Monday 8 August 2022 – So, here we are, on our way. The morning was the usual mix of dread, anticipation and panic as we made our final preparations.  We’d done quite a good job of ensuring that we had orchestrated a symphony of readiness – no excess milk, the last of the coffee was enough for the morning jolt, and nothing has been left to rot in the fridge whilst we’re away.  But still there was the underlying agitation, inevitable before a major trip, that we’d missed something.  Our taxi was due at midday, so we had the whole morning to stew. Much displacement activity was on display, wandering from room to room, picking things up and putting them down again to no apparent purpose.  Ah, the joys of holidays! After an agonising wait, the taxi turned up five minutes early, and got us to Heathrow Terminal 2 with no incident.

The terminal was busy, but in a purposeful, rather than chaotic way. There were kind people to point us in the right direction as we looked for the Air Canada check-in desks. These, it turned out, are in Area A and a helpful chap told us to “Go where it says A”.  It also struck me that this was very Canadian, as we had to “go where it says, eh?”

A further helpful chap pointed us at the remotest corner of the area where the (#smug) business class check in desk was and we managed to get our bags checked through only to Vancouver, as, left to herself, the lady on the desk would have checked our bags in all the way to Anchorage, and we don’t trust the world’s baggage handlers that much yet, hence the baggage trackers (see later).

It’s not often that Heathrow airport manages to surprise and delight me (often the former happens without the latter), but surprise and delight were the order of the day as we discovered that the Fast Track through security was open, despite rumours that it wasn’t operational at Heathrow.  So the security queue was a mere 15 minutes, and staffed by people who were very cheerful and helpful. More to the point, they didn’t regard the technology-stuffed backpack I proffered as being in any way suspicious, which was also a very welcome development.

All that was necessary then was to get to the Air Canada lounge, which, it turned out, was a major walk to Terminal 2B (or, erm, not 2B – that is the question. But the answer was that it was 2B) – a 20-minute slog, during which I discovered that my backpack was so heavy that the shoulder straps began to restrict the circulation to my fingertips. It was nice to settle down with a glass of something cold and a bite to eat as we waited for our flight.  The Maple Leaf Lounge, for this is what it is called, is a step up from yer common-or-garden BA lounge in that it features a tended bar,

kept spotless by the staff, who presumably mop up spillages with a Maple Leaf Rag. Thank you. Thank you for reading my Maple Leaf joke.  I will try to avoid using the gag again, much, I’m sure, to your re-leaf. But if I do re-use it, I’ll do it as soon as I maple.

Jane has done her usual magnificent job of ensuring that all the paperwork was not only completed but also to hand as needed as we transit over the next two days from UK to Canada to USA and eventually back to Canada.  Because of this, we will have to fill our details in twice to the app that the Canadian authorities insist you use – ArriveCAN.  As we sat in the garden yesterday wondering what the weather would be like in Canada, I discovered that “there’s an app for that”, courtesy of Environment and Climate Change Canada.  It’s called WeatherCAN, but we can’t access it from the UK, so I will load it up when we arrive in Vancouver.  I also wonder if the Canadian equivalent of CAMRA, the UK Campaign for Real Ale (I bet there is one), might have an app, possibly called BeerCAN.

It’s now an hour until our scheduled departure and so there’s little left to do except look forward to (in the short term) an opportunity to catch up with some movies on board the plane and (in the longer term future, hopefully a perfect one) two months of experiencing the joys of Canada.  Do join us as we go along.

Friday 5 August 2022 – It’s three sleeps until we leave on a trip to Canada which will involve us basically crossing it from left to right, Doing Canadian Tourist Things – seeing grizzly bears, polar bears, northern lights, glaciers, mountains, whales, maple syrup, that kind of thing. It’s quite an ambitious itinerary and you can – of course! – keep tabs on our progress through these very pages.

However, we are in the throes of the agony and the ecstasy of preparation – dealing with (seemingly endless) paperwork, indecision about What To Pack and anticipation of how much fun it’ll be.  Complicating this further is the only bit of our holiday which doesn’t involve Canada.  The first week or so will actually be spent Cruising The Inside Passage which sounds rather like something the polite people don’t do in public but actually means embarking on a ship in Anchorage and exploring coastal parts of Alaska on the way to entering Canada at Vancouver. This means that we fly to Vancouver (Canada), and after an overnight stay we fly on to Anchorage (USA). So we have to deal with two sets of immigration bureaucracies.  I’m profoundly glad that Jane, my wife, is superbly well-organised, so I’m sanguine that those bits that are under our control are sorted.

The cruise bit is mind-boggling. We are not experienced cruisers, if you’ll pardon the phrase.  We have done a couple of river cruises and a sea cruise in South America. None of the ships involved more than 200 passengers, so travelling on a ship with 600 passengers is going to be a new experience for us.

We are travelling with Silversea, on Silver Muse. The ship calls at faraway places with strange sounding names, like Skagway and Ketchikan; four ports between Seward, where it starts, and Vancouver, where it stops.

The mind-boggling bit? It’s the cruise programme, which has clearly been designed by someone who loves logistical challenges.

On our previous cruises, the options for passengers were: (a) go ashore and join the tour of the local town; or (b) don’t. By contrast, during the week we’ll be aboard Silver Muse, passengers can select from 93 – 93! – activities spread over the four ports of call.  The document which describes the options is 72 pages long and offers a frankly bewildering sea of possibilities.  There’s the obvious stuff – wildlife (often including whales and/or bears), glaciers, helicopter or seaplane trips for the affluent, and, of course, tours around the ports of call. But the hyperactive event organisers at Silversea have also arranged to also offer sea kayaking, dog sledding, lumberjack shows, bicycling (even sea bicycling) and ziplining among a plethora of Things To Do. Any illusion of wafting along for a week nursing a cocktail and relaxing have been thoroughly dispelled. All in all, it has taken a couple of days of wandering through web pages and discussing among ourselves to come up with our likely programme, and it looks like we’ll be exhausted at the end of it, dazzled by the variety and novelty of what’s been on offer.

If that weren’t enough complexity, we have to try to second guess the weather for the next two months in order to understand what to pack.  Since we’ll be seeing northern lights and polar bears, we’re told to bring skiing gear and boots; we’ll be hiking so we have to bring walking boots and wet weather gear; and it’s quite likely that some places will be quite warm, so we’ll need T-shirts and shorts. We have to get this into 23kg, somehow.  And I have all my photo gear to consider, too. I have documented my angst about this separately to spare you.

Another thing to worry about is the actual travelling itself.  If the papers are to be believed we are in for some olympic-level queuing which will call for heroic patience.  Luck will allegedly be involved when it comes to being in the same continent as our baggage when we land (I’ve bought some baggage trackers which I hope we don’t need to make use of). A sense of confusion, anticipation and excitement threatens to overwhelm.

I frame this as being a set of agonising decisions in the face of crippling uncertainty. Of course it isn’t, really – it’s supremely exciting and we’re really looking forward to starting the trip.  I hope you’ll spend some time in these pages catching up with our travels and what we see as we go.

Onward, then: to Vancouver and then – North! to Alaska! (Sound needed….)