. What's not to love? Collecting firewood, preparing and lighting the fire, giving it judicious prods and feeding it fuel... all good fun and everyone else thinks you're working so you don't have to cook, clean or wash up!
After a few days we were exhausted and happy to get back to Alice Springs, where we had a day off to recover and then it was onwards to the west coast and what really was our last bit of the trip. We had a couple of days in beautiful Margaret River, trying wines and local foods, then it was up to Fremantle where we are now. We'd decided to not really do much while we were here, and just chill out for the last few days, but we did still manage to visit Penguin Island (to see Kate's spirit animal relatives) and I took a one-night road-trip up to the Pinnacles - yet more exotic rocks to photograph, but I'd been thwarted by overcast weather last time I was there, and I wanted to fix that. I almost got thwarted again, as the sunset was yet another bust, but fortunately I was smiled on the next morning and had the whole place to myself for a couple of glorious hours before I drove back.
Now we are sat in our last Airbnb apartment, our bags half-packed with just tomorrow to go before we catch our plane out of Perth late in the evening. It's an overnight flight to Dubai and then a long day back to London, where we will stay briefly with my brother before Kate heads west to her mother and I head north to mine, before I come back to London and then out to join Kate and, soon after that, move into her recently-vacated-of-tenants flat. What happens after that, we're not quite sure... it's the beginning of a new adventure!
Sunday 5 October 2014
It's all downhill (and uphill) from here...
Another month has passed since the last update... and we're ever more sure that we made the right decision to curtail the trip! We had thought that maybe if we changed our plans we'd find ourselves regretting it later, and wish we hadn't, but that's definitely not the case. This is going to be the last post from the USA, though not the last one of the trip, so it ought to be quite a reflective one... it's been an amazing six months and we've seen so much of this country (and a fair bit of Canada too!) but it has felt a lot like this:
(Actually it was fun watching that and trying to identify parts of it - some of which we definitely did drive ourselves, other parts just look familiar)
We have certainly become expert at driving on American roads - we know what to expect, how to interpret the signs and lines - I even know when it's my turn to go at a four-way stop! Our rental cars have been impressive... we've done over 18,500 miles, 15,000 of which have been in the US, most of which was done in Hyundais, which never skipped a beat whether hammering down interstates, winding through desert highways or climbing over high mountain passes. When we were planning the trip we considered the option of buying a second-hand car but rightly decided against it - there's absolutely no way we would have such comfort and reliability! There have been plenty of roads on which a breakdown would have been deeply unpleasant, verging on actually dangerous, so we've been very grateful for our cars humming smoothly along giving us no problems! (I feel safe enough saying this without tempting fate as we've only got to get to LA from the coast - famous last words?)
Picking up where I left off, we'd got back to Seattle after an unpleasant ferry ride but we were met by friends of Kate's family who whisked us off to leisurely American retirement life - a lovely, spacious home on the shore of a lake, where we sat on the deck with a drink in our hand observing the boats cruising up and down. We visited Mt Rainier only to get stormed on while up on the shoulder of the mountain, leading to a rather unnerving descent in pouring rain! From there we drove to the Olympic Peninsula (passing through the dismal home town of Kurt Cobain) where we stayed for a few days in a very relaxed beachside resort, doing very little except jigsaws. I did manage to stir myself to drive up the coast to the more photogenic parts of the National Park at sunset, which will hopefully lead to some good photos being posted (for reference, I'm not going to tweak and upload my photos until I get back to my more capable desktop machine - this tablet's really not up to it!)
While there we had found and booked our Colorado cabin - we'd decided that it had been our favourite state, particularly the Boulder area, and we wanted to spend our month 'off' there. Airbnb came up trumps with a very cosy little cabin in the (actually rather exclusive) hills above the town of Golden. We now had a few days to get there, so we zoomed down and across Washington state, dropping in on Mt St Helens, before a brief flirtation with Oregon (avoiding contamination with the hipster infestation in Portland) and southern Idaho, before dropping down into Utah and a few days in Park City - somewhere I'd been before but in the winter, for snowboarding. In summer it was much quieter, with the bonus that large ski-hotel suites were available at very reasonable rates! They are a very outdoorsy population at any time of year so I booked a guided mountain bike ride while I was there, to check out their impressive trail network. It almost did me in - just not used to the altitude and having spent many months mostly sat down... fortunately my guide was very understanding.
From there it was a quick skip across to Colorado, and I had innocently chosen the route to Estes Park and then Golden that passed through Rocky Mountain National Park, thinking the scenery would be nice. It was, but there was the small problem (from Kate's perspective, and she was driving) that it was Trail Ridge Road, the highest paved continuous road in the US... and boy was it high. And twisty. And mostly without any guard rails. This is not the kind of road that Kate likes to drive, and in the end I had to swap seats with her at the top and drive us down the other side - not that she likes being my passenger on roads like this either! Still, it was an experience...
What was a much more Kate-approved experience was our time in the cabin. We basically spent four weeks doing very little - we'd get up, go for a run, have some lunch, read, write, have some dinner and a drink or two, then rinse and repeat! The running was interesting - the cabin was at 7000ft so to begin with we were limited to one-minute runs followed by one-minute walks for our total half an hour, but by the end we were running for five minutes at a time and barely needed the walks (except after the uphill segments, which were killers regardless...) We explored all the nearby roads, which wound prettily through the hills, dotted with expensive 'log-cabin style' mansions, and we watched the local wildlife, mostly elk, which would come right up to our windows. Later on I spotted a bobcat on one of our longer walks. Setting our own hours and cooking and eating our own food was the best - no more having to get up for motel breakfasts, trying to track down a diner for lunch or resigning ourselves to we've-given-up-trying junk food dinners.
