Copper10-8

Day 2 - 08/04/2023; Fairbanks to Denali National Park (con't) Right after this, at 2:45 PM, we picked up one of the Chalet’s shuttle buses which took us to the nearby Denali National Park visitor center where we picked up a different shuttle bus to take us to the U.S. National Park Service Park Ranger’s K-9 kennel headquarters where they currently house 39 Alaskan Huskies who are trained, or still in training, as sled dogs. Denali is the only national park facility that houses park ranger sled dog teams and they have been doing it since 1922! something I was not aware off. We were able to tour the kennel on foot and see some of the dogs on top of, inside, or in front of their houses, as well as speak to one of the park rangers/K-9 handlers. So, in the wintertime, they use these dogs to patrol this huge park, as well as perform search and rescue, and medevac for/of i.e., lost hikers, all while operating as sled teams. At 4:00 PM, the park rangers gave a demo of how the dogs operate by hooking them up to a trolley on wheels ridden/led by a ranger standing on the trolley who guided his team of eight dogs around a short track, stopping in front of the spectators stand. Just like my old police K-9 handler days, the same dogs that were sleeping by their houses while off the clock were all energy and raring to go when going to work. After the demo there was time for questions and answers from/by the audience. A very cool event to attend! Back at the Chalet, we had a Cosmopolitan which took us to our 8:15 PM dinner reservation at the Canyon Steakhouse. Maria had a green salad and rock fish, while I had French onion soup and a chicken dish, and we shared a baked Alaska of course! For tomorrow (Saturday) we have a complimentary Tundra Wilderness tour (believe everyone here part of a land/tour package gets that one) that goes into Denali National Park however, we discovered in our welcome package that they had issued us a 0450 hours departure time! Say what? Up to the tour desk we marched to find out that Tundra Wilderness tour #1 at 4:50 AM is the primo/numero uno tour because “the animals are awake and out”. Sorry for the animals, but we requested and received a more civilized 0910 hours departure time for the Denali animal tour! See ya manana (Saturday) for that one!

