Background for those who are curious: On the 16th of November, 1974, I made my initial appearance in this world in Fairbanks, Alaska. As I turned 30 this past November, my folks decided it was finally time I got to lay eyes (that could focus) on the place of my birth. Consequently, this summer found my Mom and me on a trip to visit our 49th state.

Day 1 (8/24/05)- Champaign to Fairbanks
This was a looooong day. Because I didn't want to pay $5/day for two weeks to park my car while I was gone, I asked a friend to drop me off at the airport before she went to work. So that got me to the airport at about 9 for my scheduled 11AM flight. Because I was there so early, the woman behind the counter put me on the 10AM flight up to Chicago, making my total layover there about 5 hours. To kill the time, I walked every spur of every terminal, except for the international ones. That took about two hours, and led to lots of good people watching. My favorite part of the airport is probably the underground connection to Terminal 1 that I like to call Walt Disney Presents... The Pantone Color Wheel! The accompanying music is especially soothing. The biggest trend I observed in my walks was the unusual number of businessmen sporting cyborg-like Bluetooth headsets for their cellphones. Tool of choice, or choice of tools?

Also observed out on the tarmac: Drop Zone port-a-johns. Which do you think is a funnier name, Drop Zone or my favorite Champaign brand -- —Midwest Pottyhouse? Personally, any company that's invented the word pottyhouse will always win in my book.

By 3PM I had spent two hours walking all of O'Hare, eaten lunch, read my book for an hour, and tested the Brookstone shop's massage chair (which wasn't as comfortable as others I've tried. But how do you tell that to the staff when you're sitting in their $4000 chair?) I still had 8+ hours of flying to go at this point.

The flight to Seattle was pretty uneventful, although on arrival SEA-TAC played it's little tricks on me and gave me the devil of a time figuring out how to get to my connecting flight, where I finally met my mom just minutes before the plane began boarding.

We arrived in Fairbanks at about 10:30 that night, Alaska time. Which meant that for us it felt like 1:30. We headed to the Princess desk along with other travellers, and I began to get the idea that many of my fellow passengers on this trip might be just a little... older... than I am. With what we would soon come to think of as their customary efficiency, Princess handed out packets with our room keys already in them, had us tag our luggage for delivery to our rooms, and bundled us on a bus for the hotel. It was probably about midnight Alaska time when we finally got to sleep. A very long day indeed.

Day 2 (8/25/05) - Fairbanks
This was our day on our own before the official "tour" started. We took the Princess bus into downtown Fairbanks and walked around a bit after using the visitor center email terminals to send email to my Dad letting him know we arrived safely. We found the Northward building, where I spent the first few days of my existence sleeping in a dresser drawer before (at the age of 1 week) departing on my first plane ride. Said plane ride resulted 2 months later (after stops to visit family, get baptized, get visas, vaccinations, etc.) in my first big move... to Saudi Arabia.

Ok, from now on I'm going to just do bullet points instead of constructing nice, flowing paragraphs. This is already going to be long enough as it is...

• Mom says there are significantly fewer bars in downtown Fairbanks now than there were then. It's not such a frontier town anymore.
• The flowers here just blow me away! Besides growing to huge sizes in the midnight sun, they seem to be so much more vivid and colorful than the flowers at home. I wonder if even an ordinary non-green thumb-having person could get fantastic results in their garden up here, or if skill still plays a significant factor?
• Lesson #1: Don't bother taking lunch recommendations from someone who speeds by on his bike. Soapy Smith's demonstrably does not have the best french fries in Alaska. I suspect they're Ore-Ida, straight out of the bag. Blech!
• After exhausting the sights of downtown, we figure out how to hop on a city bus to go up to the University. I think Mom was a little nervous about taking the bus when she saw we had to wait in a parking lot because the bus station was under repair, but it gave us a good view of the more residential areas of town. The University itself was nice. We were offered directions by a kid wearing a Threadless.com t-shirt, and I hate to admit that when my Mom offered up the information that we were here to visit the town where I was born, I snapped something like "as we've been telling everyone." That was pretty rude of me. Of course my Mom wants to tell people the story, because it makes us stand out from the usual tourists. But seriously, she was telling everybody. (One week later I found myself telling the guides on the bike tour I took on my own, so I'm not really any better.)
• The building on the U of Alaska Fairbanks campus are really far apart and don't seem to have tunnels connecting them. How do people walk all that way in -40° weather?
• After seeing the museum at the University, we took the city bus back down to the Fred Meyer, which is sort of a Pacific Northwest WalMart. We stocked up on bagels and other food so we could have breakfast and dinner at the hotel, and then made it out to the parking lot just in time to catch the Princess shuttle back to the hotel.
• You can request that the front desk call your room if the northern lights appear, so when they called at 1:30 or so in the morning I stumbled out of bed, got dressed and went down to look. The lights were faint, and eventually I got too cold to wait and see if they would get stronger, but at least now I've seen them. I'd love to go back in the winter, though, and stay at one of the places especially designed for seeing the lights.
  