Lookout Mountain - a foothill of the Rockies proper - is also where Buffalo Bill chose to be buried, and we could see why. It's a lovely place with a fantastic view out over the plains, Denver now sprawled underneath it, and with mountains marching off north and south. One (early) morning I drove back up to Rocky Mountain NP (though not over Trail Ridge again) to attempt to catch the dawn light - only to miss it by about 20 minutes! Beautiful drive though. We also met up with Kate's author friend again and her husband, and traded Sunday lunches, which was really nice - we'll definitely go back there.
Even after near a month we weren't bored of it, and we were very reluctant to leave... but leave we did, heading down through southern Colorado, admiring the gorgeous yellow-gold leaves on the aspens, dropping in on Great Sand Dunes National Park for another dawn raid for which I contrived to leave my proper camera at the hotel and had to use my little pocket one! There were two other comical incidents on the way there, driving on the longest stretch of straight road we'd ever seen - 42 miles dead straight (we counted). The first one was when a woman driver caught up with us and, despite the most perfect overtaking conditions you could imagine (miles of visibility, no oncoming traffic) refused to pass and instead tailgated us, even flashing her lights to encourage us to speed up, before eventually passing only when Kate refused to accelerate and slowed right down. Bizarre, yet not all that surprising in our experience of American driving! The second one was, on reaching the end of the straight section, a bend in the road that was literally only a couple of degrees was highlighted with warning arrows - in case drivers, numbed by three quarters of an hour of unsteering monotony, would fail to spot the tiny deviation and plough slowly off the edge of the road! This would also not have been terribly surprising.
Finally we were heading back to the coast, with our seventh and last crossing of the Continental Divide to negotiate before we dropped in on Mesa Verde for a quick visit, and another observation on American behaviour when a couple began debating if the effort required to walk half a mile on a paved path to see one of the famous ruined pueblos was too much. To be fair, we were at high altitude again and not everyone had been training for four weeks! After that we were retracing our steps through northern Arizona and southern Utah, which was a strange experience seeing the same places again when we hadn't expected to visit them again.
Another strange experience was our first brush with the law - Kate failed to come to a complete halt at a stop sign (in her defence, the road was empty of traffic and visibility was good in all directions) and the local state trooper was quick to pounce... We half-expected him to waive everything when he found we were from the UK but he did issue the citation - and promptly told us we could choose not to pay and instead skip the country if we wanted!
Later in Utah we - or rather, I - encountered the dreaded bed-bugs, but the hotel's response was nothing like it had been the first time it happened, which was back in June. At that time the hotel had immediately been apologetic, sympathetic and generous in compensation. Not so in the Super 8 in Hurricane... at first they denied it (implicitly accusing me of lying) then when confronted with the evidence (me stripped to the waist in their lobby!) they reluctantly took details and promised to look into it and respond the next day. They utterly failed to do so, so a week later I complained to the parent company and slated them for their response on Booking.com and TripAdvisor! Well... you do what you can...
After that delight it was time for Nevada - even worse than Arizona for MMFD (Miles and Miles of F'ing Desert). The scenery was even more desolate than before, lacking even the dramatic escarpments and mesas, and the rich fiery colours, degenerating into dull grey desert. The only thing I wanted to see was the Hoover Dam, a fine piece of civil engineering I'd been interested in seeing for a while (Kate saw it from a coach in 1997, back when the highway went across the top). First up we went to the overlook on the new bridge - a fantastically sparse and elegant concrete arch design, incredibly slim for such a huge span - and then down on to the dam itself. It was ferociously hot - 100F or more - but there was a powerful wind blowing, a kind of forced ventilation that kept you tolerably warm at the cost of being blasted by the air.
We drove around Las Vegas, as it's really not the place for us at all, and then on to California! First stop was Death Valley - not the mental image of California that the adverts would have you believe! Although we'd missed the 120F heights of mid-summer, it was still hot and, of course, very very dry. I gave in to Kate's nagging and we took *a lot* of iced water - and we were glad of it! The scenery was unforgiving, stark rather than beautiful, although there were photogenic bits, particularly Badwater Basin, Zabriskie Point and the bizarre colours at Artist's Palette. The clouds were rolling in after lunch, so we set off over the mountain ranges that separate it from the sea and keep it so parched. As we drove we saw another petrol station, expecting to find prices reduced away from the Death Valley honeypot, only to find they were charging an eye-watering $5.98 per gallon! When Brits find your fuel prices excessive, you need to have a word with yourself... fortunately we were still well supplied and were able to keep going, winding up the steep mountain roads (again Kate was driving, which she wasn't thrilled about - but I swear it just happens that way, I actually *like* driving the twisty bits and yet it nearly always seems to be her turn when we hit them!) After an unexpectedly excellent steak dinner in Lone Pine, plus most of a bottle of rather good Californian merlot and a creme brulee, Kate's mood was much improved...
We stopped near Mono Lake where I did another dawn photography raid - this time remembering everything I needed - before we drove over the Sierra Nevada and into Yosemite (this time I was at the wheel, after we traded slots). The drive was good fun, but rather sadly by the time we were in Yosemite Valley - by anyone's standards, one of the most breathtaking landscapes in the world - we were once again suffering from burnout.
We'd hoped that the month in Colorado would recharge our batteries, drain our saturated senses and generally give us another chunk of appreciation for where we were - but it seemed it had only lasted a week or so and we were done again. Naturally we're not looking for sympathy here - just trying to explain ourselves. As we sat in the carpark at the visitor centre we decided to scrap our plan for an exploration of the California coast from Sausalito to San Diego, push for the coast and stay for our last week somewhere by a beach.
