Coasting

This blog has been online off and on (mostly off lately) for eight years now, and it's admittedly running out of steam. So, for that matter, is blogging in general.

The phenomenon has been largely shoved aside by social media such as Facebook and Twitter, where people can post their opinions and relay those of others far more easily and succinctly than in blog format. I've been doing the same (on Facebook) rather than sitting and laboriously composing what I hope are shapely mini-essays.

All the same, now and then the urge to write something more substantial, useful and readable overcomes me, and so I will keep this blog going in the fits-and-starts form it has reflected in the last year or two.

But it won't be in service of my books, except in an oblique way. It'll be mostly a catchall of things I have to say, or want to say, or think are worth saying.

Don't be surprised if it's heavy on travel subjects. Of late that has occupied much of my time—not actual traveling, but planning.

In December the Lady Friend and I are riding Amtrak's Capitol Limited between Chicago and Washington, D.C., where we'll spend Christmas with our elder son and his crew.

In January we're taking the railroad's Southwest Chief to Los Angeles, thence a coastal train to San Diego, where we'll embark on Holland-America's Statendam for a cruise through the Panama Canal to Fort Lauderdale.

Late in the summer we plan to board Amtrak's flagship Empire Builder for a trip to Seattle, thence head up the coast by bus to Bellingham and the Alaska Ferry to Ketchikan, Alaska. From Ketchikan we'll take a southbound ferry to Prince Rupert, B.C. After a day or two there, we'll take the VIA Rail train once called the Skeena inland to Prince George, B.C., and Jasper, Alta. After a car trip to Banff and Lake Louise, we'll return to Jasper and ride VIA's storied Canadian to Vancouver. Finally, we'll ride an Amtrak Cascades train from Vancouver to Seattle and the Empire Builder home.

Expect detailed reports of the trips, as well as photographs of them.

Notice a sameness about these plans? None involve flying, except for the relatively short hop from Fort Lauderdale to Chicago. I've got a bad back and can't sit in an airline seat for more than two, maybe three, hours without deplaning in agony. Therefore in recent years I've limited my travel to surface journeys that allow me to get up frequently and move about in ways one can't in an airliner aisle.

Yes, this cramps one's traveling style. We haven't been to Europe in many years.

But there's a solution: to take ship aboard Cunard's Queen Mary II, which plies the North Atlantic between New York and Southampton regularly.

Expensive? Not as much as you'd think, only a little more than flying. If you take the last winter crossing in January, for instance, you could book an interior stateroom for as little as $799 per person—a steal for seven days at sea.

Of course winter weather in the North Atlantic might be no bargain.

Maybe sometime in the spring of 2015 . . .

Tour surprise

We are back from our Caravan bus tour of three of Canada's Maritime provinces, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

We'd been independent travelers all our lives, but at our advanced ages (I'm 72, she's ageless) it just seemed easier for us to let someone else do the planning and driving. All-inclusive guided package tours save money not only on motor fuel but also meals, lodging and attraction fees. Of course, this means one has to travel with a lot of other people, and if one is not particularly sociable . . .

We chose Caravan for its excellent reputation as a budget tour packager (its ads say the costs are "from $995" but those are for extreme off-season dates). The reports on TripAdvisor are particularly enthusiastic.

I'm not going to get into a detailed travelogue here, but can tell you that riding with a group of 47 tourists on one bus (in the previous blogpost I had stupidly envisioned half that number) can be remarkably rewarding.

We were almost all retirees. A few were in cliquish peer groups from flyover blue states, but some were globetrotting Australians and many were professionals and academics. Two were retired Foreign Service diplomats. Two were National Park Service rangers who had spent the first fifteen years of their retirement living out of a motorhome. One octogenarian couple (he a retired biology professor and former Peace Corpsman with a wide knowledge of birds) shamed us all with their energy and eagerness. These were interesting and congenial people.

Even the inevitable chatterbox of the group had engrossing things to say, and they were never about herself.

Every one of these people had the courtesy to be right on time for everything. We had to wait for no stragglers. There was no pushing or shoving to get on or off the bus, and everyone was fine with the technique of sitting in alternate seats and debarking in alternate rows the efficient tour director imposed upon us. Many of our fellow travelers were on their second or third Caravan tour, and every one of them who had taken the Costa Rica and Guatemala trips recommended them highly.

The downside: Riding on the bus for hours every day. The seat pitch on a 48-passenger tour bus is as short as that in a cattle-car 737. But the cushions are sufficently comfortable, and one can while away the hours with a Kindle. There are plenty of pit stops, a necessity for short-ranged elderly men.

One more thing: Every one of the hotels was among the best upscale lodgings their communities could offer. The meals (not all of them included in the price) were first-rate.

Would we do it again? Absolutely.

Tripadvisor reports

Earlier this week Tripadvisor, the Internet travel forum, published a report on "Ten Dirtiest Hotels -- United States 2011." Each hotel's low rating was a compendium of individual reports by disgusted travelers, and I have no doubt that in general each hotel deserved its dismal standing.

Still, I've spent some time looking over the individual Tripadvisor reports on hotels in places I plan to visit, and have come to the conclusion that these reports are extremely subjective and personal. People do bring different demands and expectations to a hotel stay.

One traveler gave a hotel 1 out of 5 stars just because he found mouseturds next to the bathtub. Think about it. The place otherwise might have been lovely, and cleaned carefully, by a maid five minutes before an itinerant mouse passed through the room and hung up his hat for a couple of minutes.

(My aging eyes probably never would have spotted the calling cards.)

I've heard people complain about the cleanliness of hotels because the toilet seat wasn't wrapped and the toilet paper foldy-pointed, small touches that they were used to in the hostelries that they most often frequented.

Some people judge hotels and motels by the quality of their free breakfasts, never mind the other amenities.

