Pictures from Alaska's Inside Passage, B.C., and the Yukon

It was too gray and misty for most of our cruise to get good pictures, but here are a few of my favorites with commentary:


While we stood on the pier in Prince Rupert, B.C., I noticed this elderly couple getting into this very small boat with a couple of bags of groceries, then (in the next picture) they started the motor and headed out across Cow Bay, the deepest harbor in North America. This was apparently just a normal trip to the grocery store for them. I told Scott he would need a beard like that if we were to travel by boat up here.



To me, these people were amazingly brave!



This picture of a bed and breakfast in Prince Rupert is probably my favorite picture of the whole trip because it's so colorful.



This is a mama bear we saw on our way home from the Yukon. We had stopped on the road to let one of her cubs pass. We knew she had to be nearby, so we looked around and saw her, then two other cubs. A cute little family.



We rented a van from Sourdough Car Rental in Skagway (a Sourdough is a person not from Alaska), and really enjoyed the interior scenery of the area. We were not supposed to be allowed to cross into Canada (only one of us had a current passport), but the agents at the border said we could -- that's how we picked up the Yukon unexpectedly.

More scenery from British Columbia.


We went up Endicott Arm to Dawes Glacier, where the captian miraculously turned the cruise ship around on a dime. Waterfalls were visible everywehere trickling into the fjord.


The colors of the 'bergys' were spectacular. Many of the small ice floes had baby seals on them. Mama seals keep their babies on bergys to protect them from predators.


Another picture of the fjord.

The governor's mansion in Juneau, former home to Sarah Palin and her family.


I love layering mountains anywhere, and in Alaska they were spectacular. Too bad it was so gray and misty. A local man on the city bus in Ketichikan told me that when the sun does come out (a rare event there), the colors are incredible. With so uch green and so much water, I'm sure sunshine is practically blinding.


This is a picture of a clan house with totem poles in Ketchikan's Totem Bite State Park. A Bite is a shallow cove.


At the very beginning of the Inside Passage we passed several lovely lighthouses. This was my favorite one.

Book Review: The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama

I bought this book at a library sale and took it with me on my cruise because I knew it took place in India and I'd heard that a lot of staff members on cruise ships are from India (true). I've always had an interest in India since befriending Pinky Patel, a high school exchange student from Bombay. We had a lot of fun together my senior year, and she is the reason I went on exchange myself (only India was not available at the time -- so I went to Denmark.) Enough backstory!

The book transfers you to a city in the south of India not far from the coast to the comfortable home of Mr. and Mrs. Ali. Mr. Ali has recently retired when the book begins and his wife is terribly concerned that he doesn't have enough to do. She's also frustrated that he's always underfoot, so she encourages him to start his own business. Due to India's tradition of arranged marriages, he has decided to open a marriage bureau catering to people from all three religious communities in India: muslim, hindu, and Christian.

Business is slow at first but quickly picks up, so much so that he decides to hire an assistant. Mrs. Ali selects the perfect assistant after observing her passing by their house each day on her way to secretarial school. She is as matter-of-fact as he is about what makes a good match.

The book bridges the gap between traditional arranged marriages and 'love marriages.' I kept thinking that I could predict what would happen next, but I was usually wrong, which is always nice. The characters were all likeable and realistic. The writing was never flowery. The action was very simple. The book was interspersed with humor throughout, some of it quite subtle.

I enjoyed how Mrs. Ali fretted about her husband when he wasn't working, then fretted about him when we was. And Mr. Ali's advice to a father who was upset about his son's apparently disjointed match was priceless!

What I enjoyed about the book more than anything was that its characters spoke the truth. I remember arguing with my English professor in college about "Death of a Salesman" and how I held the mother at fault for the whole situation because she would not speak the truth. She perpetuated all of Willie Loman's myths and delusions rather than protecting him and her sons by speaking the truth. The professor thought this was a form of mommy bashing, but I maintain that she had a obligation to confront reality. Anyway, I digress.

I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that I was held captive on a ship at the time.

Home from Alaska

I'm home! But maybe you didn't even know I had left. I've been sporadic at best in my blog writing lately.

It's been a whirlwind of events the past few weeks. First my son, Taylor, returned from his mission to Pohnpei, Palau and Guam in the west Pacific. We hadn't seen him for just over two years, so that was extremely exciting!