So that's what we did - we drove west to Santa Cruz and then along the famous Highway 1 to Cayucos, where we are now. Airbnb provided us with a home, and we're enjoying unseasonably warm weather and once again doing not a lot. I've pretty much finished our remaining bookings, most of which were sorted out while in the Colorado cabin, so we've got a week in Hawaii with a little island-hopping to do, then a month in Australia after that - then we go home! It feels pretty weird to see the blank space at the end of the travel plan spreadsheet, which previously seemed to stretch on, unending. I definitely won't miss all that time I've spent juggling between that spreadsheet, Google Maps, Priceline and TripAdvisor, working out where to go, for how long, trying to drive a bargain on accommodation without booking us into miserable flea-pits... I like to think (and Kate agrees!) I've done pretty well, not making any significant scheduling errors or choosing any disastrous locations, but boy will I be glad to be staying in one place for the foreseeable future once we are finally back and installed somewhere!
(Actually it was fun watching that and trying to identify parts of it - some of which we definitely did drive ourselves, other parts just look familiar)
We have certainly become expert at driving on American roads - we know what to expect, how to interpret the signs and lines - I even know when it's my turn to go at a four-way stop! Our rental cars have been impressive... we've done over 18,500 miles, 15,000 of which have been in the US, most of which was done in Hyundais, which never skipped a beat whether hammering down interstates, winding through desert highways or climbing over high mountain passes. When we were planning the trip we considered the option of buying a second-hand car but rightly decided against it - there's absolutely no way we would have such comfort and reliability! There have been plenty of roads on which a breakdown would have been deeply unpleasant, verging on actually dangerous, so we've been very grateful for our cars humming smoothly along giving us no problems! (I feel safe enough saying this without tempting fate as we've only got to get to LA from the coast - famous last words?)
Picking up where I left off, we'd got back to Seattle after an unpleasant ferry ride but we were met by friends of Kate's family who whisked us off to leisurely American retirement life - a lovely, spacious home on the shore of a lake, where we sat on the deck with a drink in our hand observing the boats cruising up and down. We visited Mt Rainier only to get stormed on while up on the shoulder of the mountain, leading to a rather unnerving descent in pouring rain! From there we drove to the Olympic Peninsula (passing through the dismal home town of Kurt Cobain) where we stayed for a few days in a very relaxed beachside resort, doing very little except jigsaws. I did manage to stir myself to drive up the coast to the more photogenic parts of the National Park at sunset, which will hopefully lead to some good photos being posted (for reference, I'm not going to tweak and upload my photos until I get back to my more capable desktop machine - this tablet's really not up to it!)
While there we had found and booked our Colorado cabin - we'd decided that it had been our favourite state, particularly the Boulder area, and we wanted to spend our month 'off' there. Airbnb came up trumps with a very cosy little cabin in the (actually rather exclusive) hills above the town of Golden. We now had a few days to get there, so we zoomed down and across Washington state, dropping in on Mt St Helens, before a brief flirtation with Oregon (avoiding contamination with the hipster infestation in Portland) and southern Idaho, before dropping down into Utah and a few days in Park City - somewhere I'd been before but in the winter, for snowboarding. In summer it was much quieter, with the bonus that large ski-hotel suites were available at very reasonable rates! They are a very outdoorsy population at any time of year so I booked a guided mountain bike ride while I was there, to check out their impressive trail network. It almost did me in - just not used to the altitude and having spent many months mostly sat down... fortunately my guide was very understanding.
From there it was a quick skip across to Colorado, and I had innocently chosen the route to Estes Park and then Golden that passed through Rocky Mountain National Park, thinking the scenery would be nice. It was, but there was the small problem (from Kate's perspective, and she was driving) that it was Trail Ridge Road, the highest paved continuous road in the US... and boy was it high. And twisty. And mostly without any guard rails. This is not the kind of road that Kate likes to drive, and in the end I had to swap seats with her at the top and drive us down the other side - not that she likes being my passenger on roads like this either! Still, it was an experience...
What was a much more Kate-approved experience was our time in the cabin. We basically spent four weeks doing very little - we'd get up, go for a run, have some lunch, read, write, have some dinner and a drink or two, then rinse and repeat! The running was interesting - the cabin was at 7000ft so to begin with we were limited to one-minute runs followed by one-minute walks for our total half an hour, but by the end we were running for five minutes at a time and barely needed the walks (except after the uphill segments, which were killers regardless...) We explored all the nearby roads, which wound prettily through the hills, dotted with expensive 'log-cabin style' mansions, and we watched the local wildlife, mostly elk, which would come right up to our windows. Later on I spotted a bobcat on one of our longer walks. Setting our own hours and cooking and eating our own food was the best - no more having to get up for motel breakfasts, trying to track down a diner for lunch or resigning ourselves to we've-given-up-trying junk food dinners.
Lookout Mountain - a foothill of the Rockies proper - is also where Buffalo Bill chose to be buried, and we could see why. It's a lovely place with a fantastic view out over the plains, Denver now sprawled underneath it, and with mountains marching off north and south. One (early) morning I drove back up to Rocky Mountain NP (though not over Trail Ridge again) to attempt to catch the dawn light - only to miss it by about 20 minutes! Beautiful drive though. We also met up with Kate's author friend again and her husband, and traded Sunday lunches, which was really nice - we'll definitely go back there.
Even after near a month we weren't bored of it, and we were very reluctant to leave... but leave we did, heading down through southern Colorado, admiring the gorgeous yellow-gold leaves on the aspens, dropping in on Great Sand Dunes National Park for another dawn raid for which I contrived to leave my proper camera at the hotel and had to use my little pocket one! There were two other comical incidents on the way there, driving on the longest stretch of straight road we'd ever seen - 42 miles dead straight (we counted). The first one was when a woman driver caught up with us and, despite the most perfect overtaking conditions you could imagine (miles of visibility, no oncoming traffic) refused to pass and instead tailgated us, even flashing her lights to encourage us to speed up, before eventually passing only when Kate refused to accelerate and slowed right down. Bizarre, yet not all that surprising in our experience of American driving! The second one was, on reaching the end of the straight section, a bend in the road that was literally only a couple of degrees was highlighted with warning arrows - in case drivers, numbed by three quarters of an hour of unsteering monotony, would fail to spot the tiny deviation and plough slowly off the edge of the road! This would also not have been terribly surprising.
