Month: July 2011

Why bother forecasting the weather when the forecasts are usually wrong anyway? Look at the 2 forecasts below, both for Whitehorse a couple of minutes ago. The top one is the one I usually use for no particular reason other than that they have a handy widget, Environment Canada....

Last week during a chat on Facebook with a woman I’ve been talking to online for years, she asked if Cathy and I would like to join her and her husband at the Frantic Follies vaudeville show. The answer was definitely “yes”! This is the 42nd season for the...

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been posting reports from the tour I’ve been driver/guide for, a trip from Whitehorse, Yukon to Seward, Alaska for Maher Tours of New Zealand. After leaving them at their cruise ship in Seward, I always do one more thing with my Maher groups...

It’s now Sunday morning and I’m back home after a superb 12-day trip through the Yukon and Alaska. The first photo is the view from our breakfast nook at 07:00 when I started writing this. Another beautiful dawn in Anchorage – this was shot from my suite in The...

The early dawn light yesterday morning as seen from my hotel room at 04:45. The intersection of 4th Avenue and E Street at 04:50. A corner of the lobby of the our hotel, The Historic Anchorage Hotel. We got away on our city tour at 09:00. We had no...

It’s such a shame that we had to leave Denali on a sunny morning! But, off we went at 9:00, heading south on the George Parks Highway towards Anchorage. About 40 minutes later, I stopped at one of my secret spots, a large complex of beaver dams. Construction of...

Yesterday was our earliest start, as the departure time for our Tundra Wilderness Tour (TWT) into Denali National Park was 06:50. Although I heard my group go much earlier, I dawdled and didn’t get to the Courtyard Cafe in our hotel, the McKinley Chalet, until almost 06:00. I was...

Yesterday the people in my group had a somewhat different day than I did. While they traveled to Denali National Park in a glass-domed railway car, I went ahead with the bus. We don’t normally do early starts on these tours, but there are two – we had to...

Yesterday was our day to explore Fairbanks. This was my 1-bedroom apartment at the Wedgewood Resort. This was the view from my apartment yesterday at 03:29, half an hour before sunrise. There’s lots of interesting stuff to look at on the walk over to the restaurant, which is at...

As I start writing this, it’s a few minutes before sunrise, which will be at 4:02. It’s only 47°F (8.3°C) right now but it’s forecast to be mostly sunny with a high of 69 (20C) – a perfect day to explore Fairbanks! Much of yesterday was cold and wet,...