Some people think a hotel without a swimming pool isn't worth a stay. Likewise a fitness center.

Probably the best way to approach Tripadvisor hotel reports is to compare each individual report about a hotel with the others. If enough people complain about the same things, that probably gives an accurate picture of the state of a hotel. But if the subjects of the complaints are wildly different, then maybe they should be taken with a grain of salt.

Maybe each of us should think about our own needs and expectations and bring those to a reading of Tripadvisor reports.

My needs are simple: a clean room, a clean bed, a decent desk and chair, a sufficiently bright lamp, a reasonably healthful breakfast. Most Super 8s do me fine.

But the Lady Friend prefers higher standards when we are on vacation, so when we travel together I look for more upscale hostelries.

But if I have to pay for Internet access, I automatically knock one star off the hotel rating. Charging for the Internet is cheesy beyond belief and I cannot understand why so many five star hotels do that. One New Orleans hotel charged me twice for a day's Internet access, once for my laptop and once for my iPod Touch. I protested and the hotel yielded one of its goddam 12 bucks-per-day charges.

If the upscale hostelry delivers only McPaper to the room in the morning, it loses a star. If it also delivers the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Washington Post or even the local daily, it gains a star.

What are your expectations and wishes of a hotel/motel? Bet they're considerably different from mine.

Remembering the men in gray and butternut

The Stars and Stripes, not Stars and Bars, flies at Confederate Memorial Hall.

One of New Orleans' lesser-known treasures (to visitors from the North, at any rate) is the little Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall on 929 Camp Street in the Warehouse District a block south of the St. Charles streetcar line.

It sits in the shadow of the huge National World War II Museum down the block. The Lady Friend and I having just one full day in New Orleans on this visit, we decided to skip the big place -- it reportedly takes a full day to explore -- and try the Civil War Museum instead.

The sign outside says "Civil War Museum," but inside it's really the Confederate Museum it has been since 1891. The place was renamed after Katrina shattered tourism to New Orleans in 2005, in the hope that visitors from the North would be less apt to turn away from symbols of the South's slave history. "You're not offended?" the lady at the door asked when we inquired about the name change.

No, we weren't, for we're not unreconstructed rebels with disdain for political correctness. Besides, the little brick building turned out to be a somber, even melancholy repository of human memories, not a vainglorious display of defiance. Whatever one might say about their cause, these soldiers, the museum seems to say, fought and died for what they believed in, and even if they lost the war, their courage should not go unnoticed. There's nothing celebratory about this museum, as there too often is in national shrines to victory.

Though it's the second largest Southern war museum in the country (the biggest is the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond), It's fairly small as such institutions go, with one large room and a corridor full of display cases of artifacts from 1861-1865. Some five thousand objects are on display, with 95,000 others stored for research at Tulane University.

Among the items on view: The personal belongings of Confederate President Jefferson Davis; the uniforms, sword and saddle of Gen. Braxton Bragg; the uniform of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard; various swords, cannons and arms, and personal relics such as musette bags and letters home. There are bloodstained regimental battle flags, notably one carried at First Manassas (Bull Run) in 1861. The letters and documents humanize the people who wrote and carried them.

One particular item of interest is a tattered blue Confederate infantryman's uniform worn at First Manassas. Because there was confusion over who was whom in the heat of battle, the Confederates switched to gray-and-butternut uniforms for the rest of the war.

The museum takes only an hour to visit thoroughly, and you'll come away with respect for the human beings -- fellow Americans -- who mostly by accident of birthplace fought and died on the wrong side of history.

This is the last blogpost about our visit last week to New Orleans, but we'll continue to post photos of the trip on the other blog.

Interior of the museum. Despite the No Photography sign, long shots are OK.

Cheap eats in the Big Easy

The unprepossessing Camellia Grill in the French Quarter.

Interior of the Camellia Grill: Standard American Diner decor.

A Camellia grillman works on an enormous omelet.

Before taking a train trip anywhere, I consult the habitues of TrainWeb's Amtrak forum, an invaluable repository of information about hotels and restaurants as well as rail travel. This time I wanted to know where to eat in New Orleans that wasn't either touristy or budget-busting, and the collective wisdom came through again.

Go where the locals go, they said, not the pricey establishments of the famous TV chefs, and they came up with a number of suggestions.

On our first evening in New Orleans, the Lady Friend and I dined at a highly recommended Cajun bistro called Cafe Maspero at 601 Decatur Street, cattycorner from the old Jax Brewery, on the edge of the French Quarter.

We weren't disappointed by either the prices (low) or the portions (huge). Or by the house merlot, remarkably good for $4.50 a glass. I passed up the much-praised muffaletta and jambalaya for a dish I've always loved, redbeans and andouille sausage over rice with a side of French bread. First-rate, and so large I couldn't clean the plate. (In the interest of full disclosure: the Lady Friend said hers was OK, only OK.)

The next morning we did the touristy thing and, after a few minutes photographing the sights at Jackson Square, broke our fast at Cafe du Monde, the historic coffeehouse in the French Market on the waterfront. As always, the beignets and cafe au lait were delicate and warming. The weather being unusually cold for New Orleans, just above freezing, the cafe's famous outdoor tables were closed, but there was room inside, where French Quarter workers grabbed take-outs for the office.

After two hours of camera work in the Quarter, we stopped at another highly recommended restaurant, the Camellia Grill on the corner of Toulouse and Chartres. (There's another on St. Charles Street near Tulane University, and branches in Baton Rouge and Destin, Florida.) Now this is where you find the locals on a workday morning.

This Camellia is an unprepossessing place in classic American Diner Style, with two large U-shaped counters flanked by fixed stools. On one side lie two grills and half a dozen workers.

