A Day Redefined

For the last 7 years September 11 has meant terror and death to me. Yesterday all that changed. Our grandson, Dimitry Joseph Fisher Lewis, was born. Now September means hope and life and new beginnings. Only problem: I'm not sure how to spell his first name yet! That's what you get when your children have diverse heritages to celebrate.

Meanwhile, Ron and I are busy getting shots and things in preparation for a trip to China. We leave September 28 and get back on Thanksgiving. I can only imagine how many cute little baby things we're going to pick up there.

Up to date

Just a note to let you know I've finally got all the pictures from our trip uploaded to Flickr. The easiest place to start is here. They're a lot more informative than I've been able to make this blog - have a look. (I'm still adding comments and putting them on the map.)

Home

It's 8 a.m. on Tuesday, and I've been up since 5. Not bad for the second morning home, I guess. And the advantage of still being on a time somewhat east of us is that we get to watch the glorious sunrise light our wonderful mountains. Driving home from Calgary Sunday evening we were both struck by the beauty of our own part of the world: the mountains in the evening light with scattered patches of rain equalled anything we had seen on this or any trip. Prince Christian Sound in Greenland comes close, but only close.

The flight home followed the great circle route, of course, which meant we flew over Greenland. We've done that many times before, but this time we had some sense of what we were passing over, and it was lovely. We also got a good look at Baffin Is., which a lecturer on the cruise had talked about quite a bit, and we could see what had moved and excited him - huge mountains with deep U-shaped valleys, barren and beautiful. I for one want to see that from the ground. It might even beat the scenery around Canmore.

One thing about Europe that I miss here is the efficient and convenient public transit. In Amsterdam in particular - and also London - I was struck by the small number of private cars cluttering up the city centre. Of course it's expensive and inconvenient to drive downtown there, but it's also quite practical not to. Amsterdam has the advantage of being flat, so bicycles are a practical alternative, but there are buses and trams everywhere. You don't have to walk more than a couple of blocks or wait more than 5 minutes to get where you're going. For out-of-town travel there are trains every hour or less going just about anywhere. Why can't we do that here? I know we don't have the population density and people are attached to their cars, but this is a rich province in a rich country - build it and they will come. It particularly annoys me that Canmore has a major railway line going right past our house, but no train station and no way of using the train to get to and from Calgary. What would it take? harumph.

Anyway, it's nice being home. Our apartment and our cats were well taken care of while we were gone, and it's so great curling up in the comfy chair with a couple of purring cats.

On the way home

I'm sitting in the Air Canada passenger lounge at Heathrow (thank you, Evan!) enjoying their free coffee and internet and catching up with a bit of Flickr picture uploading (we're all the way up to the second stop in Iceland - just wait for the Greenland pictures!). We left the ship Thursday morning, not without a sense of relief. Three weeks is just a bit long to be cooped up with a couple of loud Texan war veterans. We met some thoroughly enjoyable people, too, of course: Doug and Helen, Larry and Linda (thanks for the meditation sessions), but the others begin to oppress me after a couple of weeks.

We had three days in Amsterdam in a great little hotel Ron found just a block from the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw. We didn't get any museums visited, but we had our share of concerts: a youth orchestra on Thursday and the Rosenberg Trio + friends (Stephane Grappelli / Django Reinhart style jazz) on Friday at the Concertgebouw, and a Bach recital on the magnificent organ of the Westerkirk Saturday afternoon, so we did get cultured up. Friday we tried to get to a cheese market in a small town to the north, but we missed it by half an hour. Never mind, it was a pretty train trip. We also nibbled on a hemp-seed chocolate bar we picked up at the flower market Saturday, but we didn't really enjoy the effects. I got even more sleepy and stupid than usual, and Ron turned bright red. So we're not tempted to add to our list of favourite intoxicants yet. But we like Amsterdam.

So we're heading home. I for one am looking forward to a bit of utter torpitude and some catching up with email, pictures, knitting and other good stuff. Stay tuned for a knitter's view of the North Atlantic and a couple of patterns I came up with while we were away.

