Getting to the fun of the details of the trip

As I finished Monday's post I mentioned that I would go into a bit more detail of the plans for the excitement of the trip ahead when I had a chance.

Piecing Together Ideas for each destination

My initial discussion in Trailfinders was completed with everything booked and the deposit paid by the 7th of October. I then spent the next few months reading blogs and other online sources about each of our destinations, booking most of the accommodation in those quiet days between Christmas and New Year.

San Francisco

This was the easiest part of the planning. Once the flights were confirmed I simply went to the Hotel Triton website to look at rooms.

My first visit to San Francisco was in 1994, which was also my first visit to the USA. My sister, brother-in-law and brother and I travelled around California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah, flying in to Los Angeles and out of San Francisco. Like New York three years later, my first visit to San Francisco gave me a sense of déjà vu. The iconic sites brought back so many of the films and TV series of my younger years.

Hotel Triton - a home from home

Two years later (1997) I stopped at San Francisco for six days on my way home from Australia. The travel agent though whom I had booked this holiday had stayed in the Hotel Triton herself some years before and recommended it to me when I asked for a hotel in the centre of the town. Since then I have stayed at the Triton in 2000 (in January and September), 2002, 2009 and 2013. On my last visit I wrote a few words about the hotel on the blog.

So we are staying at the Hotel Triton from Friday the 2nd of August to Tuesday the 6th and then from Tuesday the 20th to Friday the 23rd. There are lots of plans of places to visit when we are back in the City by the Bay - I can't wait.

Kauai

I suspect Kauai will be the surprise of the holiday. Looking at what the island has to offer I decided it would be worth booking a car for our short stay here as the various sights are spread around the island. 

Kauai, Hawaii - Google Maps

The little red flags <<Co-Pilot's Note: He means, dear readers, Green Flags, you have to forgive him as he is colour blind!! Poor Dab.>> on the Google Maps image above are some of the key sights. As you see they are spread wide across the island, which is why we think we need a car. The sights include: Waimea Canyon State Park; Nā Pali Coast State Wilderness Park; Poipu Beach; Spouting Horn; Nawiliwili Harbour and Hanalei Bay. 

I spent a long time looking at places to stay, as I'd never heard of Kauai (pronounced Coweee) before planning the holiday, let alone been there. After evaluating the options we decided to stay near Poipu, with its wide range of restaurants, at the Poipu Bed and Breakfast Inn. We will be there from Tuesday the 6th of August until Friday the 9th.

Honolulu

Unlike Kauai I suspect Honolulu will seem familiar when we get there. Having grown up with Hawaii Five O, Magnum and Tora, Tora, Tora there should be some familiar scenes. Granted Tora, Tora, Tora was made in the 70s and depicted the 40s. Hawaii Five O was made in the 70s too, and Magnum in the 80s, so I suspect things will have changed. However the obsession with Waikiki in Five O and Magnum did lead me to look in that area for a place to stay. Finding the Holiday Inn Express as a base from which to see the sights of the city. So we are there from Friday the 9th to Monday the 12th of August. Most of the city is within half an hour walk of Waikiki, so there seems to be a lot to do. But we may need a bit of rest and relaxation by this point in the holiday?

Alaska

Of all the parts of the holiday it is the Alaska bit that felt easiest to plan. Why? Well because we are using the 8 days we have in what will be the 50th State of the USA that we have visited to have the kind of holiday with which we are familiar. i.e. a driving tour.

With the help of Trailfinders we discovered we could fly overnight from Honolulu to Anchorage, and this seems a good use of our time. We opted to upgrade this flight to ensure we could rest on the journey. So we will leave Honolulu at 9:40pm on Monday the 12th and arrive in Anchorage at 6:00am on Tuesday the 13th.

We pick up another hire car at Anchorage Airport and take the route outlined in the map below:

Alaska Route - 1,258 miles over 8 days, we did that over three days last year

The route takes us to:

Homer - Tuesday 13th 
Homer - Wednesday 14th
Anchorage - Thursday 15th
Denali - Friday 16th
Fairbanks - Saturday 17th
Fairbanks - Sunday 18th
Copper Center - Monday 19th
Return to Anchorage Airport for flight to San Francisco - Tuesday 20th

The key things that informed our (my) decision making with the rest of the route included (a) visiting the Kenai Peninsula (b) being in the right place on a Sunday for Mass (not as easy in Alaska as in other parts of the US) (c) visiting Mount McKinley, as it was called when I studied geography, its name having been restored to the native name of Denali since 2015. 