Finally we were heading back to the coast, with our seventh and last crossing of the Continental Divide to negotiate before we dropped in on Mesa Verde for a quick visit, and another observation on American behaviour when a couple began debating if the effort required to walk half a mile on a paved path to see one of the famous ruined pueblos was too much. To be fair, we were at high altitude again and not everyone had been training for four weeks! After that we were retracing our steps through northern Arizona and southern Utah, which was a strange experience seeing the same places again when we hadn't expected to visit them again.
Another strange experience was our first brush with the law - Kate failed to come to a complete halt at a stop sign (in her defence, the road was empty of traffic and visibility was good in all directions) and the local state trooper was quick to pounce... We half-expected him to waive everything when he found we were from the UK but he did issue the citation - and promptly told us we could choose not to pay and instead skip the country if we wanted!
Later in Utah we - or rather, I - encountered the dreaded bed-bugs, but the hotel's response was nothing like it had been the first time it happened, which was back in June. At that time the hotel had immediately been apologetic, sympathetic and generous in compensation. Not so in the Super 8 in Hurricane... at first they denied it (implicitly accusing me of lying) then when confronted with the evidence (me stripped to the waist in their lobby!) they reluctantly took details and promised to look into it and respond the next day. They utterly failed to do so, so a week later I complained to the parent company and slated them for their response on Booking.com and TripAdvisor! Well... you do what you can...
After that delight it was time for Nevada - even worse than Arizona for MMFD (Miles and Miles of F'ing Desert). The scenery was even more desolate than before, lacking even the dramatic escarpments and mesas, and the rich fiery colours, degenerating into dull grey desert. The only thing I wanted to see was the Hoover Dam, a fine piece of civil engineering I'd been interested in seeing for a while (Kate saw it from a coach in 1997, back when the highway went across the top). First up we went to the overlook on the new bridge - a fantastically sparse and elegant concrete arch design, incredibly slim for such a huge span - and then down on to the dam itself. It was ferociously hot - 100F or more - but there was a powerful wind blowing, a kind of forced ventilation that kept you tolerably warm at the cost of being blasted by the air.
We drove around Las Vegas, as it's really not the place for us at all, and then on to California! First stop was Death Valley - not the mental image of California that the adverts would have you believe! Although we'd missed the 120F heights of mid-summer, it was still hot and, of course, very very dry. I gave in to Kate's nagging and we took *a lot* of iced water - and we were glad of it! The scenery was unforgiving, stark rather than beautiful, although there were photogenic bits, particularly Badwater Basin, Zabriskie Point and the bizarre colours at Artist's Palette. The clouds were rolling in after lunch, so we set off over the mountain ranges that separate it from the sea and keep it so parched. As we drove we saw another petrol station, expecting to find prices reduced away from the Death Valley honeypot, only to find they were charging an eye-watering $5.98 per gallon! When Brits find your fuel prices excessive, you need to have a word with yourself... fortunately we were still well supplied and were able to keep going, winding up the steep mountain roads (again Kate was driving, which she wasn't thrilled about - but I swear it just happens that way, I actually *like* driving the twisty bits and yet it nearly always seems to be her turn when we hit them!) After an unexpectedly excellent steak dinner in Lone Pine, plus most of a bottle of rather good Californian merlot and a creme brulee, Kate's mood was much improved...
We stopped near Mono Lake where I did another dawn photography raid - this time remembering everything I needed - before we drove over the Sierra Nevada and into Yosemite (this time I was at the wheel, after we traded slots). The drive was good fun, but rather sadly by the time we were in Yosemite Valley - by anyone's standards, one of the most breathtaking landscapes in the world - we were once again suffering from burnout.
We'd hoped that the month in Colorado would recharge our batteries, drain our saturated senses and generally give us another chunk of appreciation for where we were - but it seemed it had only lasted a week or so and we were done again. Naturally we're not looking for sympathy here - just trying to explain ourselves. As we sat in the carpark at the visitor centre we decided to scrap our plan for an exploration of the California coast from Sausalito to San Diego, push for the coast and stay for our last week somewhere by a beach.
So that's what we did - we drove west to Santa Cruz and then along the famous Highway 1 to Cayucos, where we are now. Airbnb provided us with a home, and we're enjoying unseasonably warm weather and once again doing not a lot. I've pretty much finished our remaining bookings, most of which were sorted out while in the Colorado cabin, so we've got a week in Hawaii with a little island-hopping to do, then a month in Australia after that - then we go home! It feels pretty weird to see the blank space at the end of the travel plan spreadsheet, which previously seemed to stretch on, unending. I definitely won't miss all that time I've spent juggling between that spreadsheet, Google Maps, Priceline and TripAdvisor, working out where to go, for how long, trying to drive a bargain on accommodation without booking us into miserable flea-pits... I like to think (and Kate agrees!) I've done pretty well, not making any significant scheduling errors or choosing any disastrous locations, but boy will I be glad to be staying in one place for the foreseeable future once we are finally back and installed somewhere!
Wednesday 3 September 2014
What goes around...
As promised, the follow up:
So the discussions that came to a head on Vancouver Island were the culmination of a few things.
First up was money - despite our quite decent amount of pre-trip savings, and keeping a lid on our travel expenses, the US & Canada were both costing more than we had hoped, and the budget projection for the second half of the year away was coming up considerably short. Whatever you're doing, being stressed about the money takes the fun out of it...
Second up, and just as important, if not more so, was whether extending ourselves (via loans, credit cards, whatever) was going to be a worthwhile use of the money. We were both finding ourselves running seriously short of enthusiasm to see and do things, or to do the logistics work of finding accommodation and where to get food every day - short term solutions like the stop in Seattle were good for a while, but continuous travel is exhausting, mentally and physically (is that the world's smallest violin I can hear? Thought so...)
