Airlines

Scenery

jdewyze2 Comments

My worst fear was not being eaten by a grizzly bear. Instead the Apple Weather prediction for our time in Juneau looked so grim — temperatures ranging from barely above freezing to the mid-40s, with rain every day — I worried we might not want to venture outside. What fun would that be?

I need not have fretted. True, we emerged from the airport terminal Wednesday afternoon into a chilly, damp world, but we’ve been more than comfortable moving around in it. My gear choices were good! For this trip, I bought a waterproof Norwegian (Helly Hanson) raincoat, and yesterday I wore it over two lightweight thermal tops and a down jacket. On my legs I had rain pants over thermal long-johns. For footwear I dusted off the hiking shoes in which I trekked on New Zealand’s Routeburn Trail 8 years ago.

It all worked so well I got too warm at one point and had to stow the down jacket in my day pack! (It compresses down into a compact stuff sack.) And the rain proved to be only intermittent, never intensifying to much more than a drizzle; often stopping altogether.

We’re in a wonderful exchange home here, just a 10-minute Uber ride from the airport. The expanse of windows in its living room open onto a big deck with sweeping views of Douglas Island across the Gastineau Channel.

Our trading partners are also letting us use their Honda CRV. We drove it yesterday (Thursday) to Juneau’s #1 touristic attraction for the last 150 years: one of the easiest places in North America to see a glacier up close. It took us barely 15 minutes to reach the Mendenhall Glacier parking lot. We had a delightful time exploring the complex.

This is Mendenhall Lake into which the ice river deposits its calves.
My telephoto lens helped us see the chunks about to break off.
My very first iceberg (tiny but elegant)
Someone transported this one to the beach leading to Nugget Falls.
The waterfall itself was nothing to sneer at.

This is all within the Tongass National Forest — the largest temperate rain forest in the world. The visitor’s center was jammed with cruise-ship passengers, but we met almost no one on the nearby Trail of Time. Its misty pathways led us through a landscape lushly upholstered with mosses and a profusion of other plants.

It felt primordial but to our astonishment, we learned the glacier had covered much of this trail less than 100 years ago. It retreated to leave behind bare rock. All the dense green beauty has developed since then.

This viewpoint provided photos documenting how dramatically the landscape has changed.

After just one day, I felt amazed by Juneau’s scenery. Another feature of that scenery also has been striking. Our hosts in the exchange home left a list of (dumb) tourist questions that they advised (tongue in cheek) against asking. “What elevation are we at?” was one. “Sea level” is the proper answer. (“That water out there, that’s the sea.)

Now that I’m here, I understand why visitors might ask that. The scenery makes me feel I’m deep in some mountain holdfast; dramatic peaks jut skyward in every direction, cut through with deep valleys. For most of my life I’ve only seen scenery like this far, far from the ocean. This place feels different.

Don’t try to get to Africa this way

jdewyze1 Comment

It’s not the easiest thing to get from San Diego to anywhere in Africa. But this time Steve and I appear to be doing it the hard way. The irony is, it seemed to start so well.

We had scored inexpensive tickets traveling on Alaska Airlines from San Diego to Boston, and then continuing on Qatar Airways to Doha, the capital of Qatar. These tickets would enable us to stay in Doha (a place we’ve never visited before) for three nights before continuing on to Entebbe in Uganda.

The first flight was at 9:50 am and we were inside the terminal by 7:44. We had our boarding passes by 8, and the signs all said we’d be on time. Outside, the sun gleamed off the plane parked at our gate. We went for coffee and doughnuts and returned around boarding time, when the first creepy thing happened: a tug began pushing “our” plane away from the gate. “Wait, stop!” I wanted to shout. “We’re not aboard yet!”

But no one was, and a minute later, the sign changed to Delayed — first to 10:20, then 10:30, then 10:40 am. Our spirits dipped, but when we returned to the gate around 10 and saw another plane parked next to “our” jetway, they rose again. Boarding started soon after, and by 10:40, everyone was seated, ready for take-off.

The captain’s voice over the loudspeaker smashed everyone’s good mood. He sounded annoyed, not with us, but with whichever imbecilic manager had decreed that our plane was needed to fly to Lihue on the island of Kauai, a route on which Alaska is aggressively competing. Everyone and their luggage would have to get off this plane and onto some other one.

The infants on the plane (and there were a bunch of them) all began screaming, an apoplectic chorus, and many of the grownups looked almost as unhappy. I was aghast, but I wasn’t panicking. Our flight from Boston wouldn’t depart until 10:15 pm. We had been facing a long wait at Logan, so this would shorten it a bit, but not catastrophically. Then the ground crew announced that a replacement place wouldn’t arrive until after 1 pm; it wouldn’t reach Boston until around 10:30 pm.

Here’s the Alaska plane we all had to get off, to free it for a lucky Hawaii-borne group. Aloha!

Poof! went our visions of a swift easy transit to the Middle East. We could barely see the Alaska gate staff, the line of querulous customers trying to reach them was so long. I jumped on my cell phone; called Qatar’s customer service. The guy I talked with made what sounded like a intense effort to find some other path to Doha for us. But the flight from LA was leaving in three and a half hours. There were no flights, so we’d have to cover the distance on the ground in two and a half — not something we felt like gambling could be done. Other Qatar flights from other cities all were leaving earlier than the one from Boston. The guy on the phone finally told me Alaska would have to fix the problem.

It took some gal on Alaska’s International desk in Iowa almost an hour to figure something out for us. She said she could get us on a nonstop flight from San Diego to London that was leaving San Diego at 2:50 pm. Once in London, we could connect to a nonstop Qatar flight. It wouldn’t arrive in Doha until after midnight Saturday night (versus the 5:30 pm we had originally been scheduled for). But in our beggarly positions, we didn’t feel we could be picky. We searched for the British Airways check-in counters, where we would have to go to get our boarding passes.

Somehow the young lady in Iowa had gotten the time of the flight wrong. It turned out to be 6:35 pm, not 2:50. Waiting for the check-in counters to open, we considered getting Lyfted home and back, since home was the only place we could think of to nap in. (We couldn’t get into the secure part of the airport until we got our boarding passes. But we couldn’t get our passes until the BA counters opened. I’m here to tell you, the NON-secure part of San Diego’s Terminal Two has no place where any normal person would consider napping.) Reluctantly, we decided against trying to go home and then return. The likelihood of meeting up with some other problem that would keep us from catching our flight (a traffic accident? a Lyft strike?) seemed all too real. The hours dragged by. We finally got those boarding passes; moved to another gate area. I tried to rest, but sleep eluded me. More than eleven and a half hours after we’d entered the airport, our 747 lifted off from the tarmac.

I’m writing this onboard now, with about 17 hours left to go. Our connection in London is short. That might get screwed up too. But if it doesn’t, and we reach Doha, I’ll post this, maybe in the morning.

With any kind of GOOD luck, we could even still have a day and a half to see Doha’s sights. Then we’ll move on to Africa, where bigger adventures loom.

More than once, we were thankful we travel with carry-ons. (Here are our four, plus our lunch bag. Checked luggage would have significantly complicated the nightmare.