As you see the route picks up on all of these criteria. While the route to Homer from Anchorage and back sees us retracing our steps, something I try to avoid on holiday, but the shortage of roads in the area means a round trip isn't possible. On the other hand I have no reason to go to Copper Center, other than it was choice between going from Fairbanks to Anchorage this slightly lengthy way or going south the way we went North. At least on this occasion we didn't have to retrace our route.

Many people who visit Alaska travel by cruise boat up the 'Inside Passage' which begins in Astoria, Oregon travels up the British Columbia coastline and into Alaskan waters including Juneau, the State Capital. That part of Alaska is on a South-Eastern peninsula that is further south than most of the state. The map below shows our route in the context of the wider view of Alaska.

Alaska is a big place

So we may be traveling a thousand odd miles, but we will still be only touching on the immensity of Alaska. At Copper Center, we will only be 2,000 miles by road from Vancouver (1,200 as the crow flies), the nearest point between this year's trip and last year's.

Starting the journey home

After completing our circuit in Alaska we will leave Anchorage and return to San Francisco for a few days of chilling before flying home. It feels like a busy holiday when I write it out in this much detail, but I think it will be worth it to get to our last two states and achieve a complete set.

Time

There is one item I think I may struggle with on the holiday, time changes. Normally when in Canada or the USA we gain an hour of daylight a day when we cross a time-zone boundary. So any jet-lag is overcome once the Atlantic is crossed, not during the holiday.

This time however time shifts might be even more dramatic. Once the 8 hours time difference between London and San Francisco is overcome, we have three hours to Hawaii and then two hours the other way between Alaska and Hawaii. I may get confused, let's hope my body is more resilient!

Seeing it on my phone makes it a little clearer: 

What time is it??

So it's 1.04pm here, 5:04am in San Francisco, 4:04 in Anchorage and 2:04am in Honolulu. So for much of the holiday most of my readers will be asleep when I am writing!

Please note Tamworth, at the bottom of the image, is in New South Wales, Australia, where my brother and his family live. We are normally 9 hours different, in Honolulu we'll be 20 hours different. i.e. we'll not often be in the same day!! Weird.

I'm sure we'll cope however, indeed the time variation may turn out to be part of the fun - we'll see. 

Tomorrow

So folks - tomorrow the journey/adventure begins, I look forward to you joining us, virtually, during the time away.

Starting to get excited now

Today brings two emails which start to make the holiday seem very real. 

Food

The first came as a surprise. We have flown with Virgin Atlantic for many years, but this is the first time we have been asked about food in advance of the flight. 

The email said:

This was followed by a link for me to click to confirm the choices from the range of food available. 

The options are:

Stir fried pork with Asian vermicelli vegetable noodles and Beijing bean sauce. 

Chicken and mushroom casserole  Buttered new potatoes and green beans. 

Asparagus and ricotta gnocchi with Spicy tomato sauce, sweet peppers and broccoli.

I wonder what you would have chosen, dear reader. It was rather an easy choice for me, as it is Friday when we are flying, a day when the Church asks us to abstain from meat it is going to be the Asparagus and ricotta gnocchi.

I checked with Drew and he opted for the Pork, telling me how lovely and meaty it will be!! He does like rubbing it in when I have to abstain, as I am an instinctive meat eater!

Virgin Atlantic confirmed the choices with a few moments of us making them.

I think that is quite impressive. We have until Thursday 11.00am - 24 hours before the flight - to change our choices if we wish.

Sleep

The second email I was expecting, as we have experienced it in the past. This was out chance to Check-in online for our airport hotel. The Premier Inn, Bath Road, Heathrow.

That all sorted it made me feel the holiday is just a short few hours away, which I admit is a lovely feeling.

Planning the Holiday

In the blog yesterday I mentioned sharing the thought processes of the planning for this holiday to the last two states (both the last two to become states in the USA, and the last two for us to visit). So here is how we came to the decision to take the holiday we are taking this year.

First Thoughts 

Having completed visits to the 48 contiguous states in 2013 (me) and 2015 (Drew) I thought we had completed our US targets, as this was always my expectation and dream and we had succeeded. 

Indeed I remember the lovely meal we had in the Pirogue Grille, Bismark, North Dakota to celebrate my 48th state. However since then quite a number of people have said why not go for the 50, but I had no great incentive to do so. For me the 48 contiguous states seem like a unit, while the other two seemed like an add on. 

When we came to early discussions about 2019 holidays back in 2016 we didn’t have any bright ideas. The 2017 trip to Florida and 2018 to Canada had been planned (in general terms) and scheduled for four or five years, but we had no ideas for 2019. In case Paula Keys asks, yes I do keep a holiday planning spreadsheet!  It was at this point that Drew has the bright idea to make it to the 49th and 50th states, and suggested we should look at how hard it would be to pick up these final two states, so we began to look at options. 