Day 2 - 08/04/2023; Fairbanks to Denali National Park When you do the land tour, among other things already mentioned, they give you two different colored Holland America Line luggage tags to affix to your baggages; one is blue and green and says, “Join me tonight” and the other blue and orange and says, “Join me onboard”. So, if you have a piece of luggage that does not contain anything you need during your land tour, you can tag it with the “Join my onboard” one and you won’t see that piece again until you board the ship in Whittier, AK. We were not that organized, so we had the join me tonite tags in addition to a CHL (McKinley Chalet) on all three. The instructions provided told us to place that luggage, tagged and ready to go outside out hotel room door at the ungodly hour of 0630, so another early morning reveille! We would get used to that pretty soon! There was a big box truck parked four floors below us where all that Denali luggage would soon find a temporary home and be off before we were. Breakfast for us was once again at the Northern Latitudes which was a buffet-style affair. It wasn’t crowded at all in there because HAL, Princess and the Westmark, bless their hearts, stagger their departures to Denali, Anchorage and Fairbanks Airport. The buffet included reindeer sausage, sorry Rudolf! along with scrambled eggs, home fried potatoes, bacon strips, “regular” sausage links, biscuits, assorted cold cereal, toast, yoghurt, Danish, etc. etc. The food was good and hot except for the scrambled eggs which were of the powdered variety and not that good. Our bus, DOL-01, departure time was scheduled for 0915 hours, and we were told to arrive in the lobby 15 min early, so we did and joined pax for the three HAL coaches soon off for Denali. Our bus driver, Gene, was also our tour guide for this three-hour jaunt down the Alaska Interstate A-4 and was full of information. The George Parks Highway (numbered Interstate A-4 and signed Alaska Route 3), usually called simply the Parks Highway, runs 323 miles from Fairbanks to the Glenn Highway 35 miles north of Anchorage in the Alaska Interior. The highway, originally known as the Anchorage-Fairbanks Highway, was completed in 1971, and given its current name in 1975. The highway, which mostly parallels the Alaska Railroad, is one of the most important roads in Alaska. It is the main route between Anchorage and Fairbanks (Alaska's two largest metropolitan areas), the principal access to Denali National Park and Preserve and Denali State Park, and the main highway in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. The ride was, at time, on the bumpy side due to the perma-frost (permanently frozen soil) underneath the asphalt, but you get used to it. There was one stop about an hour and a half in at the Tatanlika Trading Company, near Clear, AK, which did an absolute killing in selling freshly popped bags of popcorn, sodas, water, candy, chips, etc. and of course had the obligatory gift shop where the female folk went to work big time, while the well-trained, domesticated husbands like myself, held on to their spouse’s purses and tried very hard not to lose the will to live. Luckily for most of us stronger sex guys, the owner of this undeniable tourist trap, had his Alaskan short field performance bush plane, a Maule M5 235c, N5647S, and great big, oversized tundra tires parked outside for all to take a look at and snap some pics. Back on the bus, our arrival time at the McKinley Chalet Resort at Denali National Park, also owned and operated by Holland America Line, was at 12:15 PM, right on the money! Denali National Park is home to North America’s tallest peak, Mount Denali aka Mount McKinley. The park itself consists of six million acres of wildland, bisected by one 92-mile-long road. The McKinley Chalet Resort, open from May through September each year (in the wintertime, Jack Nicholson roams the hallways with a big Rambo knife, yelling “Here’s Johnny”) is situated on a mere 42 acres of land. In and around the main lobby are two full-service restaurants () and several retail outposts. The separated lodging areas are located throughout the resort, connected by a looped route and serviced by complimentary courtesy shuttles. Once again, no front desk check-in necessary because, upon that arrival, a rep hopped on the bus with welcome packages in hand which contained our room keys. This time, our room was in the “I” for Ida building on the second floor. Be aware, no elevators here. The room is smallish with a separate living area, a single bed and a full-size bed, nice and cozy! Also, there is no air conditioning inside – a single portable fan was provided - and it was once again really nice warm weather in the eighties, so both windows were opened. Unlike the Westmark Fairbanks, no small fridges inside the room, which necessitated a trek, ice bucket in hand, to the ice machine at Building “B”. Life is good and we are here to adapt, improvise and overcome! At 2:00 PM, a dog kennel nearby which raises and trains Alaskan Huskies as sled dogs brought over two 3-month-old puppies, Raven and Chickadee and placed them inside a small pen in the field in front of our building. They do this 3-4 times a week where the residents here can pick them up, pet them, and socialize with them as part of their training. Maria and I each got to do just that and be the recipient of lots of puppy kisses in the face, a fun experience! To be con't

Hey Brian, the tour designator for the land portion was D01 or DOI or combination of those, but definitely not DUI 😉