We'd already noticed that epic vistas weren't triggering much of a reaction any more, and our desire to explore new cities was near-zero. Some of that saturation is definitely an effect of already having been reasonably well-travelled - after the Himalayas, other mountains just don't do it for us ;-) It's quite different at 37 years old than at 17, when everything is fresh and new and amazing!
Thirdly there was a building desire in both of us to live in our own place again and be 'grounded'.
The conclusion? Sticking to our plans would lead to us spending money we didn't have, to not make the most of where we were going, when we would really rather be at home. Therefore, we have decided to change our itinerary quite drastically, and come home in mid-November. Way back in the planning stage we'd envisaged two big trips - one for the US and Canada, and a separate one for Australia and New Zealand. Hopefully we're just reverting to that idea, and we're postponing the big southern hemisphere trip to a later date. We're extending our stay in the US in order to come back to our favourite bit (the Colorado mountains) where we're currently living in a little cabin for a month (hurrah for long-term visas!) before we finish off with Nevada and California.
We hadn't bought tickets to New Zealand, and it's the place we both really want to do justice to when we go. Being under budget pressure and too travelled-out to enjoy just seemed like a terrible waste, so we've cut it entirely (sorry Dave!). Tahiti's out too - despite having paid for flights, it wasn't going to be value for money to keep spending the rest we would need.
Our round-the-world tickets take us through Hawaii and Australia, so it seemed crazy to drop that entirely and fly directly home. As such, we're going to spend a week on Hawaii and about a month in Oz, seeing Sydney, the south east coast, and Melbourne, jumping to the Red Centre for a week, and then a last week in Perth and the west coast. That's still a pretty awesome Australian holiday! If we can, we'll come back and do the circumnavigation the next time.
It feels insane to be planning to leave Australia in the balmy late spring and arrive back in dismal British November, but we'll just have to get over that... at least there will be Christmas with the family to look forward to!
So the discussions that came to a head on Vancouver Island were the culmination of a few things.
First up was money - despite our quite decent amount of pre-trip savings, and keeping a lid on our travel expenses, the US & Canada were both costing more than we had hoped, and the budget projection for the second half of the year away was coming up considerably short. Whatever you're doing, being stressed about the money takes the fun out of it...
Second up, and just as important, if not more so, was whether extending ourselves (via loans, credit cards, whatever) was going to be a worthwhile use of the money. We were both finding ourselves running seriously short of enthusiasm to see and do things, or to do the logistics work of finding accommodation and where to get food every day - short term solutions like the stop in Seattle were good for a while, but continuous travel is exhausting, mentally and physically (is that the world's smallest violin I can hear? Thought so...)
We'd already noticed that epic vistas weren't triggering much of a reaction any more, and our desire to explore new cities was near-zero. Some of that saturation is definitely an effect of already having been reasonably well-travelled - after the Himalayas, other mountains just don't do it for us ;-) It's quite different at 37 years old than at 17, when everything is fresh and new and amazing!
Thirdly there was a building desire in both of us to live in our own place again and be 'grounded'.
The conclusion? Sticking to our plans would lead to us spending money we didn't have, to not make the most of where we were going, when we would really rather be at home. Therefore, we have decided to change our itinerary quite drastically, and come home in mid-November. Way back in the planning stage we'd envisaged two big trips - one for the US and Canada, and a separate one for Australia and New Zealand. Hopefully we're just reverting to that idea, and we're postponing the big southern hemisphere trip to a later date. We're extending our stay in the US in order to come back to our favourite bit (the Colorado mountains) where we're currently living in a little cabin for a month (hurrah for long-term visas!) before we finish off with Nevada and California.
We hadn't bought tickets to New Zealand, and it's the place we both really want to do justice to when we go. Being under budget pressure and too travelled-out to enjoy just seemed like a terrible waste, so we've cut it entirely (sorry Dave!). Tahiti's out too - despite having paid for flights, it wasn't going to be value for money to keep spending the rest we would need.
Our round-the-world tickets take us through Hawaii and Australia, so it seemed crazy to drop that entirely and fly directly home. As such, we're going to spend a week on Hawaii and about a month in Oz, seeing Sydney, the south east coast, and Melbourne, jumping to the Red Centre for a week, and then a last week in Perth and the west coast. That's still a pretty awesome Australian holiday! If we can, we'll come back and do the circumnavigation the next time.
It feels insane to be planning to leave Australia in the balmy late spring and arrive back in dismal British November, but we'll just have to get over that... at least there will be Christmas with the family to look forward to!
So, Canada...
Back on the road again, then - well, the sea first. We'd recharged quite successfully in our little Seattle studio, and it was time to catch a ferry to Canada. We'd found it was easier (and cheaper) to rent a car on Vancouver Island and start our circular route there instead of Vancouver itself - also we'd just had a dose of city life and it was time for some wilderness again.
Not that Victoria, a lovely little seaside city, was anything but civilised. This was my first time in Canada, and it immediately felt comfortable - hardly a new observation but it felt like America filtered through a British prism. We got to see quite a lot of Victoria, on foot, carrying all our bags, as I'd slightly misjudged the scale of the walk from the ferry terminal to our hotel! Given that this was my biggest logistical faux pas so far, Kate wisely cut me some slack. We'd decided to spend time here when we got back after our loop into the wilds, so we didn't hang around - the next morning I went to pick up our hire car and was pleasantly surprised to be offered a luxury-trim Ford Fusion rather than the relatively dinky Hyundai we'd requested. However, it felt like a boat compared to the nimble little Elantra, and it took quite a while before either of us was confident about where the corners were... the fancy motorised seats, reversing camera & built-in everything we got used to pretty quickly though!