Iceland again, Scotland and beyond

After two days of rough sailing we were in Iceland again, this time in Reykjavik (smoky bay) in the south-east. Didn't spend long there, though - we boarded a bus right away and headed out into the countryside again for more waterfalls, plate tectonics and geothermal stuff. We saw the original Geysir, but he's not spouting any more - tourists threw too many rocks into his mouth. His neighbour Strokkur goes off every 5-10 minutes, though, so we saw lots of geiser activity.

We continue to think we need to spend more time in Iceland. It's beautiful, the people are pleasant, there's a manageable amount of interesting history - we definitely need to go back. And the next stop needs to be revisited, too: Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. Lots of wool available, of course, and I'm bringing back some along with a £10 Shetland wool pullover. But the best thing was the museum. We had time for only a quick survey tour, but it was enough to convince us we need to spend a day in the museum and a week in the islands. Beautiful, beautiful place.

We got to Edinburgh the next day (yesterday). It's in the midst of its annual Festival, with odd-looking people doing interesting things on the street and handing out invitations to the events they're involved in. There are so many plays, concerts, art exhibits and stand-up comics happening in so many places that there is a Sears catalogue-sized book giving all the details, a smaller book listing events by date and time in 10-minute intervals, and a map showing the hundreds of venues around the city. We went to two: a play that was the next thing happening at a venue we stumbled into, and a free stand-up comic performing near where we were when we were browsing the book trying to figure out what to do next. We didn't see any of the standard Edinburgh attractions - Holyrood palace, the Castle, museums, or anything else except from our hop-on hop-off bus tour, but they'll keep until next time.

We did manage to get to the Tattoo, however. It's definitely the best of its kind of event - bagpipes, marching bands, Scottish dancers and the like - and definitely worth doing. For me, once is enough. The seats are intolerably small and squished together and it's coooooolllllldddd. I was dressed for iceberg viewing and still freezing. The woman next to me moved, I think because I was shivering too much! But the music and the marching were superb.

It's looking like we're going to have to spend a good bit of time next summer doing Britain. So far the itinerary includes Penzance, Edinburgh and the Shetlands, and I'd like us to do Plymouth, Stonehenge and places around there as well (I saw them with Rachel's choir 15 years ago, but Ron hasn't been there yet).

It didn't rain in Reykjavik, Lerwick or Edinburgh, although it tried. Now we're back on the high seas - well, the North Sea anyway - and we're back into fog and rain. Perfect planning, I think. Tomorrow it's Amsterdam and the end of the cruise. I expect a return to summer, which we've managed to avoid so far on this trip. It will be a shock!

Greenland

When we first heard about this cruise it was the chance to see Greenland that appealed to me most. I've always wondered what that big white blob at the top of the globe was really like. And here was a chance to find out in relative safety and comfort.

Usually we've found that it's dangerous to have high expectations for a place. Some of our best experiences have been in places we expected to hate - Warsaw, for instance. But not this time.

We got to Greenland after two bumpy days crossing the North Atlantic. Nosing into the shelter of Prince Christian Sound at the southern tip of Greenland, our ship suddenly found itself in calm, smooth water. For nearly six hours we drifted at canoe pace between high rocky walls, past noses of glaciers that spilled down from the main ice sheet, avoiding small icebergs calved just days before. The only green was moss that had found a foothold on the scoured rock. The rest: rock and water and intense blue sky. Until we actually entered the Sound we had no idea if we'd be able to do it - the last ship that had tried to make the passage had encountered fog and ice that made it turn back. But we had great weather and were able to see this landscape that is beyond incredible.

When we left the Sound we sailed right into a dense fog bank that stayed with us until the next day, when we reached the small settlement of Qaqertoq. But as we entered its harbour we sailed into a bright sunny day and a view of cheerful little houses scattered over the rocks. The ship had to anchor and send us to the small dock in the lifeboats. And for a couple of hours the patient Greenlanders endured (with great cheerfulness) an invasion of mostly friendly tourists. We saw a nice little museum, a pretty old church, and Greenland's only fountain. I was most impressed with the colourful and skillful beadwork. The traditional Greenland Inuit woman's outfit includes a huge bead collar that drapes down around the shoulders. There were several for sale by women who'd made them, but I managed to resist - they're heavy.