He was home for less than a week when we left for a family vacation to Alaska, squeezing in a quick (very quick!) trip to the Yukon just to say we did. We traveled by car to Seattle, where we boarded the Norwegian Star, a cruise ship that took us to Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway and Prince Rupert, B.C. with a visit to Dawes Glacier on Endicott Arm. We rented a car at Skagway and drove north to the Yukon through some gorgeous scenery where we saw a family of black bears. It was a beautiful trip and I will post pictures when I get them onto this computer.

For now, it's good to be home. Driving home from Seattle seemed to take forever! We've been reunited with our dogs, Sherpa and Panda, but the family room is still full of luggage and piles and piles of dirty clothes. It will all get straightened out eventually, right?

But the big news is, Taylor and I reached a lifetime goal by visiting our 50th state. Scott, Tom and Abby are holding impatiently for now at 49, and Emily has 47. I couldn't have done it without my two travel facilitators, Mom and Scott. Mom is the original adventurer in the family and taught me everything I know about hitting the road.

Scott was once lost on a business trip in Atlanta, so he pulled over and asked an elderly black man for directions. The gentleman thought a while then said, "I'm afraid you can't get there from here." We often laugh about that because there's really no where you can't get to if you really want to get there. There are certainly a lot of obstacles, not the least of which are money and time. Travel requires you to re-evaluate your priorities. Would I really rather go to Alaska or spend the money on (fill in the blank)? Of course, travel to distant places is a luxury, but we are all surrounded by beauty just beyond our own imaginary boundaries close to home. Day trips and overnighters can be just as fun as far-flung adventures, and much more relaxing.

Checking Drudge Report for my political fix as soon as I'd booted up, I read that Mitt Romney visited ND for the first time on June 23. I beat Mitt to 50???!!! Amazing. Maybe Taylor and I need to take a pre-emptive visit to Puerto Rico in case it becomes the 51st state. If Guam becomes a state, Taylor will be one up on me.

Politicians, Step Aside

[Who wears fine leather shoes and white shirts and blazers to an oil spill?]


What are community organizers (or any garden-variety politicans) good for?

They are really, really good at talking. They talk by themsevles on soapboxes and at podiums and lecterns. They talk on committees and in small groups pounding out and refining legislation. They talk to reporters. Sometimes they even talk to their constituents, or their would-be constituents.

The idea is that they are soooo good at talking that they inspire people to take action, but they rarely, if ever, take action themselves. I am racking my brain to remember a president actually DOING anything other than ceremonial types of things like throwing out the first pitch at a ball game or placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. (I heard once that George W. Bush liked to remove brush from his ranch in Crawford, but I never actually saw footage of him uprooting anything.)

This gift of gab only becomes an issue when actual problems arise that can't be resolved with words alone, like the Gulf oil catastrophe. Obama initially reacted to the crisis by publicly, bitterly deriding British Petroleum as if to clarify that it was all BP's fault -- a fact which is not yet a fact. No one knows why the oil platform blew up, though an invesitgation is underway. Ironically, the platform could have been blown up by radical environmentalists reacting to Obama's recent decision to allow more off-shore drilling.

Anyone who has experience dealing with crises knows that that blame is the last thing to be resolved. First, we should have announced our commitment to work as partners with BP to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. We should not have talked about keeping our boot on BP's neck - what a ridiculous and counter-productive image that is, though it has been stated over and over again by adminstration officials, espcially Salazar and Gibbs. We should have positioned all requisite government resources in the vicinity to be used as needed while convening the world's most knowledgable and experienced experts to hear their ideas and discuss pros and cons, then we should have started trying their solutions while drilling a relief well, the long-term but surest solution, just in case all of the quicker resolutions failed.

Next time, I want a president who can DO something. I want him or her to have some sort of potentially useful hobby, an actual, demonstrable skill. Maybe he'll know how to plant a garden or write a poem or bake brownies. It would be really cool if he or she knew something about carpentry or how to fix a car. I'll take a computer geek or a ten-key whiz or a lifeguard.

No more verbose politicians standing impotently on the sidelines denigrating people who are actually DOING something.

My next president does not have to know everything, but he has to know how to DO something.