On the Trainweb forum I was warned that the Camellia Grill omelets were hubcap-sized, way too big to finish. So the Lady Friend and I shared a ham-and-cheeser that was cut and served on separate plates, with separate piles of hash browns -- and still was way too big to finish.

I considered the omelet excellent, and the Lady Friend thought hers nonpareil. But the real attraction of the place turned out to be the chattering camaraderie among countermen, grillmen and customers. Amusing conversation ebbs and flows and surges all day, and the staff seemed as friendly to the two lone tourists as they were to the locals, telling stories of deep freezes of past years in the Big Easy.

And the prices are standard for diner fare -- inexpensive, but not dirt cheap.

After haring with our cameras all over frozen New Orleans all day, we returned to our hotel tired and cold, and both my back and knees were bothering me from the unaccustomed activity. At dinnertime we looked at each other and decided not to hobble out in the frigid wind again, but to remain snug and warm at the Omni Royal Orleans and dine in its Rib Room, no matter what it cost.

The Rib Room is definitely pricey -- two entrees, two glasses of wine and a shared chocolate mousse set us back more than a C-note, with tip. But this is New Orleans, and even the hotel dining rooms -- so often disappointing elsewhere -- live up to the city's high standards. The Lady Friend still swoons over her blackened salmon over stone-ground grits, drizzled with tabasco butter sauce. I was not in the least bit disappointed by my grilled black drum, fresh from the Gulf.

On this trip, life was finger-lickin' good, if you'll excuse the expression.

Inside the Cafe du Monde on an unseasonably cold January morning.

Holiday album, continued

The "front yard" of Chena Village, a replica Athabascan fishing settlement on the Chena River outside Fairbanks. Salmon are captured in the weir, cleaned and dried on racks, then smoked for winter use. The Lady Friend (a k a Deborah Abbott) took the photo; click on it for more detail.

On our first day in Alaska, I was not looking forward to the sights in Fairbanks especially concocted for Holland-America cruise passengers. They are not exactly authentic; "reconstructions" and "replicas" are kind words for most of what we saw. A cynic might use "Disneyfied."

But the pretend steamboat ride (powered by a diesel engine, of course) for a short way on the Chena River had a couple of redeeming features. One of them was the stop at Chena Village, a slick and probably quite accurate museum reconstruction of an Athabascan fishing village from, say, 300 years ago.

Its chief attraction was the trio of charming Athabascan (as the interior Alaskan Native Americans are called) college students whose summer jobs were as docents for the museum town. The Lady Friend and I have rarely encountered young people as articulate, enthusiastic and knowledgeable as these three. They kept 250 or so restless cruise passengers rapt as they described Athabascan culture, in which they took considerable pride. Life in the Alaskan bush, especially in the winter, was arduous, and the Athabascans long have been masters at dealing with it -- trapping and trading furs, subsisting on salmon, traveling by dog sled.

Here is a selection of photos from the event (the Lady Friend took some of them):


Two of three young Athabascan docents at Chena Village display their people's winter dress. Modern Athabascans use zippers, of course. More efficient than whalebone buttons.


She's simply irresistible, isn't she?


This young woman grew up in her family's fish camp before going to college, and expertly demonstrated salmon filleting.


Latter-day Athabascan cabins feature glass windows and sod roofs. (Deborah Abbott photo)


Athabascans adapted to snowmobiles long ago. This machine probably dates from the 1930s. (Deborah Abbott photo)


In the wild they're caribou; when domesticated they're called reindeer. Chena Village had a quartet of them on display.

Holiday album

The Lady Friend took this shot of the Alaska Range in Denali National Park at Polychrome Pass, about 20 miles from the mountains across the Plains of Murie. Click on the photo for a large and detailed version.

And now for the best photos of our Alaska trip. If you, like me, cannot stand looking at other people's vacation snapshots, you may now mouse elsewhere. (The most striking pictures will be on the Other Blog.)

One of the best days of the journey brought a "Tundra Wilderness Tour" in a bucketing school bus for 60 miles and eight hours through Denali National Park.

These guided bus tours, uncomfortable as they may be, are just about the only way you can travel deep into the six million acres of the park, unless you are hale of health or young of years and can hike and hike and hike. Private vehicles are not allowed into the park much past the entry so that wildlife will not be disturbed, and though they will stop so tourists can see the animals, bus drivers will let passengers off only at designated viewing points and pee stops.

The tours can be wonderful, but they are a crapshoot. One might run into bad weather, clouds preventing a view of 20,320-foot Mount McKinley (only 30 per cent of tourists to Alaska ever see it), or the wildlife might choose to lie low and out of sight. At least Holland-America Cruises doesn't make one pay extra for the bus ride.

All tours for three days preceding ours were skunked, but our group was lucky. Not only did the clouds part, allowing us to spot McKinley, we also saw moose, caribou, grizzlies, golden eagles, Dall sheep and ptarmigan, and I managed to capture some of them with a long lens through lowered bus windows. Here they are:


Grizzly sow and cub, perhaps two years old. Grizzly young stay with their mothers for three years, our guide said, before being kicked out of the house to make their own livings.


This solitary grizzly is probably a male.


Moose graze unconcernedly by the road as vehicles pass in clouds of dust.


Alaska's state bird is not Sarah Palin, but the willow ptarmigan. Note the feathered "leggings."


Gulls are everywhere, even in deepest Alaska, and this herring gull perched atop a rest stop building hoping for a handout.


Low clouds parted to reveal the lordly south (and higher) peak of Mount McKinley.

Towelgami

Observations of a formerly virgin cruise-line passenger:

“What the hell is that?” I said to my dinner companion as we sneaked into my stateroom late in the evening. On the bed sat a frog made out of a towel. I had never heard of towel sculpture, also called towelgami, but it seems that it's been a big thing in the cruise industry for many years. As part of the evening bed turndown, stateroom attendants all over the ship fold washcloths and hand towels into all sorts of amusing critters. We had a turkey, a lobster, an elephant, a rabbit and I can't remember what else.