Back into the fog again as we moved further up the coast to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. And again we came out of the fog bank as we entered the harbour and had another radiantly sunny day. This was a somewhat bigger town that's been growing fast since Greenland got home rule. It had the apartment blocks to show it. Our ship circled around in the bay for awhile, and I could see and hear the captain on the flying bridge: "But we confirmed that we were coming two weeks ago!" he was saying on the telephone. Finally the pilot boat showed up and we backed through a narrow entrance to dock in the inner harbour. Pretty impressive!

The town's buses were commandeered to take our small horde into the pretty part of town and we wandered around a bit, browsing through the tourist shops (expensive!) and the museum (very good, complete with mummies and many other interesting things). I finally found some qiviut (musk ox wool), and thereby hangs a story.

I'd seen some spun qiviut in Qaqertoq, but it was more expensive and not as nice as what's available in Banff. So I was pleased to see a cardboard box of unspun stuff in a funny little tourist shop packed with interesting junk. It was even what I thought was a reasonable price - 1.5 kroner for a gram, which is a fair chunk of this light stuff. So I got a small plastic bag full. But after we left the shop (I also got a musk ox horn and a labradorite pebble) there was a woman with a musk ox hide spread out on the grass, selling a few little things she'd made. To pass the time she was working over some musk ox fur, removing the guard hairs to get the undercoat that's qiviut. We got to talking, and I told her how much I'd paid for the stuff I bought. She was shocked and ashamed that I'd be charged so much, so she took a big bagful of the fur she had and gave it to me. Free. So now I have lots, and lots of work to do to clean it, too.

We sailed out into a fog bank again, but this morning dawned clear and lovely. Sailing down the coast we passed by quite a number of icebergs and realized what our captain and navigator had been dealing with in the fog the day before. We got quite close to one lovely berg - circumnavigated it, even - that obligingly shed bits of itself into the water as the assembled multitude of tourists filled their camera memory cards. What a show!

So now we're back into rough water heading for Iceland again - we'll spend Saturday in Reykjavik - completely satisfied with our Greenland experience. I don't know if we'll ever go back - probably not - but it was an experience I'd recommend to anyone.

From Norway to nowhere

I've been falling into the trap of waiting until there's a good solid internet connection to write about what's been going on. That's not going to happen very soon, so what I'm doing now is writing something on my computer when I can and uploading it when the ship is in contact with a satellite for a few moments. 'Cause most of the satellites - why am I surprised? - are positioned to make communications easy for the largest number of people. And there sure aren't many people where we've been going.

So where have we been? I left off, I think, just before we got to Oslo. Which we did, a week ago Saturday (the 19th, I think). That's where Ron and I left the ship to go across Norway by train, boat, bus and train again, taking a couple of days to do it. We followed the Norway in a Nutshell tour that the Norwegian travel people make easy to arrange over the internet so we could see a little more of what Norway might be like.

The biggest surprise came on the first train leg. We set out from Oslo and travelled through nice green countryside, a bit like the East Kootenays of BC - trees, rounded mountains, some lakes and fast-flowing rivers, farms wherever possible. Nice. Pretty. Finally we came to a large, busy ski resort full of German and Polish tour buses, and then disappeared into a tunnel. When we came out we were on the surface of the moon. Rocks. Lichen. Struggling grasses and a few bent bushes. Lakes with rivers rushing to the Oslo side of the country still, but definitely a different climatic zone. And it was foggy and rainy, not the lovely mostly-sunny day we'd left behind. And it stayed like that for the next couple of days.

We spent the first night in an isolated former sanatorium reachable only by train (a tiny train that clung to the cliff face). The next day we took this train through spiral tunnels and switchbacks to a fjord-side town to catch a car ferry to another little town a couple of hours away. That's when we saw the Norway you see on post cards. Our pictures (to be uploaded to Flickr when there's a bit more internet) aren't post card quality thanks to the rain. Am I ever glad I got my coat waterproofed before we left, because I couldn't stand to spend any more time than necessary inside. By the end of the trip we got to feeling about waterfalls the way we feel about Roman amphitheatres - "Another waterfall? Yawn" - but it took a while. There must have been 39 gazillion of them in every possible arrangement.

