I didn't write anything yesterday because I was a bit busy. So let me recap:
I got up at 6AM in order to make a 9:25AM flight. I'd been intending to get up a bit earlier in order to have more time to button up the apartment but I'd been running short on sleep all week and I was up later the night before than I'd intended. So: feed the cats, water the plants, shut down the computers (not hosting anything gives me the luxury of Turning It All Off when I don't need the heat -- and Seattle is supposed to be having a major heatwave this weekend!), and take off.
Got to the parking, took a shuttle to the airport, got through the checkin line. There's a much bigger line for getting through security, but it moves so rapidly that there's not much point in putting down your luggage. So I got to the gate in plenty of time, even had time for breakfast. There was a Burger King in the terminal. I don't much like Burger King normally, but their French Toast sticks breakfast is, in fact, very good.
I was also a bit nervous because the time of my connecting flight had been moved up, giving me a bit less than an hour in Vancouver to get from one plane to the next. That doesn't sound like much of a challenge, but I have to get through Customs. I was pleased when the flight from Seattle left on time despite starting boarding late, and then we actually got to Vancouver about fifteen minutes early! Lines at customs were short and the major challenge in reaching my next flight was hiking most of the way across the airport: first there's the Deserted Zone, then customs, then baggage claim, then a relatively small area which I'm not sure what it is, then the international terminal, then finally you reach the domestic terminals. Whee!
So: I made it onto the next plane, which was painted a really hideous shade of red with a bit of hot pink in it. Fortunately, I could only see a little of it from inside. What I mostly saw were mountains. There is a reason why British Columbia is mostly empty north of Vancouver: it's shoulder to shoulder mountains, many snowcapped even in July, with only a few narrow river-filled valleys in between, and the mountains just get higher and snowier as you go north.
At Whitehorse, the wind was from the opposite direction than when I'd been there before, so we had to fly past the city and circle to come in for a landing. As a result, I got a much better view of the city than I've ever had. It's about twice as big as I thought. The downtown core is what I've been seeing, but there are some outlying residential neighborhoods. So it didn't surprise me too much to discover, while sitting in the hotel shuttle, that Whitehorse actually has a city bus line, and supports at least three taxi companies as well.
This is the first time I've been in Whitehorse in the summer. I tried coming in May, but that was still winter by my standards. It's definitely summer, now. The few deciduous trees are in full leaf and flowers are blooming and it's very pretty. It's also warm enough to walk around in just a t-shirt, and the city has come to life in more ways than just the floral. There's actually traffic! I mentioned to the driver that I've never seen so much traffic in Whitehorse, and he agreed that it gets a bit crazy in the summer. I suppose if you're used to Whitehorse in the winter, this does look crazy (where I live now, traffic only gets this light in the wee hours of the morning), but then he pointed out the number of RVs on the road, vehicles the size of busses being driven by people who have never driven anything larger than a compact car. I suppose that has to count for something.
I reached the hotel and checked in. I brought my laptop and a pile of other gear because the hotel's web site says that they have "high-speed internet access in most rooms". My room did not have Internet access. (I have to admit that I was kinda waiting for that to happen.) After hauling my laptop through two security checkpoints, I was't going to not use it, so I went back down to the front desk and asked if I could upgrade to a room that does have Internet. The front-desk lady was surprised, they've been told that all the rooms on the second floor do, and gave me some instruction on what to look for. I tried again, and it definitely wasn't there, so she upgraded me to a room that has access.
After getting settled in the new room, I decided that I really needed something real to eat. Sadly, the hotel restaurant still can't make a burger worth a darn. Burgers are difficult to ruin, but being both burned and badly spiced will do it...
Then the next stage of the curse kicked in. On Thursday night before I left, I tested my PCMCIA ethernet card by plugging it into my laptop to see if Windows XP recognized it. (The card was working under the previous Windows 98 installation, but that install finally corrupted itself so my laptop now has XP on it.) XP recognized it, loaded drivers, etc., and I let it go at that. I did not try to configure TCP/IP and actually pump packets through it. I, of all people, should know better than to let things go on trust with computers.
XP does in fact recognize the card. It has drivers for it. Those drivers are unable to tell when a network cable has been plugged into the card. They think the card is unplugged all the time, even though the card knows and has lit the Link light, so therefore they will not send or receive data. And of course I don't have the driver disc with me, not that it would have drivers for XP on it anyway. I could always go to D-Link's website and get them, except that in order to do so I'd need a working network connection, which I can't get without the drivers, etc.
I didn't haul my laptop through two security checkpoints to not use it, so I grabbed the phone book and started looking for stores which carry computer gear. I found one and hiked down to it. They had exactly one PCMCIA ethernet card, but the UPC wasn't in their computer. It took ten minutes and three people before they were able to find it in their inventory. But finally the transaction was done. It's another D-Link card, but it is actually a nicer one in some ways -- this one is CardBus (32-bit) instead of PCMCIA (16-bit). On the other hand, the other one is also a modem. But I don't care, if this one works.