Day 3 (8/26/05) - Fairbanks

• And so the touring begins. Oh my God, I'm easily the youngest one on this bus by 30 years. This isn't going to be good.
• First tour is to a place where we get on a little train and ride through some dioramas about the history of gold mining in Alaska, complete with local high school students playing the roles of the miners. We do get to go through a tunnel in the permafrost, which is pretty cool, and the demonstration of mining techniques by a couple who actually runs a working gold mine is interesting too. The woman is wearing about $2000 of gold nuggets as various pieces of jewelry. Afterwards we get a pan and some gravel to practice panning for gold. Between us my mom and I get about $6 worth. Later in the trip I'll see a necklace with a lampwork bead that makes use of gold flakes, so I'm hoping to replicate that when I get around to pulling out my glass rods and torch again. I wonder how much gold they get from re-sifting the stuff that the tourists go though?
• Next we get back on the bus and make a stop at the pipeline. It was kind of cool to see the thing that brought my family here. Mom says that when she and Dad lived here the pipeline was still in giant stacks of pipe in a field. That field is now a WalMart and some other stores.
• Had lunch back at the hotel (very clever how they schedule your tours so close together that you have no chance to get food outside of the hotel), and then got back on the bus to go to a paddle wheel boat that took us down the Chena River. By far the coolest part of this trip was watching Susan Butcher demonstrate how her sled dog team works together. I've never seen animals that were so eager to do what they were bred to do. This wasn't a job for these dogs; it was the most fun thing any of them had ever thought of! It was great! C'mon, let's go! Go! Go! Go! Such seemed to be the translation of their barks and plunges while Susan was talking. When she got them hooked up in tandem to the ATV (no snow, so obviously no sled), they were almost wild with impatience to run. She gave them the signal and they took off around the lake like a dream. When they made it back they were into the river and frisking around as soon as they were unhooked. I guess running works up enough heat that they enjoy the frigid water. I suppose all that fur helps too.
  

Day 4 (8/27/05) - Fairbanks to Denali National Park

• Back on the bus. This time we're leaving Fairbanks and heading for Denali. The bus ride is about 2.5 hours on a good day, probably about 3 today because of construction. We arrive at the Denali Princess Lodge in time to get to our room and then have a quick lunch (pizza and some god-awful wilted salad) before getting back on another bus. Sigh.
• This bus is driven by a 40-ish guy who still spends his summers working in Alaska. He expresses admiration for Chris McCandless and tells us that his nickname is "Crash". The passengers just eat up everything he says. He looks a little like Timothy Treadwell, but with significantly less crazy. We manage to spot a few moose, but not much else. The moose are really neat to see up close, though. And Denali is just gorgeous. I really wish I could have done some hiking there. It's just vast and beautiful.
• We had dinner at a local restaurant that didn't make very good salmon spring rolls, but did make great desserts. Mom got blueberry pie and I had a cobbler that mixed blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. Delish!
• I was determined to try the hotel hot tub, which overlooked the Nenana River, but my vision of a peaceful soak under the stars was destroyed by the kid sharing the hot tub with me, the people that kept stopping by to ask how the water was, and the clouds of chlorine steam that almost choked me. I think I need to take a new vacation: one that involves hot springs and the northern lights at night.
  