Day 1 - 08/03/2023; Getting to Alaska (con't) Prior to take-off from Sea-Tac enroute Fairbanks, the captain came on the P/A but the only thing we could hear was “Blue Angels” in town and “maneuver”. The lead flight attendant repeated the announcement and stated that since the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy’s famous aerial flight demonstration team were in town for Seattle’s annual Seafair celebration. They were practicing that show out of the King County International Airport terminal, their temporary base at the north end of Boeing Field, which put them somewhere inside our normal take-off pattern. So, as a result, the captain would have to perform some kind of “odd maneuver” right after take-off in order to avoid them there blue boys in their six F/A-18 Super Hornets flying weally, weally close to each other! That, my friends, is what they call an attention getter or in this case an “odd maneuver”. This turned out to be a banking climb to the left after wheels up which gave us seated on the left side of the aircraft, a nice view of terra firma. Once crossing 10,000 feet, we continued the climb to 34,000 feet and crossed into Canadian airspace, eh. This route would take us northbound over the British Columbia airspace, leaving big Vancouver Island on our port side, before entering back into U.S./Alaskan airspace. This turned out to be a three hour and 15-minute flight, once again in smooth air over some outstanding Alaskan scenery. There was once again a meal service. I had some combo Polenta dish over pasta which was once again quite good. Being the uncouth, bottom-dwelling non-foody individual that I am, I had no clue what “polenta” was/is, but now I do, oh joy! I watched Woody Harelson’s movie “Champions” on my laptop which turned out to be a funny story. Maria watched a British TV show. We went wheels-down at Fairbanks International Airport and taxied past an entire collection of nineteen fifties and sixties propellor birds, some of which are still flying as cargo aircraft. Fairbanks (FAI) is more or less in the center of Alaska, and the airport there serves as a gateway to much of the interior. There are good paved roads running south to Anchorage (360 miles), and southeast to the rest of North America (2,000ish miles to Vancouver or Calgary), but surface transportation throughout the state is limited, with vast expanses accessible only by air. While there’s no shortage of passenger and cargo operators ferrying tourists and freight, there’s a large number of residents whose link between home and the rest of the world is aviation. On the way out today, we saw one of those old cargo boys, a DC-6A, taking off retracting his/her landing gear while still over the runway huffing and puffing away, a cool sight and sound one doesn’t see too often anymore. Brought back memories of my semi-regular trips to Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport by bus with a little Kodak camera in hand as a youth. OK, so once collecting our luggage off the belt, we strolled down to a HAL agent at a suitably marked tour desk, who gave us a welcome envelop that contained, among other stuff, luggage tags for the Westmark Fairmont, our hotel for one night, directed us to affix them tags to our valises, drop those three bags off with the blue shirted guys in the corner and, and take a seat with some other HAL passengers, and wait to be picked up. There were also Princess and Norwegian Cruise Line reps walking around to collect their pax. The wait was less then fifteen minutes when we were directed to board a coach outside, driven by Dolores, hailing from Alabama via Alaska. That drive for 29 of us took all of 12-13 minutes before arriving at the Westmark. There was no checking in at the hotel’s front desk because our, and everyone else’s, room keys were already in that same envelop, which was a good thing, because we were arriving at our temporary abode, with about 100 other HAL and Princess passengers which caused a little bit of a wait for the elevators. Our room was on the fourth floor with a separate kitchen area with small fridge and microwave, a seating area with desk (free internet) and TV and a sleeping area with another TV and, yes, a king-size bed. We’ve done this combo land tour/cruise once before some 15-20 years ago and stayed in the same hotel. At around seven PM, we went down to the hotel’s Northern Latitudes restaurant for dinner. The place was pretty full, but not overcrowded. Maria chose the salmon and moi the fish & chips, both were good while service was prompt. After dinner, we strolled the neighborhood of the hotel to get some light exercise after having been seated for most of the day. The weather was great in Fairbanks, and it stayed light out until 11 PM. Tomorrow (Friday) is our 3-hour trip by bus from Fairbanks to Denali National Park See you then!

Hi, last month (August), Maria and I celebrated our wedding anniversary with a 3-day Alaskan land tour, followed by a 7-day Alaskan cruise (Whittier, AK to Vancouver, BC) on HAL's Nieuw Amsterdam. This is our story, better late than never! Day 1 - 08/03/2023; Getting to Alaska So, Thursday’s reveille was early! 0400 for Maria and 0500 for moi! Our yellow cab pickup to LAX was scheduled for 0600 hours. Stiv, our cat knew exactly what was happening and didn’t like it a bit. He had one of his “thunder runs” sprinting from the family room up the steps, down the hallway, and into our bedroom where he jumped on the bed, letting out a howl/growl all the way. He then sulked away in my office until it was our time to leave when Maria put him on top of our bed under his “blankie”. Maria’s mum Carmen is once again cat sitting! Our cabbie was on time, and we wound up having the same Afghani driver as our last hop to the airport, back in May. He’s the guy that proposed to let us off at Arrivals downstairs, as opposed to Departures in order to avoid the morning rush which there always is at LAX. Good idea! Alaska Airlines is located at Terminal 6, we took an elevator up one level to check-in which is at a kiosk. We then saw an agent who checked I.D.’s and took our bags. TSA was a breeze with their pre-check, so we moseyed up to Gate 64A. Boarding started promptly at 0720 hours, and we took our seats, 2A and 2C in one of Mr. Boeing new generation 737-890’s. After taxiing from the south complex to the north complex and stopping at the threshold of Runway 24 Left, the captain gunned his two CFM International 56-7B engines, and we left the surly bounds. A right turn over Santa Monica Bay and feet dry over Santa Barbara. Our route would take us over northbound over central California, northern California into Oregon, over Portland and into Washington state, where we would start our initial descent into Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport, our first stop. The two hour and five-minute flight to cover the 954 miles was uneventful in smooth air with the fasten seatbelt sign off all the way until the initial descent. Alaska does not have, or no longer has, entertainment monitors in the seatback in front of you or hanging from the overhead. Instead, they offer their complimentary Wi-Fi option which has plenty, or “plentong”, as our Indonesian friends say, of movies and TV shows to choose from, so bring an iPad or a laptop along and you’re good to go. There was a meal service provided by the flight attendants which was served hot and was good. Once on the ground at Sea-Tac which was very busy today, we took the tram to Terminal N and waited for our next flight to Fairbanks, AK, a distance of 1,528 miles, once again in a Boeing 737-900ER (ER for extended range). We got our seats on that bad boy, 3A and 3C, and once the boarding door was shut, and a power cart connected, start up of the No. 2 engine was at the gate because the aircraft’s APU was having a bad day. To be con't

