The Fearless Woman's Guide to Men, Motherhood, and Making Things Happen
Next time your angry boss or spouse tells you to “Go to Hell,” you really can…that is if you can book a flight to Grand Cayman in the western Caribbean. It’s the only place I know of (at least literally speaking) where you can find Hell on Earth. Don’t forget to send Mom a postcard….
Coming in from a kayak trip around John Hopkins Inlet (Courtesy Marylyn Williams)
If you’ve never traveled to Alaska previously, and you’re overwhelmed by the vastness of this most beautiful of our 50 states, even though you’ve been dying to go there, there are some good ways to get your feet wet (no pun intended). When Sarah and I took our latest girls’ getaway last summer, we booked a week-long small yacht tour of the Inside Passage through American Safari Cruises, which places you on a small luxury yacht with 12 to 36 other passengers and plies the small bays inaccessible to the increasingly large number of cruise ships that come sailing into Alaska’s southeast archipelago. Not only will you enjoy comfortable (if small) accommodations aboard these small ships, you’ll also experience unparalleled access to the Alaska wilds (including unescorted kayaking excursions, explorations by skiff, and hiking adventures) while still being able to spend your evenings in something much finer than a tent. I’m talking pretty well-done gourmet meals, an open bar, and daily opportunities for massage, yoga, and hot tub immersion. Yes, it’s pricey. But if your goal is to get an overview of southeast Alaska without sharing the experience with a thousand of your closest friends on a mega cruise ship and never setting your foot on land, it’s well worth the expense.
I’ll admit it. I’ve never been a fan of flying, not even before 9/11. But I do remember the days when flying wasn’t so…well…painful. Those good old days when it was actually faster to fly from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta than to drive there. Remember those days?
Now unless you’re flying across the ocean or across the country, flying just doesn’t make economic sense anymore. Apart from the ridiculous prices you’ll pay for an airline ticket these days (and mind you, that’s a ticket that does not include the cost of checked baggage, though it does include a bag of exactly six tiny pretzels and a complimentary beverage–mostly ice in a little plastic cup), by the time you factor in the time driving to the airport, then finding a parking space, then riding some shuttle all over half the countryside to reach your terminal, then standing in a TSA line for an hour or more, finally getting on your flight only to find it delayed an hour (an hour you spend in a cramped seat on the tarmac), then flying to your destination, where you spend another hour or two trying to track down your luggage and an over-priced rental car….well, yep, you could have driven there faster.
The true headache of flying was made manifest to me over the holidays when I and my family were scheduled to fly out of D.C. to Minneapolis. Yes, as it so happened, our flight was scheduled the day after a blizzard, which meant a seven-hour drive on snow-packed roads to the airport, only to find out 30 minutes after our arrival that our flight was cancelled. Did I mention we were scheduled to fly on AirTran? (That was the first mistake–there is a reason AirTran’s rates are lower.)
Well, initially I wasn’t worried, despite the mile-long line in front of AirTran’s customer service desk at Reagan International. I had my cell phone, and AirTran’s customer service number. I could get this mess straightened out and have us on another flight in no time! How wrong I was. AirTran, true to their lousy reputation, dropped all calls that day, forcing its thousands of unhappy, stranded customers to wait in long lines at the airport, many of them with exhausted two-year-olds just like ours.
THREE hours later we found ourselves at the customer service desk, after watching many folks ahead of us get turned away with no alternative flights, flights leaving on Christmas Day, and various other unhappy outcomes. And here comes my first big piece of advice: If you find yourself in this situation, KNOW YOUR AIRLINE. Know what cities they fly out of, and keep your options open. If you go up to the desk after your flight is cancelled expecting you’ll get on another flight to your destination that very same day, especially in the wake of weather-related cancellations, you’re smoking more than cigarettes. It took 45 minutes of negotiations with the lady at the AirTran desk, but we finally found a flight to Minneapolis that would put us there before Christmas. But we had to be willing to drive three hours to another airport in Newport News to get on it, then be willing to spend the night in Atlanta before proceeding on to our final destination.
We took it.