Day 5 (8/28/05) - Denali to Talkeetna

• Today at 11:15 we had to be ready to get on a bus that would take us to the train station in the park, where we would take the train to Talkeetna. I got up and grabbed breakfast in time to take the 8AM shuttle into the park so I could walk around a little bit. I did a short three mile round trip hike to Horseshoe Lake, just inside the park. Afterwards I walked along the bike path and another trail for another couple of miles or so until the trail joined up with the path along the Nenana, which led back to the hotel. I met up with my Mom about a half-mile short of the hotel and we walked a little bit more. This helped keep me from going crazy with inaction during the long day to follow.
• On the train, you're assigned a table with another pair of travelers. Ours were actually pretty fun to talk to and we kept running into them at various points later in the cruise. You could get drinks at the bar on the top level of the train car, but when it was time for lunch we went down to the lower seating level. Having lunch on the train was pretty posh, but I could have done without facing backwards for the rest of the ride in our seats on the top of the train.
• Note: Even though I always think I'm going to like Bloody Marys, I don't like Bloody Marys. This one had a green bean in it.
  
• The scenery was gorgeous (really, whenever I don't mention the view, you can just plug in this as the default sentence. The scenery was never less than stunning.) I rode out on the platform between the cars for a bit and got a few pictures, but it was really too cold to stay out long.
• When we got to Talkeetna we still had an hour's bus ride to the hotel, so there was no chance to come back to town and look around, which is a pity, because not only does Talkeetna claim to be the inspiration for Northern Exposure (I'll bet a lot of towns say that), but it also hosts the Wilderness Woman contest and the Talkeetna Bachelor Auction. I'll bet it would be a fun place to get to know.
  

Day 6 (8/29/05) - Talkeetna to Whittier / Onboard the Dawn Princess

• Train isn't scheduled to leave until nearly noon, which would give us time to walk around Talkeetna if we weren't so tired and if the weather wasn't so miserable. This morning was really the one day of actual bad weather we had on the whole trip. It was chilly and drizzling quite a bit. Mom and I walked a very short trail near the hotel, but it was too soggy to really enjoy it, so we ended up going back to the room and reading until it was time to queue up for the bus.
• Since riding backwards the day before made me slightly nauseous, Mom maneuvered us off the bus and into prime position for boarding the train, so we got to face forward and the new couple we were sitting with had to face backwards. These two were much less entertaining than our companions of the day before, plus the train ride was much longer. We went through Anchorage and it looked a lot like any other big city. Lots of fast food and chain stores. Apparently people say that the best thing about Anchorage is how close it is to Alaska.
• Somewhere between Talkeetna and Anchorage we passed a sign for a tiny town called Honolulu. Wishful thinking on someone's part.
• Also passed a town that was population 2. The husband and wife alternated who would be mayor from year to year. They made their adult daughter live just outside the boundary of "town" so she couldn't vote.
• We finally pulled up alongside the ship in Whittier around 6:30. They gave us our room keys on the train, and after that boarding went quickly and smoothly.
• Went to the mandatory safety briefing that was conducted by a very hyper Romanian girl. She said her parents were glad to have her working here for the summer because they wouldn't have to listen to her so much. Scanning the room revealed that the crowd on the boat was no younger than the land tour crowd. Sigh.
• Had dinner at the buffet and did some exploring of the ship. The floor plan was very confusing at first, but over the course of the next week which door led to which section became second nature. Around 9:30 or so the ship pulled out of dock and headed south.
  