Maybe the purpose is to demonstrate the exalted level of service to which the cruise line is devoted, or maybe it's just an elaborate Filipino joke.

I can't speak for other cruise lines, but the thin and fit Holland-America passenger seems to prefer the formal dining rooms to the cafeteria-style eatery, called the “Lido” aboard HAL ships. The dining rooms (at no added cost) feature white napery, attentive service and sensibly sized portions of excellent cuisine, while the Lido offers ass-to-elbow jostling and unlimited self-shoveling of much less tasty fare for the wide of body and prone to coronary.

The dining rooms offer open seating, but the au courant passenger makes reservations to minimize waiting for a table. With reservations I was always seated immediately, either alone or with others according to my preference.

The waiters will always suggest a bottle of wine, but those who prefer single glasses are politely accommodated. The prices are reasonable, too – my party had Alice White chardonnay and shiraz from Australia, a good deal better than bargain plonk, for $6 a glass plus a 15 per cent service charge. Everything else in Alaska and aboard cruise ships is expensive, but not wine.

My table companion, a champion long-distance eavesdropper, overheard quite a few fellow diners complain that “Holland America isn't what it once was.” Whether they were talking about HAL in general or the Statendam in particular I don't know, but this ship is 17 years old, quite mature for a cruise liner, and perhaps small mechanical glitches occur with more frequency. For three days my room was way too cold, and a nice lady from the hotel staff took its temperature with a fever thermometer several times a day until a technician arrived, screwed and unscrewed several hatches, and put things right. By way of polite apology the staff sent a platter of chocolates, which I didn't need but appreciated anyway.

Computers being what they are, mistakes get made and tickets go missing, but upon being shown a printed itinerary brought from home, the shore excursion agent quickly reissued the ducats. At least for me, HAL always fixed its errors.

I for one am not terribly sociable, so the shipboard events and classes held no attraction. But those who need to be entertained all the time will find plenty to accommodate them: travel classes, ranger lectures, culinary instruction (even for children), computers with “Techspert Hana,” tai chi, fitness classes, shopping previews, tennis, volleyball, bridge, trivia games, AA meetings, movies, musical shows, dancing – and, yes, towel sculpture.

At sea the Internet is hugely expensive – 50 to 75 cents a minute, depending on the plan you buy. Part of the problem is that the marine satellite Internet is so slow, and the meter ticks while you impatiently wait for pages to load. I learned quickly to read only important-seeming e-mail and compose my answers offline, pasting them online. Several times the ship lost the satellite signal in mid-post, wasting expensive minutes. But reading the New York Times web site is free.

Speaking of the Times, each day an eight-page digest of that newspaper is printed and distributed at breakfast in the restaurants and to the rooms. You may not know what day of the week it is (although the elevator floor mats will always tell you) but you will not be unaware of what is happening in the rest of the world. On a cruise to get away from it all that is not necessarily a good thing.

The cruise lines, it seems, make their money not in the stateroom sales but in the ancillaries. We wondered why the Statendam's shopping "director" kept pushing the jewelry stores onshore (“Diamond necklaces by the yard!”) – what's so special about Alaska gems? Not until we were in a Native American museum at Ketchikan did we find out: "The cruise lines own the jewelry stores,” said a guide. Oh.

Would I do it again? Sure, but in a different way. If I were returning to Alaska, I'd skip the cruise liners and go from town to town by state Alaska ferry, making my own independent bookings. No regrets, though, about taking this inaugural cruise tour; for my first visit to Alaska, it was better to use the expert hands of Holland America to book the entire trip. It clearly knows what it's doing.

Those with suspicious minds might wonder what I was doing with a dinner companion in the stateroom. None of your business.

But she indeed is the familiar Lady Friend with whom I live; it just seemed wise not to let the world know our house was empty while we took a cruise. Even the most trigger-fingered burglar alarms can't prevent everything.

Eagle . . . finally!

Those who frequent this blog know of my repeated efforts to get a good shot of a bald eagle in Upper Michigan. Finally I nailed one, but in Alaska. Not that that was such an accomplishment -- this state is hip-deep in eagles, both the bald and the golden variety. This one was taken near Juneau on a guided photo safari. All by itself this picture makes the expensive trip worth the effort, so far as I am concerned.

Rails, whales and eagles

JUNEAU, Alaska – Up here at the roof of North America it rains. And rains. And rains some more. One can almost feel one's joints corroding.

But the infamous summer weather of the Alaskan coast can be dealt with simply by donning raincoats, over one's camera as well as one's torso, and forging on into the wet. The sights are just as spectacular in fog as they are in sunlight.

Aboard Holland-America Lines's Statendam on the way south the last couple of days from Seward through College Fjord and Glacier Bay, we saw glaciers from up so close we could almost reach out and touch them. (A watched glacier never calves, don't you know?) At the dinner hour emerging from Glacier Bay the ship passed close aboard a school of whales playfully lifting and slapping their tails.

The next day in Haines a high-speed catamaran ferried some of us from the ship's mooring 40 minutes to Skagway, the world's capital of tourist schlock, a place so shameless that it's amusing. The town's most popular bar features pretend hookers with real bosoms bursting out of camisoles. Cheap gift shops (Polar Fleece! $9.99! T-shirts! $1.99!) choke the main drag.

Even the storied White Pass & Yukon narrow-gauge railroad resorts to artifice – most of its scores of little open-platform coaches are steel replicas, not restored wooden carriages. But its distinctive diesel locomotives are the real thing, and so is the twisting 67-mile-long line up the Skagway River to Carcross, Yukon Territory, over gorges and high trestles and past willowy waterfalls hanging from the clouds.