Of course the internet was our first location to look for potential trips. At the time Trailfinders, the travel agents, had a tour called The Tour of Ice and Fire, as I mentioned yesterday this is a reference to the Game of Thrones original novel series which is called A Song of Ice and Fire. The title Game of Thrones being the name of the first book of the series. However by the time we got down to serious planning the Trailfinders trip was no longer on their site, but at least it showed that doing the trip was possible.

Getting down to the planning

We came to September last year, the week after getting back from our last holiday. This was when we began to move our general idea to specific plans. The fact that the particular tour was no longer available was, it seems to me, a bonus, I think that the holiday feels much more personal when planned ourselves. So we began to look at a range of options to get from the UK to the two States, and it became clear that the travel process was complex if we tried to go direct. So I suggested to Drew we use San Francisco, an old favourite of ours, as a base from which to fly from and back to the UK before moving on to our main destinations meaning we could use Virgin Atlantic, our favourite airline, for the UK to/from US leg of the journey. 

Trailfinders

At this time, having mapped a possible route and looked at possible dates I looked for help. Given the complexity of travel, I decided to make use of Trailfinders to help book the flights for the holiday.

Trailfinders Cardiff - a great help in the planning process

Though I’ve been doing self-booked holidays since the 1990s these have mainly been flydrive, rather than multiple flights. I was really glad I did choose to do it this way as the core ideas of the holidays became part of the discussion with Paul Jardine at Trailfinders who clarified both where to go in Hawaii and where was worth visiting in Alaska.

Paul Jardine, provided insightful and clear advice - Photo courtesy of Trailfinders website

Paul advised doing two centres in Hawaii, a sightseeing place and a city break, combining the options the islands have to offer. Drew's only guidance/instruction, given the propensity we have had to encounter disasters (earthquakes, floods, fires) on previous holidays, was to stay away from Big Island, which has some active volcanoes. Paul recommend the oldest, and therefore the least prone to live volcanoes, island - Kauai. 

Overview Plan

So after 45 minutes of discussion I left Trailfinders in September with the basic plan of the holiday booked as follows:

Friday 2nd of August - London Heathrow to San Francisco

Tuesday 6th of August - Oakland to Lihue 

Friday 9th of August - Lihue to Honolulu

Monday 12th of August - Honolulu to Anchorage

Tuesday 20th of August - Anchorage to San Francisco

Friday 23rd of August - San Francisco to London Heathrow

or as the Trailfinders App called Viewtrail would have it now we have also added in Car Hire:

The Trip on Viewtrail app
NB - Just remembered to doctor the picture so that the booking references were illegible.
I wouldn't want someone booking in as us!!

So we are about to have five flights with four different airlines and Car Hire in two locations. A great difference from our usual three weeks of driving, but a combination that, I hope will provide a great opportunity to engage with the places we are visiting.

Pop back tomorrow for further reflections on the holiday, especially the more detailed planning that followed the outline above. 

A Tour of Fire and Ice

Another Year, another Holiday Blog

Well folks here we are again at the start of another of my holiday blogs. This is now the ninth holiday when I have used a blog to capture my thoughts, feelings and reflections and share them with you my dear reader.

It was in 2006 that I first blogged about a trip when we visited South East Asia, since then I have blogged as we have travelled around Southern Europe (2012), Scotland (2016), the USA three times (2013, 2015, 2017) and Canada twice (2011, 2018). I have always found keeping a blog to be a great way to engage with family and friends as we are on the journey, and as a source of memories and pleasant reflections when I look back at the trips when back home. 

Hopefully this blog will serve the same function this year as we take a very different type of holiday than in the past.

So time for the big question: 

Where are we going?

A Tour of Fire and Ice

2019 - A Tour of Fire and Ice

Drew, who was the main instigator of the initial plans for this year's holiday, has called it "A Tour of Fire and Ice" since we began our planning. This title is an allusion to the Game of Thrones original novel series which is called A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as a reference to the places we are visiting.

As the image above, and the background image of the blog (which may not be visible if you are reading the blog on a mobile device) indicates, the holiday will be based around the West Coast of the mainland USA (San Francisco), Hawaii (which has long been considered as the Heart of the 'Ring of Fire') and Alaska (with its Ice and Snow).

So we have a very varied range of locations and a lot more travel (especially by air) than in our previous holidays where most of the journey had been done by land (road or train) not air.

We leave home on Thursday, in the days between now and then I'll update on the details of the holiday and the way we planned for this year's trip.