We drove up the island, veering west to the wild coast at Ucluelet, spotting our first bear (black) eating grass by the side of the road. It was very 'cool' there - surfing and general outdoorsing is a big thing, and we walked among the huge trees and on the foggy beaches, then back to the east coast and the extremely pleasant, though remote communities up to Port Hardy, where we were getting a much bigger ferry, for a much longer journey. Vancouver Island seemed like a lovely place but most of it is a long way from everywhere - something it apparently shares with New Zealand, which it resembles quite a lot in places, it would appear.
The ferry from Port Hardy cruised up what is known as, no sniggering at the back please, the Inside Passage - a long chain of channels running parallel to the coast but protected from the weather. It takes all day to get to Prince Rupert further up the coast, with a very early start in the dark. We'd splashed out on seats in the posh bit of the ferry, hoping for peace and quiet. This was not to be - a group of bikers occupied the entire front row and began yelling and laughing from the start, displaying that charming American habit of acting like they were the only people in the room and they didn't have to give consideration to anyone else. By the end of the day, around 10pm when everyone was desperate to sleep (including plenty of families with children) they got back from a movie or something and were continuing to make a racket, even starting singing songs, enough to make even mild-mannered me get up and tell them to shut the hell up. I think I embarrassed them quite successfully - they did shut up, mostly.
One thing to bear in mind - they may have been bikers but they weren't exactly Hell's Angels... they were the baby-boomer type, all around 60 years old. You'd think they would have known better. Maybe being on the bike all day damages your hearing so much you forget you don't have to talk really loud all the time.
The other disappointment of that trip was the weather - it was very cloudy all day, foggy at times, so we couldn't see a great deal of the beautiful scenery. The bad weather continued in Prince Rupert, and after our tiring day on the ferry we got up, looked outside, and went back to bed, taking another much-needed day off.
From Prince Rupert we only had one way to go - the road struck off east into the mainland, so we followed. We got to one turnoff that had us only 240km from Alaska, but we resisted that temptation (not least because there was nothing much actually there to see in Alaska if we'd gone that way) and continued towards Prince George. Aside from the royalty theme, we discovered a bit of Simpsons connection too, from Port Simpson just up the coast, through Smithers, where we stopped (pronouncing it with a Mr. Burns accent, naturally) and then Moe Road and Burns Lake a little later. Didn't spot anyone with yellow skin though. The towns along this road were surprisingly substantial and well kept - we'd expected them to be a bit one-horse.
After Prince George came the Canadian Rockies - we'd planned to stop in Jasper (or at least nearby - it was very expensive to stay there) and walk in the mountains, but weather was terrible and we only visited the town for lunch. Since we hadn't booked all the rest of our Canada loop we figured we could come back on the return leg and see it in better weather.
Instead we drove east out of BC and into Alberta, to visit Edmonton. It's not somewhere I'd rush back to... we went to the famous (famous in Canada, that is) mall, and found it to be, well, a really big mall, filled with lots of people. The takeout food we got delivered to our hotel was also a strong candidate for the worst meal of the trip - all in all, pretty dismal.
The next day we had great weather as we drove out to the small town of Bruce where they were having their annual Stampede, aka rodeo. The idea of a herd of stampeding Australian men all called Bruce was a pleasing one, though. The rodeo had an interesting Canadian flavour, including a performance from the remarkably well-trained Mountie display team, but the hot weather and the long, long list of events meant the crowd's energy died after lunch and we ended up bailing before the end. Turns out 2 and a half rodeos is about as much as I can take. Also they had wire fencing round the arena instead of rails, so I couldn't get clear photos... but then I have a lot of rodeo photos now and they all do start to look kinda the same...
After that we drove south to Calgary across the rather featureless Alberta plains, and I took the car the next day to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum out in Drumheller - a seriously awesome dinosaur museum. It had the distinct advantage of being a long way from anywhere so the people who went there really wanted to go, and thus it wasn't filled with bored, unappreciative kids. I may have mentioned my feelings on children in museums before. I know I was one, once. I'm pretty sure I was attentive though!
We couldn't summon the energy to poke around Calgary (plus the parking was super expensive) so we headed straight back to the mountains, to Banff this time. Lovely town, very hot in the summer, also has ludicrously expensive accommodation. The only place we could find that was reasonable was a hostel. As hostels go, it was really rather good - but we're so over hostels now. It's not too much to ask for aircon when it's in the mid-thirties centigrade... Funnily enough we shared with lads (including heavy drinking travellers and stag-do attendees) and with girls - and we were both agreed we'd share with the lads again every time. The girls were noisy, they took ages to get ready, hogged the bathroom... who knew?
Fortunately with the good weather we were able to get some exploring done - we went for a fab hike up through forests into alpine meadows filled with beautiful flowers and with great views. I'd bought bear spray in case we encountered any residents but only ended up killing a ground squirrel when it literally dashed under my boot as I walked past. Oops. Add that to the couple of prairie dogs I'd run over in Montana, the porcupine I shot in Wyoming (at least that one was deliberate)...
We also visited Lake Louise, which was very pretty, though thronged with tourists as it was a Canadian holiday weekend. We took a chairlift up the nearby mountain and nearly saw a grizzly bear that was roaming around the tourist area at the top - frustratingly close but we had to stay back. Just as we were leaving, people coming off the chairlift told us the bear was visible further down, and so it was - and luckily for it, there was no way for me to accidentally kill it. We also saw coyotes, elk and bighorn sheep on the way back - quite a day for wildlife spotting!
After all that we drove north, back up to Jasper, along the famous Icefields Parkway - spotting another black bear and cub, eating berries by the side of the road, with a crowd of tourists out of their car and taking pictures only metres away. I confess I did get closer than I should have, but then I had bear spray in my hand, and I wasn't encouraging children to get a good close look too.
On the way towards Vancouver we did what neither of us had done before - left a restaurant having ordered but without being served, after waiting for too long for not much. There seemed to be some kind of feud going on between the server and the chef, but we didn't stick around to find out what it was!