For the rail buff with a camera, riding on the open platform of the last car of the 15-car train (evidently a Holland-America perk) is heavenly. Only the locomotive cab could afford a better view.

My group detrained at Fraser, B.C., Mile 27.7) after a Canadian customs agent cursorily glanced at our passports. (“Do not photograph the agents. Your camera will be confiscated.”) Others returned to Skagway on the train, but we chose to make the trip back to the ferry dock on a bus. (A U.S. Customs agent made a similar cursory passport check at the border.)

The WP&Y, like much else in Alaska, is devoted to the tourist trade. A few freight cars molder in the yards, but they're not used to haul cargo into the hinterlands. Rather, the road hauls passengers, and it's fun to watch the trains come in, some of them heading directly for sidings across from cruise ships. Incoming locomotives are uncoupled from one end of their trains, then are run around and coupled to the other end for the journey into the mountains. It's a quick, slick operation that made up for the kitsch of the town and the four glitzy floating Las Vegas cruise palaces in Skagway harbor.

There are no railroads in Juneau, today's destination, but this town is as elegant as Skagway is skaggy. The weather at this time of year is just as wet but the visit just as charming. I took a “photo safari” to Mendenhall Glacier, one of Alaska's most impressive ice fields, and a boat across the bay to watch bus-sized humpback whales broach and crash in clouds of spray. On the way back we did a close-in drive-by shooting of several bald eagles perched on a rocky outcrop.

The day wound up with a tram ride 1,800 feet up Mount Roberts overlooking Juneau Harbor and a visit to a raptor rescue center there, where I snared a frame-filling head shot of a one-eyed eagle.

Tonight, on to Ketchikan, the ship's last port before entering the Inside Passage.

Shipboard life

AT SEA IN THE GULF OF ALASKA – Cruising is a singular experience for a traveler whose preferred mode of conveyance is flanged wheel on steel rail. When the Statendam, one of the Holland-America Line vessels, is at sea, there is a whole lot of nothing for the rail buff to do. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Lectures, origami demonstrations, yoga classes, cooking instruction, shopping-till-you-drop, extreme dining and other such crowd-pleasing shipboard activities have no appeal for the longtime introvert. Rather, I've found it much more congenial to sit in the Statendam's library and watch fellow passengers, speculating on their personalities and stations in life – just as I do in the lounge car of the California Zephyr or Empire Builder.

That must be Marv and Madge from Oklahoma, farmers who have pinched pennies for decades to take this two-week trip of a lifetime. Or Bertil and Hannelore, well-to-do Swedes checking items off their international bucket list. Mr. and Mrs. Teabagger, corpulent Arizonans who smoke endlessly, bitch endlessly about Mexicans, and support the ship's economy with endless hours in the casino.

There also are Evie and Edna, elderly sisters from Cincinnati, taking a rare vacation from their husbands and letting an unanticipated world blossom before them. Bill, a leathery Wyoming rancher, is inseparable from his Stetson, even at meals, but cleans up well in suit and tie for formal dinner nights. He may even have gone to college.

The glowering fellow who never seems to change out of his warm-up suit might be a stowaway, a killer on the lam hoping to drop out of sight ashore if he can get past the watchful eyes of security.

There is one splendid similarity between ship and train: Watching the people who ride them is good for the creative juices of the mystery novelist.

And oh yes, there's a lot else to see. Yesterday we cruised College Fjord, taking in the spectacular views of ice-strewn waters and distant glaciers, and today we will enter Glacier Bay National Park, hoping to see noisy calving of icebergs as well as marine life such as whales, orcas and seals.

I do have one bit of useful information to offer you today: If you take a cruise tour, aboard Holland-America or any other line, be sure to bring along printed documentation of everything you've paid for.

Several times there have been minor glitches in the proceedings, usually involving computers. I wasn't on the manifest for the Cruise Train from Anchorage to Seward, but a printout of my official schedule persuaded the conductor to let me aboard. The cruise line upgraded my stateroom from an obstructed to a full ocean view, but my shore excursion tickets went to the original room, not the new one, and disappeared. The excursion guy checked my bona fides and issued new tickets.

Tomorrow will bring a train ride – aboard the storied narrow-gauge White Pass & Yukon from Skagway into British Columbia. With, of course, new opportunities for people-watching.

One more thing: I won't upload any photos until returning home next week. Using the Internet at sea is slow and expensive, and pictures just take up too much bandwidth.

Cruising on the train

SEWARD, Alaska – “Black bears at three o'clock!” the engineer called, and a hundred heads swiveled as the Alaska Railroad's Cruise Train ground its way along a rocky outcrop deep in the Chugash National Forest.

This 114-mile journey from Ted Stevens Airport outside Anchorage to the quay at Seward where cruise ships dock seemingly is one of the better-kept tourist secrets of the Far North. The Holland-America factotum running our land tour from Fairbanks said his charges almost never took the twisting 4 1/2-hour trip, preferring to save money by taking a bus from downtown Anchorage to their ship in two hours. Too bad for them.

They could have spotted bear, moose and eagles from the train, which follows the coast eastward along the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet, then southward deep through the wild interior bush below glacier-strewn coastal peaks to the Bay of Alaska. The mountains loom close over the twisting line, affording sights you can't see from the highway.

Except for its start at the brand-new Alaska Railroad terminal at the airport, the Cruise Train follows the route of the Coastal Classic (which begins at the downtown depot in Anchorage). Each day it carries a different load of passengers for whichever liner – Holland-America, Princess, Celebrity and so on – has docked at the lone cruise liner quay at Seward. You get off the plane, hop on the train, and debark right at your ship. That couldn't be more convenient.

