Month: October 2014

The subject of Northern history shows up a fair bit on this blog, and a lot on my main Web site (ExploreNorth), but I’ve never really shown you what my passion for history looks like at home. With the weather not being very conducive to outside activities, I’m spending...

It’s hard to believe that it’s only 12 days ago that we were on Waikiki Beach. My head has been having a hard time adjusting, and I needed to do something to get myself into winter mode, so I drove to Skagway with the fur-kids yesterday. It’s been almost...

The last-minute decision to make the fairly long detour to Wells Gray Provincial Park resulted in one of the most memorable 24 hours of the trip. Established on November 28, 1939, the 541,516 hectare (1,338,115 acre) park offers superb opportunities to see spectacular canyons and waterfalls as well as...

On Thursday, we began the 4,000-mile trip home. We were scheduled to fly out of Honolulu at 1:15 pm with Alaska Airlines, have a very short overnight in Seattle, and be in Whitehorse just before 2:00 pm Friday. Although there were some bumps along the way, that’s not too...

With the end of our Hawaiian vacation nearing, there was one more site we needed to see on Oahu – Nu’uanu Pali Lookout. It was planned to be a very short excursion with MJ and Jim, but we got a bit sidetracked 🙂 From our hotel to the lookout...

On Tuesday, we finally reached the special day that this trip was planned to celebrate – Cathy’s 50th birthday. After our long and hot day at Pearl Harbor the previous day, this would be a calm beach day, with dinner at a great restaurant that night. After a walk...

This is part 2 of our day at Pearl Harbor, which began with about 3½ hours at the USS Arizona Memorial. We would have less than 2 hours to go through the Pacific Aviation Museum, which I knew would not be enough. It had become clear that to see...

The only big day we had planned for Oahu was a visit to Pearl Harbor, which we had booked months ago for the 4 of us. The USS Arizona Memorial was the first priority, next was the Pacific Aviation Museum, and if we had any time left there were...

Saturday evening was a busy night for most of the passengers on the Celebrity Solstice, but not in a good way. For about 2,400 of the 2,800, this was our last night on the ship – on Sunday morning we had to disembark. The other 400 would continue to...

On Friday night, our ship stayed in the harbour at Lahaina, Maui, allowing me to book an early-morning scuba trip to the island of Lanai for Saturday. Just before 06:00, I boarded a tender to get back ashore from the Celebrity Solstice. The seas were rougher than they had...