Have a great trip on the Queen, Roy! Fair Winds and Following Seas! 😀

Unlucky ship; caught fire three times during her career. After the third time, she was sold for scrap and towed to Kaohsiung, Taiwan where she was reduced to razor blades in 1984

And if you're really, really interested 🙂 in the LAFD / LA City Fire Maritime Operations Division, here's the remainder, besides Boat 2. LAFD has five fireboats total, so the L.A. Harbor is well protected from teh water #1 - Boat 1 (FS 111 San Pedro-Fish Harbor) - 2003 Kvichak Marine Industries 39' Rapid Response Fireboat #2 - Boat 3 (FS 49 Wilmington-East Harbor) - 2002 Kvichak Marine Industries 39' Rapid Response Fireboat #3 - Boat 4 "Bethel F. Gifford" (FS 49 Wilmington-East Harbor) - 1962 Albina Engine and Machine Works 76' fireboat #4 - Boat 5 (FS 110 Fort MacArthur) - 2002 Kvichak Marine Industries 39' Rapid Response Fireboat

Hey Roy; here's a better pic of LA City Boat 2, the "Captain Warner L. Lawrence" out of Fire Station 112 / San Pedro - Ports 'o Call. She's a 2003 Nichols Brothers Boat Builders 105' fireboat with lots of water canons

Humanity is a favorite, but we also like "In Tandem," their Latin show, which has the BB King's male vocalist in it

Hi Jeroen; So, we saw one brand new show last week - "Move" - by the Step One dancers, and they did one of their older shows "Humanity" The plan is to add two vocalists to the six dancers and come out with brand new shows between the end of 2023 and the beginning of the 2024 Alaska season. Unknown at this time if that new group will still be known as the Step One dancers (the vocalists will not dance, at least not like the Step One group dances) or if they will go back and name them "ship name cast"

"Move," the brand new show by Step One; Pretty good!

Thanks for the wishes y'all! Flying home today from Vancouver, BC after seven days on Nieuw Amsterdam in combination with a 4-day land tour of Alaska. Had a great time!

That's happening as we speak here on Nieuw Amsterdam with/by a trio (piano/bass/vocalist/guitar) playing dance music inside the Ocean Bar

Hi y'all; we are currently on Nieuw Amsterdam in Alaska and learned about some entertainment additions to come. This may be old news so, if it is, please ignore it! HAL will be adding two vocalists to the group of six Step One dancers and is also adding new shows, one of which called "Move," they performed last Monday evening (without the vocalists). Once in place, it will start looking a bit more like the old performance casts of several years ago prior to the introduction of Step One. Also learned that they are bringing back Lincoln Center Stage for performances, not nightly in the Explorations Lounge, but on the Main Stage, two to three times a week. These changes/additions will be introduced on the different ships towards the end of this year, and will be completed prior to the start of the 2024 Alaska season

Excellent news about Scrapnana, thanx!

Thanks Roy! We'll be southbound to Vancouver out of Whittier, AK on Nieuw A after doing a 3-day land tour from Fairbanks via Denali to Whittier Have a great time on QM 2 and Serenity, but I know you will!

We'll do it for you, Roy, starting next Sunday! All the best until you can get your next one! Did you read Crystal is going to be building four new ships?