Two of the five cars are full-dome cafe lounges with tables for passengers willing to pay a little extra. An attendant serves a decent light lunch and drinks all along the route. There's a locomotive at either end of the train so that it doesn't have to be turned at each terminal – and I'm not sure it can be anyway.

The ride is a slow one, with a lot of 30-m.p.h. running – the best kind for sightseeing. What's more, the vestibule windows are kept open for. photography, something you'll never see aboard super-safety-conscious Amtrak in the Lower 48. (The engineers of the Cruise Train will yell at you if they catch you with your head or camera out the window. They had to do that dozens of times throughout the trip. Of course I was not one of the guilty, was I now?)

I do think the smart cruise passenger will opt for the Cruise Train, which costs a first-class supplement of $48 per person over the bus. It's one of the least costly items on the Alaskan shore-excursion menu, and in my opinion one of the best.

Aboard the Denali Star

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Now let us compare Amtrak and the Alaska Railroad.

Both are government entities that own and operate passenger trains. There the resemblance ends.

Much-maligned Amtrak tries to serve everybody, from commuters to vacationers, folks afraid to fly and those too obese to fit in an airline seat. Except in the Northeast Corridor, it is at the mercy of the freight railroads that own the tracks. Its on-board crews can be surly and lazy (although that seems to be changing).

But the Alaska Railroad's much-praised passenger operations are of the tourist, by the tourist and for the tourist – especially cruise ship passengers. Local trains do carry ordinary Alaskans to flag stops in and out of the otherwise inaccessible bush, but that is a tiny part of the ARR's business. Its cheerful conductors and attendants are mostly well trained in serving the public.

Most travelers on the Alaska Railroad ride 456 miles in 12 hours between Anchorage on the coast and Fairbanks in the interior, more than half of them stopping at Denali National Park on the way.

And they ride in style. Sure, the budget-minded can rough it in coach aboard the train called the Denali Star, but most tourists choose to go first class, either in dome cars painted in Alaska Railroad colors or in huge, gaily decorated luxury conveyances owned by cruise lines and towed behind the regular train.

I rode the cars Holland America calls the McKinley Explorer from Fairbanks to the national park, then two days later from the park to Anchorage. Oh, it was lovely, passenger railroading as it should be but too often is not.

These two-story cars – reputedly the largest rail passenger carriages in the world – feature a full-length Lexan dome unmatched for rubbernecking, with extraordinarily comfortable seats. The lower level is devoted to dining. Best of all, each car features an open vestibule platform for wind-in-the-face photography. (Leave your hat inside. The breeze carried away my favorite ball cap.)

Lunch and dinner were only OK, a cut above Amtrak cuisine but somewhat short of four-star. The young waitstaff, evidently college students in summer jobs, needed a bit more seasoning, as did the soup. (The berry pie a la mode was fresh and fine.)

The car crews could also use training in dealing with the aged and infirm; they allowed a shaky nonagenarian to descend the potentially treacherous spiral stairway from upper level to lower unescorted. One of the crew should have gone ahead to catch her if she fell.

It was the scenery that was the real attraction. We dashed down river plains, rode over high trestles spanning deep valleys and chugged slowly through high, weaving rock cuts. We spooked moose, caribou and trumpeter swans. We arrived in Anchorage well satisfied with our journey.

Tomorrow, another rail ride: a four-hour journey aboard the Cruise Train from Ted Stevens Airport to Seward and the Holland-America liner Statendam.

Genuine Denali

DENALI NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA -- This place is real, as real as Fairbanks was an exercise in cheerful tourist deception.

An all-day "tundra tour" aboard a dusty school bus bouncing through the approaches to the Alaska Range in the 6.2-million-acre Denali National Park brings travelers remarkably up close and personal with the Alaskan wilderness, even though we're not allowed to get out of the bus except for pee stops.

These eight-hour journeys, part of Holland-America's Alaska cruise tours, are hit or miss.

Some of them result in no sightings of animals at all. Some of them slog through a steady rain and fog that obscure sight lines. It's catch as catch can in this part of the world; everything depends on fate and chance and the vagaries of weather.

As luck would have it, "I've hit a home run!" crowed Jason Blaylock, our driver, as we returned to the McKinley Chalet Resort, Holland-America's choice hostelry just outside the park on the highway between Anchorage and Fairbanks. His passengers were just as delighted.

We'd seen a moose a few feet away from the bus, dozens of grizzlies munching in the tundra a safe hundred or more yards in the distance, as well as caribou, golden eagles, Dall sheep, ptarmigans, snowshoe hares, a red fox and ground squirrels -- an outdoor smorgasbord of wildlife.

And, glory of glories, the clouds briefly lifted so that we could behold 20,300-foot Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America, through its attendant peaks in the distance. Only about 30 per cent of visitors to Denali ever see McKinley, so capricious is the weather.

Photographing wildlife from the bus is not easy. The windows get too dusty for sharp shots, and although they can be lowered, shooting through them requires some contortion, not easy for geezers. All the same, I managed to get some fairly good photos of grizzlies, and will post them on this blog in the next few days.

A word on the McKinley Chalet Resort: It's a big place, with dozens of large cabins scattered throughout the property. One gets about either on foot or by using free jitney buses. The amenities are as lovely as they are rustic. I just wish the cabins had wi-fi; only the main lodge has it in the lobby. But it's free, not an expensive add-on as in so many American hotels.

As is true all over Alaska, meals are not cheap, for most provender has to be shipped in from the Lower 48. We budgeted $100 a day to eat in the hotel and in the cafes across the highway, and that's tight.

But that's part of the glorious reality of Alaska.

In the next blogpost, we'll do some railroading.

Mickey Mouse in Fairbanks

FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- The first day of my Alaskan tour was a surprise. I hardly expected to enjoy it, but I did.