It does, in fact, work. I promised myself that if I could get online to find out movie times at the local theaters, I'd go see something, so after a few minutes I disconnected again and went out to see Spiderman 2, hiking back down to the center of town again. There are only two theaters in Whitehorse, each of which has only two screens. I don't know about the other theater, but this one obviously used to be just one screen, then they built a wall down the center. However, it's not like the Eric Gardens back in Princeton, which did the same thing but so poorly that you could hear both movies at once. (The Eric Gardens eventually got shut down for health code violations, too.)
Not much to report after getting back from the movie. I checked out the TV, discovering that they have a lot more channels now, and no bikini porn in the evenings. It's pretty much like hotel TV anywhere, now.
I'm sure the locals enjoy the increasing sophistication of their city. But me, superficial occasional tourist that I am, I miss the days when Whitehorse was a little smaller, a little remoter, and a little more unique.
Sunset last night was at 10:58, according to the newspaper. At midnight you could still get around without artificial illumination. At 2AM it was genuinely dark, although the horizon to the east was noticeably bright. By 4AM you could walk around without artificial illumination again. Even though it's a month past the longest day of the year, they're still pretty long up here, even by Seattle standards.
I woke up late this morning and had pancakes in the hotel restaurant. They don't seem to do waffles anymore, which is too bad because I loved their waffles. Oh well, the pancakes were OK. And now I'm typing this, listening to police sirens in the distance. Sounds like home.
On Saturday, after writing up Friday's adventures, I trekked down to Well-Read Books on the far side of downtown. On the way, I took a movie of traffic in Whitehorse, to prove that there is some, which my camera apparently decided to throw away rather than save. Also on the way, I confirmed something I thought I saw on the way to the hotel: there are several buildings which have a reserved parking area for emergency vehicles. One appears to be an ordinary apartment building, the other is the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army's sign is a bit more blunt and says "ambulance loading zone only". I'm not sure what either one is about.
Oh, on Friday night I spotted a Texas license plate in the hotel parking lot. They're a long way from home! It's something like 1500 miles from Seattle to Whitehorse, and a lot further than that from Seattle to Texas.
Well-Read Books seems to have more books than last time I was there. There are also more people shopping, which is nice because I'd like them to stay in business. I spent an hour or so selecting a few paperbacks. While I was there, a gentleman came in. He was a real know-it-all and was vocally disappointed that they weren't an antiquarian bookstore and didn't have anything on the "Bauhouse" (his spelling) architectural movement. Um, yeah.
Went back to the hotel and read until it was time for a late dinner. I thought I'd try a steak. Sadly, it appears that the only meal the hotel restaurant can do well is breakfast. The steak was coated in barbecue goo, whose only redeeming feature was that it was mostly flavorless. The baked potato was underdone and I had to scrape sour cream off it. Oddly, the sour cream was mostly flavorless as well. The salad was adequate and the chocolate ice cream for desert was the only part of the meal that really went well. I think that tonight I'll go out and hit Dairy Queen for dinner instead.
New information: there still is bikini porn, it just starts later in the evening. Note that there isn't a local TV station here in the Yukon. The Whitehorse cable company runs a few channels with slideshows of local announcements and advertising, but that's it. And whoever types in the local announcements makes a lot of typos.
I have a few more minutes before checkout so here's the update from Sunday. For once, I actually went down to breakfast on Sunday. I have to be a bit more careful of my blood sugar now and I can't just eat cookies all day. Although after breakfast that's what I did until dinner. I finished a book, then spent most of the day watching anime. I watched the first disc of Noir, which appears to be a very good series.
I really didn't want to try another dinner from the restaurant, so I was thinking of going to Dairy Queen. It occurred to me that I didn't even know if anything was open at 8PM on a Sunday. I got out the phone book to give them a call and find out, and on the front of the slipcover that the hotel put on the phone book is an ad for Domino's Pizza, free delivery to your room.
Sold. So I had pizza for dinner while watching Treasure Planet. After that, I spent the remainder of the evening working through part of the Tales of Future Past website, which is wonderful stuff.
The trip back was uneventful but hungry. I had breakfast at the hotel, then I was going to have a very late lunch in the airport at Vancouver, except when I got to the terminal I discovered that they didn't really have anything but drinks. I'd eaten all the cookies that I started the trip with, too. So I waited until I got home and hit a Wendy's.
Here are some fun pictures that I took:
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Aloria tries to come along by hiding in my backpack. (This is an in-joke, don't worry if you don't understand.) |
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The room that I was upgraded to had some interesting features. For example, this is the shower. Or perhaps that should be punctuated, this is the shower? |
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It also has a light under the counter. So you can see the wastebasket clearly, I guess. |
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The view out the window of my room. |
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Fourth Street. The purpose of taking this picture was to show some traffic, but the cars drove out of the frame before I could hit the button. |
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This is one of the apartment buildings with a parking space reserved for emergency vehicles. I took this picture at maximum resolution, hoping that the sign would be legible, but it wasn't, so I resized the pic down to normal. |
| From the hotel to the airport | A movie I took on the shuttle from the hotel to the airport. Unfortunately, we went out the back way instead of going through the center of the city, so you see a lot of trees. Warning: BIG! About forty megabytes. |