And….40 hours after we intially started our journey to the airport, we were safely on the doorstep of my grandmother’s house in southwest Minnesota. 40 HOURS. Did I mention it takes a little over 20 hours to DRIVE from our doorstep to my grandmother’s? Exactly what did we gain by flying? Certainly not any extra time with family. Certainly no savings for our pocketbook given we had to pay full price for our two-year-old to fly even though she spent the whole flight in my husband’s lap.
Most businesses that offer this level of terrible service (and did I mention the cramped seats that make the airplane water closets seem spacious?) would eventually drive themselves under. How do the airlines manage to stay afloat?
You got me. But I’d be glad to hear any explanations you might come up with.
This is one increasingly less frequent flyer who is desperate enough to consider Amtrak an option in the future….
How's the hay on your side of the roof?
And chickens, too. I wonder how many wrecks occur along Highway 441 south of Clayton, Georgia, with folks trying to figure out just what is going on here. I know I had to make a U-turn, go back, and take another look. Whoever came up with this idea for getting tourists to pile into their country store was no ninny. 
Sweet Highland County Maple Syrup at the Bolar Ruritan Club (Photo courtesy Jeff Greenough)
The latest issue of Virginia Living hit newsstands this week with my all too short article on my home stomping ground of Highland County. If you’ve ever ventured over the mountains to find this sweet spot of earth, especially during “sugaring season,” you might be a bit disappointed by the derth of photography. Never fear. Photographer Jeff Greenough has posted his best shots from last year’s Maple Festival on his blog. Check them out–then let me know if those maple donuts don’t look succulent enough to eat right off the screen….
Don’t miss the 2010 Highland Maple Festival March 13-14 and March 20-21. Come hungry!
Glacier Bay National Park is easily one of the most beautiful places on earth, and nothing adds to that beauty like its sheer remoteness. Find out how to get here (as in right where this lucky hiker is sitting) on my travel blog next week.
Sunset over Currituck Sound
I’ve never been a big fan of the Outer Banks of North Carolina as a whole, at least not the section most people visit, which includes Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head. Too busy, too crowded, and too much like one giant beach strip mall.
If you’re looking for a little more serenity on the shore, head north to Corolla. Yes, there has been a boom in beach house building up here in recent years, but the area has a decidedly quieter feel as in no monster mini-golf parks, giant beach tourist traps, and endless streams of beachfront chain hotels.
The beaches are quieter, too.
You’ll likely have to rent a house if you want to stay in Corolla, as other lodging options are scarce with the exception of the Inn at Corolla Light. But avoid Brindley Beach vacation rentals like the plague…unless you like staying in a house with dog hair stuck in the carpet and black grease caked on the dining room chairs. Housekeeping is not their specialty. Take advantage of Vacation Rentals by Owner or some other source where you can rent directly from the homeowners and not have to go through a rental agency.
And if you go in the shoulder or off season, like spring or early fall, you can get a substantial house rental for half the price of the summer season and still enjoy fine weather….and gorgeous sunsets year-round.
Juneau aside, I knew I was going to love southeast Alaska long before I ever got there. I’d been dreaming of Alaska all my life, imagining a place where there was no human scale by which to measure things.
Alaska is funny that way. You’ll wake up in the morning, peer out the window of your cabin, expecting to see a brown bear lumbering along the shore in plain and perfect view. But no, he is only a brown speck you have to strain to see with your binoculars. How can this be? The shore looks like it’s right there, only a few feet away, and that boulder there could only be a few feet high. You forget there is nothing out here in this wilderness by which to understand scale–no buildings, no automobiles, no people. As it turns out, you are miles from that shore, that boulder is many stories high, and the bear, he’s big, too. But your mind won’t grasp it. It has not been taught how to measure nature in a world without man.
That is why it took me only moments to fall in love with my first views of the distant Fairweather Mountain range and the crumbling glaciers at their feet. Everything is so massive. And then there is the knowing, too, that there is no one out there, not one at all.
So how do you see it all? Check back for the scoop on how to do it….and how to put yourself in the scenes above.
Could it be Kate?
Well, we did almost see Kate Winslet. She was on another boat. Whether or not she was required to wear a neon orange Mustang suit while touring Dawes Glacier in Endicott Arm, we may never know….