We then stayed in a glorious little B&B in Vernon in the Okanagan for a few days, remembering what it was like to live in a civilised manner, before we hit the big city of Vancouver itself. I did some of the most intense driving I've done trying to get there on time to meet our next Airbnb host - a lot of high-speed miles in some fairly busy traffic, and then trying to fight our way through rush-hour congestion in the city centre.
We were pretty late, but our host had waited for us - he was a nice guy, though his apartment was a bit shabby. The location was amazing - a really lovely bit of Vancouver, right on the edge of huge, beautiful Stanley Park and with the sea just minutes away - but the apartment was altogether a bit 'student', the crowning disappointment being the bed, which was just a mattress on the floor with ill-fitting linen! After a lot of really nice motel beds, this wasn't a good thing... but we made the most of it, got some groceries and had home cooking again, and did a little light exploration of the area. Vancouver's well known as a great place to live - we can see why.
After a couple or three days there we got the car ferry back to Vancouver Island. This crossing was lovely and sunny, the island looked beautiful and we found a great little pizza place in a charming little seaside town called Sidney, where jazzmen entertained us with live music in the streets as we ate. It was all very nice indeed. As we sat, I idly checked my phone and realised we were supposed to return the car in half an hour. My second logistical error of the trip - I'd thought we had an extra day.
Fortunately Victoria wasn't far, and Enterprise were totally OK with us requesting an extra day - in fact we'd had until the next morning anyway. So we drove on to our hotel, had a lovely meal, and went to bed - only to find there was noise like a loud TV coming from somewhere... yet it wasn't next door, or upstairs, and there were no rooms downstairs... only there was a nightclub, running a comedy night! Genius bit of planning there, having a noisy late-night business under the rooms where people are paying to sleep...
The next day we drove out to a coastal park to go for a walk, and a talk... which continued as we went back to Sidney for lunch again, and walked along the pier, talking some more. There'll be another blog post just after this one to explain what we talked about, and decided...
Soon we were packing up to leave Canada, dropping the car off and heading back to the ferry terminal in Victoria. The sailing back to Seattle was not at all as pleasant as the outbound trip - it was full, noisy and seemed to take much longer - though that could have been down to our seating partners who kept up an inane chatter the whole journey (have you gathered by now that we like people to be quiet around us?). We arrived in Seattle under the full (super) moon, and that was that for Canada. Kate had been several times before, but it was my first time - we both really like it, though we both felt we were too worn down from travelling so much to really appreciate it. And that's what the next blog post is about...
Not that Victoria, a lovely little seaside city, was anything but civilised. This was my first time in Canada, and it immediately felt comfortable - hardly a new observation but it felt like America filtered through a British prism. We got to see quite a lot of Victoria, on foot, carrying all our bags, as I'd slightly misjudged the scale of the walk from the ferry terminal to our hotel! Given that this was my biggest logistical faux pas so far, Kate wisely cut me some slack. We'd decided to spend time here when we got back after our loop into the wilds, so we didn't hang around - the next morning I went to pick up our hire car and was pleasantly surprised to be offered a luxury-trim Ford Fusion rather than the relatively dinky Hyundai we'd requested. However, it felt like a boat compared to the nimble little Elantra, and it took quite a while before either of us was confident about where the corners were... the fancy motorised seats, reversing camera & built-in everything we got used to pretty quickly though!
We drove up the island, veering west to the wild coast at Ucluelet, spotting our first bear (black) eating grass by the side of the road. It was very 'cool' there - surfing and general outdoorsing is a big thing, and we walked among the huge trees and on the foggy beaches, then back to the east coast and the extremely pleasant, though remote communities up to Port Hardy, where we were getting a much bigger ferry, for a much longer journey. Vancouver Island seemed like a lovely place but most of it is a long way from everywhere - something it apparently shares with New Zealand, which it resembles quite a lot in places, it would appear.
The ferry from Port Hardy cruised up what is known as, no sniggering at the back please, the Inside Passage - a long chain of channels running parallel to the coast but protected from the weather. It takes all day to get to Prince Rupert further up the coast, with a very early start in the dark. We'd splashed out on seats in the posh bit of the ferry, hoping for peace and quiet. This was not to be - a group of bikers occupied the entire front row and began yelling and laughing from the start, displaying that charming American habit of acting like they were the only people in the room and they didn't have to give consideration to anyone else. By the end of the day, around 10pm when everyone was desperate to sleep (including plenty of families with children) they got back from a movie or something and were continuing to make a racket, even starting singing songs, enough to make even mild-mannered me get up and tell them to shut the hell up. I think I embarrassed them quite successfully - they did shut up, mostly.
One thing to bear in mind - they may have been bikers but they weren't exactly Hell's Angels... they were the baby-boomer type, all around 60 years old. You'd think they would have known better. Maybe being on the bike all day damages your hearing so much you forget you don't have to talk really loud all the time.
The other disappointment of that trip was the weather - it was very cloudy all day, foggy at times, so we couldn't see a great deal of the beautiful scenery. The bad weather continued in Prince Rupert, and after our tiring day on the ferry we got up, looked outside, and went back to bed, taking another much-needed day off.
From Prince Rupert we only had one way to go - the road struck off east into the mainland, so we followed. We got to one turnoff that had us only 240km from Alaska, but we resisted that temptation (not least because there was nothing much actually there to see in Alaska if we'd gone that way) and continued towards Prince George. Aside from the royalty theme, we discovered a bit of Simpsons connection too, from Port Simpson just up the coast, through Smithers, where we stopped (pronouncing it with a Mr. Burns accent, naturally) and then Moe Road and Burns Lake a little later. Didn't spot anyone with yellow skin though. The towns along this road were surprisingly substantial and well kept - we'd expected them to be a bit one-horse.
After Prince George came the Canadian Rockies - we'd planned to stop in Jasper (or at least nearby - it was very expensive to stay there) and walk in the mountains, but weather was terrible and we only visited the town for lunch. Since we hadn't booked all the rest of our Canada loop we figured we could come back on the return leg and see it in better weather.