Holland-America, the operator of the tour, is famous in the travel industry for its slick and stagey day of exhibitions in Fairbanks. In the space of eight hours it ushers hundreds of tourists through a riverboat ride, a fake Indian village, a reconstructed coal dredging camp and a gold panning "experience."

Such Disneyfication would draw a sneer from sophisticated travelers looking for depth and authenticity, but Mr. and Mrs. Middle America (and Herr und Frau Mitteleuropeen, for that matter) just ate it up. So did I, for the most part.

That was largely because the players on the stages were so good at their jobs -- giving mass tourists a broad taste of colorful Alaskan history at a level easy to understand.

For instance, immediately after the "steamboat" set out along the Chena River outside Fairbanks, a bush pilot in a Super Cub took off and landed alongside in the river twice, gladdening the heart of this former private pilot who'd never before seen floatplane operations.

There was a brief stop in the river off the sled dog training camp established by the late Iditarod champion Susan Butcher, with a noisy and crowd-pleasing demonstration of a team mushing a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle around the place. The dogs had a good full-throated time of it, too, leaping about and barking happily.

We debarked to visit an Athabascan Indian "village" that turned out to be unexpectedly absorbing. Three Athabascan youths whose summer jobs are to lecture on and demonstrate their forebears' culture were remarkably poised and articulate for college students so young. One of them had grown up in a fish camp and expertly demonstrated how to fillet and smoke a salmon caught in a weir in the river.

Lunch at a coal dredging camp -- a real one, judging by the rust and ruin -- was mess-hall style, hundreds of tourists sitting hip to elbow on benches at long wooden tables. The miner's stew and cornbread was just OK, but it was a good way to feed a lot of people in a reasonable time.

Only the visit to a gold mining camp seemed excessively hokey. The tourist "train," drawn by what the engineer claimed was a steam locomotive but which emitted neither cinders nor smoke, was as lame an attempt at pretend railroading as I've ever encountered. So was the dormitory-style gold panning under an enormous roof. One never saw the Forty-Niners do that.

And why does the exit from every attraction have to pass through a gift shop?

On the whole, however, the day, ersatz as it may have been, was a satisfying experience for those at whom it was aimed.

The next day brought a real ride on a real luxury train to a real national park. About this, more later.

Eight Hours to Fairbanks

FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- So I arrived in Fairbanks after 8 hours of flying from Chicago. As I get older I lose another half inch of sitzfleisch a year, and by the time the 737 landed in Fairbanks the well-worn seat cushion felt as if it were composed of coarse gravel.

But the flights on Alaska Airlines were good -- the cabin crews were actually friendly and efficient, and my reservation was marked as "Handicapped" so I could point at my ear, mouth "Deaf" and board with the babies, scoring scarce overhead bin space early. (United and American, however, caught on to the scam long ago and it doesn't work with them anymore.)

Fairbanks, as Alaska metropolises go, is a bit of a northern dump. It looks like a fast-food strip ten years after the disappearance of humans. The Westmark Hotel matches the ambience -- it's a spartan Motel 6 sort of place. But it is supposed to be one of the top hostelries in town, and it is quite adequate. It has to be; as I write, an Alaska Airlines flight crew is checking out at the front desk.)

The king size mattresses are really very comfortable. The cuisine is all right -- the elkburgers are tasty enough.

What am I doing in Fairbanks? Would you believe I am on a mission to Blomkvist the state's passenger railroads? No? Well, yes, it's a Holland-America tour, and it involves three rides on the Alaska Railroad (Fairbanks-Denali, Denali-Anchorage, Anchorage-Seward, and a round trip on the White Pass & Yukon). And six nights at sea.

Today the agenda is a riverboat, a little train, and panning for gold in what I have heard is a Potemkin village expressly designed for Holland-America tourists.

The real journey doesn't begin until tomorrow when we board the Alaska Railroad for Denali.

More later, if Lisbeth Salander doesn't hack into my netbook. (Yes, I'm reading Stieg Larsson's latest on the iPod Touch.)

Geezer's hike back into deep time

MOAB, Utah – A “moderate difficulty” hike, they call the half-mile round-trip foot trail to Upheaval Dome in Canyonlands National Park, but for me it was like climbing an Alp – in reverse.

I had little trouble scrambling up to the rocky viewpoint overlooking the spectacular geologic oddity three miles wide and 1,200 feet deep that some geologists think is a collapsed salt dome and others a massive meteorite crater in the sandstone cliffs of southeastern Utah.

Coming back, however, severely tested my bad knees and terrible sense of balance, and only a dead slow pace and the help of two stout trekking poles allowed me to get back down without tumbling keister over teakettle on the steep, stony and mud-slicked trail.

This was, by God, an accomplishment, even if I do say so myself.

The trek to Upheaval Dome was the high point of my four-day stay at Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, a rugged twin desert wonderland of tall spires, soaring stone arches, gingerly balanced rocks and deep box canyons. Mini-lessons in elementary geology abound everywhere, carrying the awed visitor into a land where time is measured not in seconds and minutes but epochs and eons.

The place turned out to be a perfect week's vacation for two aging train lovers from Illinois who'd rather take Amtrak to their destination than fly – and its glorious sights were more than negotiable even for a gimpy geezer like me.

In both places paved roads lead to short and level trails designed to take even the lame and halt to vistas overlooking the eroded rock layers carved by the Green and Colorado Rivers thousands of feet down through high mesas that were once sea beds hundreds of million years old.

To reach the parks, the Lady Friend and I rode Amtrak's California Zephyr from Chicago to Grand Junction, Colo., stayed overnight at the Hampton Inn a few walkable blocks from the station, then rented a car for the drive to Moab, headquarters village for the parks.