Downtown Juneau
So Sarah and I couldn’t help ourselves. We had to try and top our Caribbean cruise from hell in 2008 with something even bigger and better in 2009. And what could be bigger than Alaska? Or harder to get to…. It seemed to me after spending 24 hours on airplanes or waiting in airports, I should have at least been as far away as Norway. But no, it really did take an entire day to fly from Washington, D.C. to the capital city of Alaska, which by the way is accessible in only three ways–by boat, air, or birth. There are no roads into Juneau. In fact, the small city is nothing more than a precarious spit of land backed up against vertical mountains and clinging to the edge of the sea.
Arriving in Juneau at 11 p.m. is something of an adventure, especially when you get picked up from the airport by a hotel shuttle driver who can only be described as, at minimum, mildly tipsy. But we tried not to let it bother us as we went careening down the highway in a dusty van with a bag of day-old sandwiches crammed in between the seats in front of us (not sure what that was about either). After all, we were scheduled to be spending the night in what we had been advised was the “best hotel in town.”
Be careful of the advice of people who live in Seattle.
A City Between the Mountains and the Sea
Juneau’s Goldbelt Hotel does a booming business serving the guests of the small cruise lines that ply the Inside Passage. Unfortunately, the lodging makes no attempt to actually earn any repeat business. Our room was comparable to what one might find in a Motel 6 with beds resembling upside-down sagging cardboard boxes. It probably wouldn’t have bothered us so much had we not paid $180 for the privilege of sleeping there.
Nevermind. We were exhausted. Morning would shine a new light on everything.
Or so we thought. I knew it was going to be rough when I awoke to Sarah chuckling as she looked out the window at our “mountain view.”
“Debbie, there’s a smashed up toilet outside our window,” she called.
Something made me want to cover my head with a pillow and go back to sleep, if only the bed would cooperate with my desire for comfort. It was happening again…I could feel it. This was going to be another vacation from hell. Even for me who had been dreaming of Alaska all my life.
Well, there was plenty of incentive to get out of bed this morning. Things would have to be better once we checked out.
If the bear pants fit, wear 'em!
Of course, checking out before the rest of the town was barely awake in our great rush to escape the Juneau equivalent of a Motel 6 led us into relatively deserted streets on a typically cool and wet southeast Alaska day. Fortunately, I was not expecting great things of Juneau, not in the sense of discovering high civilization on the edge of wilderness that is. I wanted my Alaska rough and wild, and Juneau satisfies in many ways. And that’s as it should be. Juneau sprang to life overnight with the Klondike Gold Rush, and it still has that look of a haphazard thrown-up-in-a-rush frontier town.
With most of the stores closed, we set about looking for breakfast and found one good enough to allay all our misgivings of the previous night and early morning. The Capital Cafe on Franklin Street, directly adjacent to the Baranof Hotel, a decidedly nicer option our acquaintances in Seattle had failed to mention when proffering advice on southeast Alaska lodgings, gave us our first taste of southeast Alaska fare. For Sarah, it was a salmon and asparagus omelet, for me, slightly spicy gravy over biscuits with some strangely neon yellow eggs.
After breakfast, with a full day to kill before boarding the yacht that would take us on our first tour of the Inside Passage, we headed down into what at first seemed a pleasantly deserted town. But then, out of nowhere, three mega cruise ships came plowing into port, unloading an incredible array of blue-haired passengers who, it seemed to me, were ill-equipped to brave the Alaska wilds.
But they were brave enough to descend on Juneau’s rather prosperous waterfront with its shops selling everything from Russian imports to sealskin hats. And as we plied the stores in search of some souvenir that wouldn’t make our carry-on luggage overweight and over-stuffed for our trip home the following week, we noticed something else curious about Juneau. There are more bars here than restaurants. And most of the bars don’t serve food…with the exception of the highly touristy Red Dog Saloon (the one place above all others you should avoid like the plague if ever you’re in Juneau).
But perhaps, given the city’s persistently wet climate and minimal days of sunshine, bars are all the rage. Juneau does receive over 50 inches of rainfall annually, plus another 90 or so of snow. Most of southeast Alaska is, in fact, a temperate rain forest, and a day without rain (or at least mist) is an anomaly.
It took me no more than a day to understand why an Alaska native we encountered on our flight claimed, despite her smooth skin, to be 90 years old. “We don’t get wrinkles in Alaska,” she claimed. “We rust.”
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