We landed in a small town that seems to exist now mostly to look after the tourists like us who miss the bus for the next stage of the tour, but that was okay. Time to get a little lunch and to walk around the perimeter of the Viking fair they were holding that weekend. It was kind of like the Indian Village at the Calgary Stampede, complete with tents and campfires and people dressed up to look like their ancestors. They seemed to be having lots of fun, but we felt a little nervous as we walked along beside the archery pitch - not everyone had a Viking's skills with the bow. Fortunatly the organizers had figured out how far a novice can shoot and had cordoned off the appropriate area outside.

Finally we were in a bus climbing up an incredibly steep one-lane two-way road past a couple of superb waterfalls to a modern hotel overlooking the valley. I think one of my pictures there is postcard quality - I'll stick it in here when I can. The view was incredible. The hotel was expensive, not terribly friendly or well run (except for the young wait staff from Finland, Poland, Spain, Australia, everywhere but Norway), and boring for those of us not suited to trekking over hill and dale (I know, we should - but it hurts!). Back on the bus in the morning to another lovely little town with a gem of a 13th-century church and people parasailing on the lake, then onto the train for the trip to Bergen.

Bergen was lovely, sunny and warm (weather the ship had been experiencing all the time we were away) with a fantastic view from the top of the funicular. It had a good wool shop, too.

Impressions of Norway? Expensive! Everything is at least twice what I felt comfortable paying (except the wool I got on half-price sale in Oslo). Very pretty. Not hugely friendly, and you'd better remember your Turkish ways when trying to board trains or buses. I think that it's one of the few places we've seen enough of on our travels. We don't feel we need to spend more time there, but it was good having seen what we did. And Ron was finally able to realize there his goal of having three different kinds of pickled herring for breakfast.

Next stop, after a couple of days at sea: Iceland. First Akureyri, on the north coast at the end of Iceland's longest fjord. Sharper eyes than mine saw whales and puffins. I enjoyed the scenery and the bright sunny day. We took a bus tour to Myvatn (which our travel companions had figured out means "lake of midges" and had brought bug spray for) and the lava fields around it. It was everything we'd hoped for. We stepped over one of the many cracks where the European and North American tectonic plates are separating; didn't get splashed by boiling mud; and went to Hell and back (an extinct crater near a large geothermal power plant is called Hell - and the water in it freezes over in the winter, too. Our American friends were delighted: if Barack Obama becomes the next U.S president a black man will be inaugurated when Hell is frozen over).

The next day we moved along to the sort of claw that sticks out on the northwest coast of Iceland - a bunch of spectacular fjords - and spent an afternoon walking around the tiny town of Isafjordur. Nice place on the sunny day we enjoyed, but I can imagine how dismal it must be in the winter.

Got one small hint of how things have changed since Viking days. I walked into a lovely little craft store where the young lady behind the cash was knitting. I asked her where I could find wool, and she gestured vaguely along the main street. I wandered all over town and couldn't find the place, so I came back (bought a nice knitted hat for a shockingly small amount of money) and showed her the rather good map we'd been given on the boat. She couldn't read it! Had no idea how to make sense of it. What would her ancestors have thought?

Anyway, we liked Iceland. We're back again in a couple of days, stopping in Reykjavik, and I'm looking forward to it. So far it's a place we'd like to come back to. Maybe spend a couple of weeks near Akureyri exploring and getting to know the people a bit. So our list of places we'd like to go back to continues to get longer.

And now we are really in the middle of nowhere, on our second day at sea heading to Greenland. We finally had a glimpse yesterday of the North Atlantic my father experienced on corvette duty during WW II - near-gale winds and 2-3 meter waves. The biggest surprise so far has been the many birds - kitttiwakes and fulmars - following our boat even way out here. People say they've seen whales, but I've had to settle for the birds. Oh well.