Instead we drove east out of BC and into Alberta, to visit Edmonton. It's not somewhere I'd rush back to... we went to the famous (famous in Canada, that is) mall, and found it to be, well, a really big mall, filled with lots of people. The takeout food we got delivered to our hotel was also a strong candidate for the worst meal of the trip - all in all, pretty dismal.
The next day we had great weather as we drove out to the small town of Bruce where they were having their annual Stampede, aka rodeo. The idea of a herd of stampeding Australian men all called Bruce was a pleasing one, though. The rodeo had an interesting Canadian flavour, including a performance from the remarkably well-trained Mountie display team, but the hot weather and the long, long list of events meant the crowd's energy died after lunch and we ended up bailing before the end. Turns out 2 and a half rodeos is about as much as I can take. Also they had wire fencing round the arena instead of rails, so I couldn't get clear photos... but then I have a lot of rodeo photos now and they all do start to look kinda the same...
After that we drove south to Calgary across the rather featureless Alberta plains, and I took the car the next day to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum out in Drumheller - a seriously awesome dinosaur museum. It had the distinct advantage of being a long way from anywhere so the people who went there really wanted to go, and thus it wasn't filled with bored, unappreciative kids. I may have mentioned my feelings on children in museums before. I know I was one, once. I'm pretty sure I was attentive though!
We couldn't summon the energy to poke around Calgary (plus the parking was super expensive) so we headed straight back to the mountains, to Banff this time. Lovely town, very hot in the summer, also has ludicrously expensive accommodation. The only place we could find that was reasonable was a hostel. As hostels go, it was really rather good - but we're so over hostels now. It's not too much to ask for aircon when it's in the mid-thirties centigrade... Funnily enough we shared with lads (including heavy drinking travellers and stag-do attendees) and with girls - and we were both agreed we'd share with the lads again every time. The girls were noisy, they took ages to get ready, hogged the bathroom... who knew?
Fortunately with the good weather we were able to get some exploring done - we went for a fab hike up through forests into alpine meadows filled with beautiful flowers and with great views. I'd bought bear spray in case we encountered any residents but only ended up killing a ground squirrel when it literally dashed under my boot as I walked past. Oops. Add that to the couple of prairie dogs I'd run over in Montana, the porcupine I shot in Wyoming (at least that one was deliberate)...
We also visited Lake Louise, which was very pretty, though thronged with tourists as it was a Canadian holiday weekend. We took a chairlift up the nearby mountain and nearly saw a grizzly bear that was roaming around the tourist area at the top - frustratingly close but we had to stay back. Just as we were leaving, people coming off the chairlift told us the bear was visible further down, and so it was - and luckily for it, there was no way for me to accidentally kill it. We also saw coyotes, elk and bighorn sheep on the way back - quite a day for wildlife spotting!
After all that we drove north, back up to Jasper, along the famous Icefields Parkway - spotting another black bear and cub, eating berries by the side of the road, with a crowd of tourists out of their car and taking pictures only metres away. I confess I did get closer than I should have, but then I had bear spray in my hand, and I wasn't encouraging children to get a good close look too.
On the way towards Vancouver we did what neither of us had done before - left a restaurant having ordered but without being served, after waiting for too long for not much. There seemed to be some kind of feud going on between the server and the chef, but we didn't stick around to find out what it was!
We then stayed in a glorious little B&B in Vernon in the Okanagan for a few days, remembering what it was like to live in a civilised manner, before we hit the big city of Vancouver itself. I did some of the most intense driving I've done trying to get there on time to meet our next Airbnb host - a lot of high-speed miles in some fairly busy traffic, and then trying to fight our way through rush-hour congestion in the city centre.
We were pretty late, but our host had waited for us - he was a nice guy, though his apartment was a bit shabby. The location was amazing - a really lovely bit of Vancouver, right on the edge of huge, beautiful Stanley Park and with the sea just minutes away - but the apartment was altogether a bit 'student', the crowning disappointment being the bed, which was just a mattress on the floor with ill-fitting linen! After a lot of really nice motel beds, this wasn't a good thing... but we made the most of it, got some groceries and had home cooking again, and did a little light exploration of the area. Vancouver's well known as a great place to live - we can see why.
After a couple or three days there we got the car ferry back to Vancouver Island. This crossing was lovely and sunny, the island looked beautiful and we found a great little pizza place in a charming little seaside town called Sidney, where jazzmen entertained us with live music in the streets as we ate. It was all very nice indeed. As we sat, I idly checked my phone and realised we were supposed to return the car in half an hour. My second logistical error of the trip - I'd thought we had an extra day.
Fortunately Victoria wasn't far, and Enterprise were totally OK with us requesting an extra day - in fact we'd had until the next morning anyway. So we drove on to our hotel, had a lovely meal, and went to bed - only to find there was noise like a loud TV coming from somewhere... yet it wasn't next door, or upstairs, and there were no rooms downstairs... only there was a nightclub, running a comedy night! Genius bit of planning there, having a noisy late-night business under the rooms where people are paying to sleep...
The next day we drove out to a coastal park to go for a walk, and a talk... which continued as we went back to Sidney for lunch again, and walked along the pier, talking some more. There'll be another blog post just after this one to explain what we talked about, and decided...
Soon we were packing up to leave Canada, dropping the car off and heading back to the ferry terminal in Victoria. The sailing back to Seattle was not at all as pleasant as the outbound trip - it was full, noisy and seemed to take much longer - though that could have been down to our seating partners who kept up an inane chatter the whole journey (have you gathered by now that we like people to be quiet around us?). We arrived in Seattle under the full (super) moon, and that was that for Canada. Kate had been several times before, but it was my first time - we both really like it, though we both felt we were too worn down from travelling so much to really appreciate it. And that's what the next blog post is about...
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