Moab is 114 miles west of Grand Junction by way of Interstate 70 and U.S. 191, a 1 3/4-hour drive, but we chose to take the breathtaking “back way” from I-70 down Utah 128 along the Colorado River. That took an extra two hours because we stopped numerous times to photograph the striking rock formations rising high above the river.

The narrow road is full of steep hairpin turns, and I wouldn't want to drive it during either the traffic-choked high season (mid-March through October) or in a winter snowstorm. But in early March Route 128 was high, dry and nearly deserted.

(The Amtrak stop at Green River, Utah, is closer to Moab – only 52 miles, less than an hour away – but no car rental agency keeps shop there.)

Moab is a typical kitschy-touristy Western resort town, its main drag chockablock with fast-food joints, adventuring shops and downmarket chain motels, but it also has a number of cozy and reasonably priced bed-and-breakfasts as well as upscale resorts outside town.

We stayed at the Cali Cochitta in town, a charming and comfortable B&B that had come well recommended on TripAdvisor, and were delighted with it. Its proprietors, Kim and David Boger, are friendly folk and David, the chef, does a first-rate eggs Benedict as well as a heavenly quiche.

For lunches and dinners we liked both the Moab Brewery and Rockslide Cafe, both of which feature enormous servings. One entree easily fuels two senior citizens.

I should mention that both parks are also naturals for youthful and athletic backpackers who want to escape civilization in the back country. The particularly adventurous can go river rafting, hang gliding and even ballooning, and the more sedentary can enjoy sedate boat cruises on the Colorado.

I recommend going during the off season (high season runs from April to October) to avoid the crowds that choke traffic on the roadways as well as the scorching desert heat of summer. The first week of March was perfect for us; most of the snow had melted, and the temperatures rose into the low 50s. We practically had the place to ourselves.

Arches and Canyonlands are also an amateur photographer's dream, as you'll see in the selection of pictures to follow on the other blog in the next week or so.


One can use a car to reach almost all the sights in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks that are worth seeing.

Arches and Canyonlands

Delicate Arch in Arches National Park (National Park Service photo).

Last week's PBS-Ken Burns series on the U.S. national parks, interminable as it sometimes seemed, has fired up the Lady Friend and me for another trip to see the nation's natural glories.

By Amtrak, of course. We're both rail buffs, and whenever we need to go somewhere and time isn't pressing, we'll take the train.

The two most obvious candidates for a train trip from Chicago to a national park are Glacier Park in Montana (via the Empire Builder over the old Great Northern's High Line) and the Grand Canyon (aboard the Southwest Chief along the old Santa Fe main to Los Angeles). We've done the former three times, the latter once.

So where to go? How about Rocky Mountain National Park (just north of Granby, Colorado, on the route of the California Zephyr over the old Denver & Rio Grande Western line to Salt Lake City)? That would be doable, but the Rockies, grand as they are, have become overly familiar to us. We need something new and different.

Aha! Just off the beaten path are the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in southeastern Utah, where the naturalist-writer Edward Abbey was once a park ranger and gathered notes for his celebrated Desert Solitaire. We've never seen the world-renowned high desert rock formations of the region, reputed to be heaven for the amateur photographer.

A little research reveals that we could take the California Zephyr (in sleeper, of course) to Denver and through the Rockies to Grand Junction, Colorado, where we'd stay overnight and rent a car for the two-hour road trip southwest along the Colorado River to Moab, Utah. We'd use a bed-and-breakfast in Moab as a base for day trips to the Arches and Canyonlands, driving in, parking, and hiking to the sights.

I'm a short-range hiker (two miles or less) owing to arthritic joints, but both parks feature several easy trails for gimpy geezers like me.

And so I've set to planning the journey, a task that's almost as much fun as actually taking the trip. More later.

Theroux hits the rails again

On August 18, every red-blooded American who has ever thrilled to the song of flanged wheel on steel rail has a grand treat in store:

Paul Theroux' new travel narrative Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (Houghton Mifflin, $28), in which he retraces the 28,000 mile trip from Europe to Siberia that he took for his classic The Great Railway Bazaar of 1978.

I've started reading an advance review copy and (although I swore I'd never review a book again) will be posting a full notice come publication day. Until then I will say no more except to quote the opening paragraph:

"You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude on other people's privacy -- being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler."

Whee!

Traveling light with Jack Reacher

Everywhere in the last few days, newspaper travel writers have bemoaned American Airlines' draconian new $15 charge for the first checked bag, a move most other airlines are likely to adopt. Cram everything into a carry-on, they say. Plan your wardrobe carefully. At your destination wash your skivvies and hang them from the shower curtain rod.

To which I might add: If you're disabled in any way, pipe up so you can board early and score scarce overhead bin space before the mad scrum. And so on.

Or emulate Jack Reacher, that footloose traveler and knight-errant tough guy.

Reacher is, of course, a figment of the imagination of Lee Child, the best-selling whodunit author. Reacher travels the world with only four things in his possession: 1. A passport. 2. An ATM card. 3. A folding toothbrush. 4. The clothes on his back.

He wears those clothes for perhaps three days, then, just before they start to smell, visits a cheap clothing store, perhaps a St. Vincent's resale emporium, perhaps a janitor's uniform store, and buys everything new -- shirt, slacks, socks, underwear. Then he ditches his old ensemble in the nearest wastebasket.

Of course he is hardly a fashion plate, but you can't have everything, and, besides, traveling really, really, really light is the fastest way to get at the bad guys.

I'm not kidding about the disability angle. Long ago I learned to point to my ear and say, "I'm deaf," and board with the mommies and babies and first-class passengers. There are few advantages to hearing impairment, but early boarding is one of them.

By the way, in Child's newest novel, Nothing to Lose, Reacher carries a two-piece collapsible toothbrush, not a folding one. Don't ask me why.