Day 7 (8/30/05) - At Sea

• Our room was v. compact and efficient. I could even have loved it if it wasn't for the fact that it was the nearest to the public areas and one side backed onto the staff's corridor. So starting at about 6 each morning there was loud talking and thumping that woke us up. Not to mention that what sounded like the ship's laundry would sometimes be going till after midnight. So mornings weren't my best time. Several days my instinct would have been to poke the overly cheerful buffet waiters in the eye with a spork had a spork been available.
• Our first morning on the ship, though, we tried the sit down breakfast instead of the buffet. Besides having to sit at a table of total strangers and make conversation, which is really not my thing, the food wasn't even that good. My Mom ordered her favorite meal, Eggs Benedict, which she only allows herself on special occasions, as a way to test the quality of the food. The fact that she hated it didn't auger well for the meals on the rest of the trip. I had some pretty delicious bagels and lox, but could do without the cloth napkin service at that time of day, so after that we had breakfast at the buffet, which presented it's own set of annoyances in the form of waiters whose smarm level went up to 11. I don't know if it was just because I was one of the youngest girls they had probably seen all summer or what, but most mornings the guys would say "good morning" to me in exactly that same way that creepy guys on the street will say "Hey! Smile pretty girl." As if all you were waiting for to cheer you up was to be chatted up by a random stranger who will flirt with anything with breasts. And there were usually 10 guys working the buffet each morning.
• After breakfast we went out and watched the glaciers in College Fjord and then took another walk around the ship. This time we went through the casino and happened upon a craps lesson in progress. This was exciting because Lisa and I tried to find a demonstration of craps in Vegas and could never manage to track one down. The people playing craps always seem to be having the most fun out of anyone in the casino, so it's a good game to know. I think I've got the very basics down now, although I didn't manage to test out my skills on this trip. That just means I need to go to Vegas again!
• 3 laps around the promenade deck = 1 mile. So we did 9 laps and then went looking for the hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps in it to reward ourselves. What?! This was vacation!
• I know somewhere in here we saw a demonstration of how to make animals out of fruit.
• By early evening I was getting a bit seasick, and for some reason Mom didn't want to hear me talk about it. Something about making her feel seasick! Anyway, I tracked down some of those accupressure wristbands at the onboard store, and whether it's all in my head or not, they really made a difference. I wore them all night and all the next day.
  
• Was this our formal wear night? I think so. We dressed for dinner (how fancy!) and went to the dining room. This was when we ended up with Jimmy -- World's Worst Waiter. He was pushy about trying to get us to order wine, which I wasn't too interested in with the seasickness and all. When I did order sparkling water he took my ship card to write down the room number to charge it to and leaned over me (the better to see down my cleavage I suspect) and said "Ah! Miss Dolan! So you are singular?" Well, of course, I always will be singular, but somehow I don't think that was quite what he meant. He proceeded to bump the back of my chair or brush past my ponytail every two minutes for the rest of the dinner. When my Mom ordered the cheese plate for dinner he brought out the cheese without the accompanying crackers, and then disappeared for about 10 minutes. Finally my Mom was able to flag him down and ask for the crackers. He brought out a plate of Keebler saltines still in their plastic wrappers! (We found out later that this was apparently the standard presentation. So it's really partly Princess's fault that their cheese plate seems like it should be served in Denny's.) Jimmy's service was also so slow that even though we sat down to dinner at 6:30 we weren't done until 8:30, after missing the start time for the early show. I mean, I know waiting tables is a crap job, but you're there and you might as well do it well, right?
  
• I played a little roulette after dinner, but lost my $20 after about a half hour or so and decided I wasn't feeling the magic enough to toss another $20 in to try and recover it.
  

Day 8 (8/31/05) - At Sea

• Spent the morning wrapped up in blankets on deck looking for whales. With more hot chocolate and schnapps first, of course. I spotted a humpback off the bow of the ship doing one of these, but unfortunately Mom missed it because she was inside for a minute. Aside from a few puffs of spouting whales in the distance this was the only whale I saw the entire trip.
• After lunch I was getting a little stir crazy, so we split up for a while and I went to do a load of laundry. While I was waiting for my clothes to wash I went out to the "secret" area at the front of deck 11. You're right on the front of the ship, and for some reason they don't label the area on the ship maps, so we wouldn't have known about it if it wasn't for the ship's naturalist who mentioned it at a lecture about glaciers the day before. We were getting into Glacier Bay now, so I went and got Mom and we watched the beautiful glaciers for quite a while. (This is probably the point at which I caught the cold that would follow me around for the next few days.) We heard a bit of creaking, but never actually saw a piece calve.
• After dinner I let Mom drag me to one of the onboard shows. This one was a medley of various musicals, with about 2-3 songs from each one, and accompanying costume changes by the Dawn Princess Dancers. It was cheesy as hell, but it was musicals, so the cheese factor was already pretty high, and it actually ended up being pretty entertaining. Although they did the songs from Grease out of order and totally messed up the story! (Yes, me = dork.)
  
