Our travels eastwards by plane from Melbourne commenced on a drizzling Thursday morning with a three hour flight to Auckland. Everything went very much to plan and we headed to the ‘Koru Club’ where we met up with David (“Max”) and Sallyann Brewer who are to be our travel partners for the next two months. After lots of catching up on news and enjoying the luxuries of the Air New Zealand’s Lounge, we boarded our flight to Vancouver at 11.40pm on Thursday evening.After a thirteen hour flight we arrived at Vancouver where it was 2.00 pm on Thursday. Clearing customs was desperately slow due to a vast herd of people from four international flights arriving in quick succession. We eventually reached the front of the queue and collected our bags (joy of joys, they’d arrived too) and arranged transport to our nearby hotel. After a shower and a freshening up we went for a walk around the waterfront region of Richmond, the suburb adjacent to the airport. The marinas were situated in muddy estuarine waters with numerous luxury cruisers packed into pods each with a roof. Our wanderings took us through an industrial region with warehouses, building sites for several new hotels and high-rise apartment blocks side by side. There was an Italian restaurant near our hotel where we enjoyed a hearty meal and some nice Canadian wine prior to retiring for the night. I awoke after only two hour’s sleep at 11.57pm to the realisation that it was still this ‘never-ending’ Thursday! After a much-needed sleep, we breakfasted and headed back to the airport for our flight to Alaska via Seattle/Tacoma. In contrast to last night, the airport was very quiet and despite the intense security measures in place we were through the formalities in super swift time. We initially flew south from Vancouver to Seattle in a Bombadier Q400. This was a short flight of around an hour over the most incredibly complex waterway imaginable. Hundreds of islands, large and small make the border between Canada and the USA a boating paradise and the number of yachts, boats, large liners as well as marinas seen below was testament to this. We finally boarded our 737-800 and headed for three hours ‘north to Alaska’ arriving at Anchorage in mid afternoon. The air temperature was 13C with heavily overcast conditions with occasional hints of rain. With all of our luggage in tow, we phoned for a complimentary mini-bus service to our hotel which eventually turned up. We are sharing a hotel unit with the Brewers for two nights. Tomorrow we have a day in Anchorage and intend to do some site seeing and generally relaxing prior to commencing our Peregrine travels on Sunday 27th July.
Anthony's wine, Seattle, 25 Jul 2014