• The thing I hated most about these two days at sea was that the entire trip seemed to be structured around eating or waiting to eat. And then the food was bland and boring! If I'm going to be forced to live as an epicure shouldn't the food at least be top notch?
  

Day 9 (9/1/05) - Skagway

• Finally off the boat! After breakfast we headed down to the dock to hook up with our hike and float tour. About 10 of us were driven out to the start of the Chilkoot Trail where we learned about the miners that had hiked the trail during the Gold Rush. Then we hiked about 2 miles of the trail, which had some bits that were quite steep. We passed several poisonous mushrooms, devil club - a plant with prickers all over, and some poisonous berries that only look like cranberries. But we did get to taste some real wild cranberries. Boy were they sour! We also got the lecture on bear safety. (Something that I'm glad everybody in Alaska takes very seriously.) We didn't see any bears ourselves, but saw plenty of scat and a nice clear footprint right on the edge of the path. I heard the next day that the afternoon tour actually got to see the two juvenile bears that roam the area fishing in the river. At the end of the two miles we put on our life jackets and hopped onto a raft which Chrissie, our extremely strong guide rowed all by herself. We floated gently down the river to the rendezvous spot where they plied us with hot chocolate and cookies before sending us back to town. The hike was definitely one of the high points of my trip!
• Ran into a guy on the dock here that looked so much like a guy I knew in college that I had to ask if they were related. They weren't. Still, it's good to know that what were once dubbed Dave K's "empirical" good looks are alive and well somewhere else in the gene pool. ('Empirically good looking' came from a discussion one night in college where a few of us discussed guys we thought were cute, but that others could take or leave. Dave K. was our one example of someone who's attractiveness everyone could agree on.)
  
• Mom and I went back to the boat to change clothes and then headed into town for lunch. I hate to say it, but the best food of the entire trip was a fantastic, flavorful Mussamun curry I had in a little hippie cafe in Skagway. Take that Bland Princess!
• We did a little bit of shopping here too, because they really design the port stops so that once you've done whatever activity you signed up for you really don't have enough time to do anything else but shop. Still, I did get some interesting syrups and honeys that I'm going to sample with my friends at an upcoming pancake breakfast.
• Mom and I got in our only argument of the trip here, which is not bad for traveling 24/7 with one person for two weeks.
  

Day 10 (9/2/05) - Juneau

• Yay! This was my favorite day trip of them all! Mom headed off to do a boat tour of Juneau harbor and I joined up with about 10 other people to go biking. The guides, Angus, Marjean, and Robert were awesome. Robert and I discovered we had both done the MacBackpackers trip in Scotland, although he hadn't had the luck of having Spud for a bus driver. Angus let me borrow his watch at one point because mine had broken apart a few days before in Denali. They drove us out near the Mendenhall Glacier and got us set up with bikes and helmets, and then we rode for about 10 miles, with a few uphill bits, stopping every couple of miles or so to look at some beautiful piece of scenery or another: the glacier, salmon going upstream, hidden waterfalls. It was wonderful to finally have an excursion that was somewhat of a physical challenge. And at the end of the biking we went to the Alaskan Brewing Company for samples of their beer. Bike rides should always end that way.
• I think this was the afternoon that we had to be back on the boat by 5. Since there really wasn't much shopping we wanted to do, we headed back to the ship not too long after having lunch in a nice little cafe and checking out the public library. (Free Internet access, and those suckers on the ship are paying 35 cents per minute!)
• This might have been the night I had the escargot for my appetizer at dinner. Yummers! Kind of like clams. We discovered the secret to having a good dinner was asking for a table for two, and being lucky enough to get anyone but Jimmy!
  

Day 11 (9/3/05) - Ketchikan

• Ketchikan was my least favorite of all the towns we visited. I don't know if it was the weather, or the even worse than usual tourist shops that lined the waterfront, or the skatepunks that looked like they'd hitched up from Seattle, but I found the place really off-putting.
• Our activity for today was kayaking. We were bussed out to the kayak shop, fitted up with rain gear and life vests and loaded on a Zodiac for a half hour (?) trip to the kayaking spot where our guides waited. When we got there the sun was shining and I mistakenly decided to discard my waterproof rain layer because the guides said kayaking would really make you sweat, and there's nothing that would make me grouchier than being too hot and trapped in a life vest, unable to take off any layers. Nothing, that is, except for being drenched by the steady drizzle that started midway through our 5 mile journey. I think the guys who guided us could have made the experience more enjoyable by making opportunities to just drift and take in the scenery more frequent. Mom and I especially, being the only kayak with two women in it, had to paddle almost constantly to keep from being left behind. More time to enjoy nature would have made for more fun. Also, the marine life was notably absent. We saw a few bald eagles (so common in Alaska that they're not even on the endangered list there), but no seal or whales.
• Tonight was the second formal dinner on the ship. I still had a cold, so I don't really remember much of the food. (I figured getting drenched in the kayak would probably either cure me or make it much much worse. It did cure me, but not until I was almost on the plane home.) After dinner we went to our last show, Piano Man, a tribute to 'modern' piano artists. I use the word 'modern' advisedly here, because for this crowd modern still included Liberace. The show started out all right, with a guy playing piano center stage and a small combo backing him up in the balcony. But just music wouldn't have been a cruise ship entertainment extravaganza, so before too long the Dawn Princess Dancers appeared, singing and doing their best interpretive dances of such classics as Uptown Girl. (I don't think the costume designer got the memo that the "uptown girls" shouldn't look like they shop at Forever 21.) You can see some pictures here on the site of the female lead. The Liberace segment had me biting my lips hard, especially when the guys laid on their backs and scissor kicked in the air. Then the woman with a candelabra on her head came out...
  

Day 12 (9/4/05) - At sea

• During this last day Mom and I watched the shore go by for a while, saw a cooking demonstration/comedy routine by the head chef and maitre 'd, and then split off to read our books separately. (Actually both were my books, and Mom had to finish hers so she'd know the ending by the time we left for home.) I took my book and my be-kleenexed self off to one of the ship's bars to have a bit of Dewars on the rocks. (Cause that kills cold germs, right?) While I was reading a man walked by and asked if I had to get the book back to the ship's library by closing time. "Nope," I said, "this one's mine," and then I went back to reading. When I finished my book I took it back to the room and decided to go do a few laps on the Promenade Deck (as one does, don't you know). While doing my laps I saw the same slightly Michael Caine-ish gentleman a few more times, and eventually he asked me if I had given up on the book. When I told him I'd finished it he asked if he could walk with me, and he seemed nice enough, so I said yes. It ended up being one of the most fun conversations I'd had the entire trip. We talked for most of an hour and it turned out that he was the piano player in the ship's orchestra, who I'd seen on stage the night before in Piano Man. He told me a little bit about what it's like to work on a cruise ship. (For the performers, the hours aren't bad, but you do work 7 days a week for 3-4 months, and the housing is like living in a college dorm.) We talked about all kinds of stuff like the recent hurricaine, Dubya, and Kayne West. When I left to go meet up with my Mom he asked if I wanted to meet for a drink later. Since I didn't really know him well enough to be giving out any kind of contact info I told him I might be in the bar where I had been reading earlier around 9 that night. But I have to admit that when it came down to it I chickened out. I had such a blast talking to him that I didn't want things to be ruined if it turned out that instead of asking me for a friendly drink he was asking me for a friendly drink. So, yeah. Anyway, if anyone else is ever sailing on the Dawn Princess, Tom is a heck of a nice guy. Made my cruise end on a high note. No pun intended, piano man.
  

Day 13 (9/5/05) - Vancouver to Champaign

• Not much to tell here. They got us off the boat too early, so we stood in the basement of the Vancouver port authority for a while until they loaded us on our bus for Seattle. The coolest thing about the bus is that they seal the door with special tape, so that when you get to the border the border patrol knows you haven't opened the door en route for anyone to take a runner into Canada. Very crafty, America Junior.
  
• Said goodbye to Mom in the Seattle airport. I really appreciate she and Dad giving me such an awesome birthday present. The style of travel wasn't my cup of tea, but the chance to spend time with Mom and see Alaska was (to use a trite phrase) priceless.

If this has whetted your appetite for pictures of Alaska (and if you've managed to read this far, bravo!) you can check out my Flickr photostream of the trip. I can't wait to go back someday!