Mar 23, 2018
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Puerto Rico
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
Today’s topic: Annabelle’s Candy
Agreed!
3am issues
Last night I stayed up with one of my best friends, Marielys. At like 1am I was jamming to straight hood rat music and trap music. I figured out that I don't start school til the 18th when I have been thinking I start on Monday. I had to wake up at 7am to go get my hair done then I went had a Lunch with Marielys and some good ass Fish N' Chips. To top it all off i had this chocolate chip cookie goodness that made me want to jizz in my pants. Didn't get back to my house til like 6:30 and we both knocked out yo. My bed is the regenerate spot yo!!! My mother went to my aunties house she betta bring me back some danm BK of we gunna have a talk.
Distance Sucks!
My room is so far away from the kitchen.
Townies, Thieves & Bears... Oh My! (Part 2)
Days 15-19 (July 30th – August 3rd): Ketchikan, AK; Prince Rupert, BC; Vancouver, BC; Everett, WA
Apparently getting into the United States as an American citizen is a lot easier than getting into Canada. We woke up rather early, walked to our ferry terminal and talked to a pleasant woman behind the counter who told us when we could board the ferry. It wasn’t for another couple of hours so we had some time to kill. With no service, our options were limited. I thumbed through a copy of “Alaska Travel” while Johnny munched on one of our $10 bagels. After I was finished Johnny split half his bagel with me and I gave him my copy of the magazine. We were one of the first ones in line to go through security. These security officials were a lot nicer than the border patrolmen at Oroville, WA. The guard that helped us was an imposing man standing taller than either Johnny or me. He asked if we had any goods we would be bringing in. We answered with just the orange and he said “Have a good trip.” The whole ordeal took about 5 minutes. We read in the local paper that a group of Pakistani men and disappeared from a freighter in Vancouver. We figured that with that going on security would be heightened. The ferry was a lot smaller than I expected. There were only four levels to it and maybe about 20 or so cars to come aboard. We boarded on the lowest level with all the cars and proceeded to walk up the other 3 stories worth of stairs. This was not an easy task when you have 3 days worth of equipment strapped to your back. We found a common area in the highest level and got situated. It wasn’t soon after we departed that we both fell asleep in our chairs. When we awoke a couple hours later (only about 2 hours into the 6 hour trip) we needed a pick-me-up and went to the cafeteria a level below to get some coffee. I don’t know what it is about the coffee we make but all of the coffee we’ve gotten from other places just doesn’t taste nearly as good. I spent most of the voyage catching up on some podcasts I had been a little negligent of.
We arrived in Ketchikan, AK around 3 PM. We looked up the town and Wikipedia to see how big it was and if we needed to take the car. According to Wikipedia the town of Ketchikan is 4 square miles. I took that to mean 4 miles long and 1 mile deep. I didn’t take into account that it could be 8 miles long and a half mile deep. According to the website we booked our hotel through, the hotel was located just across the street from the dock. This was true and false. We got through customs as fast as we had getting onto the ferry and asked some greeters at the terminal where our hotel could be located. One very nice guy who couldn’t have been much older that 20 told us the hotel wasn’t far, just 3 miles south of the terminal. Just 3 miles south?! Why is the internet lying to me?! It turns out that the hotel is located just across the street from the dock. However, that dock is for cruise ships, not ferries. After a second’s contemplation on getting a taxi, we manned up and started walking for the hotel.
The town of Ketchikan is really two parts: the local part which seems to be more bars than houses and the “tourist area” for the cruise ships. A couple days after arriving we decided to take the bus and see what the rest of the town had to offer. We waited for the bus with a man, his wife and their son. The man told us that 10 years ago the town was very different from the way it is now. Everyday 4 cruise ships come in and tourists spill out into the town. With the cruise ships moving in, they bought a lot of the property around the dock and turned it into a strip mall. Every shop is filled with “Ketchikan Alaska!” sweatshirts and shot glasses. The man also told us that when Wal-Mart came in 100 small businesses closed down including his music shop. I had heard of Wal-Mart doing this but had never really talked to anyone it had happened to.
Walking down the main street of Ketchikan you see the harbor all along the right side of the road and a mixture of houses, small eateries and bars on the left. The group of greeters at the terminal made it a point to see that we had to check out “the tunnel” on the way which is in the Guinness book of records for being the only tunnel you can go through, around and over. Trust me, it sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is. We made it to our hotel in no time. At the entrance of our hotel an older man with wandering eyes wearing a cowboy hat and a tattered Carhartt jacket walked up to me and said “I LIKE YOUR HAT!” Before I could say thank you he abruptly stopped me and blurted out “Never mind, that’s just the yellow from your pack!” He then giggled to himself and walked away. After the strange conversation we shot up the stairs to our room on the third floor and threw off our packs in just enough time to collapse completely exhausted onto the bed.
After showering up, we got dressed and headed down to the bar connected to the Gilmore Hotel where we were staying named Annabelle’s. Johnny took to the local cuisine and ordered a cup of clam chowder and some halibut. I on the other hand being a connoisseur of buffalo chicken was forced to order the buffalo chicken wrap. Surprisingly, the white sox game was on the TV there so we ordered two Alaskan Summer Ales to finish off the meal and struck up a conversation with our bartender, Mike. We asked him what there was to do in this town when it was rainy and his answer was simple… drink. Always being people that do as the Romans do, we ordered 2 more beers. This time Johnny went with a Black Butte Porter and I went with the Alaskan White which was a delicious wheat beer that came with an orange slice. After finishing those, Mike told us that the bar across the street had cheap pool if we were looking to play. This place was called the Sourdough Bar. It seems that our drinking schedule was still in Illinois time so when we walked in at 9 we were the only ones there. Rounding out the day in class we decided to drink the nightly special PBR. We played pool for about an hour or so before what seemed like the whole town descended upon this small bar. I went to the bathroom and when I came back the whole bar was full. A few local patrons challenged us to some pool so we humble said “we’re not that good”. Their reply at hearing that was “neither are we”. We played maybe 6 or so games striking up conversations in between shots. The two guys were younger, close to our age, and were really friendly. My recollection is a bit hazy, either because of the PBR or the absurd amount of cigarette smoke in the bar, but I’m pretty sure we may have just squeaked out a game or two more than those guys. I must say that Johnny and I are quite a formidable team on a pool table. I think we had just began our 2nd game when the came crazy cowboy we met outside the hotel that afternoon walked up to our group and said “I got $20 that says I could whip any of you!” and started to take off his jacket. After we assured him that he would have no problem wiping the floor with us because of our horribleness we exclaimed “Well Hell! You done made me take off my jacket for nothing!” He then looked at me with frustration wanting me to help him put his jacket on. That wasn’t the only strange occurrence we had with the townsfolk. While we were in the midst of our 3rd or 4th game a small middle aged inuit woman walked up, tugged the back of my shirt and said “HEY! That’s a nice shirt!” I was looking quite good in the shirt so I thanked her for the compliment. She then continued to tell Johnny and I that we were really cute. She spouted out a few more nonsensical words before walking away. After we finished our last round of PBR’s we wished everyone a good night and headed back to our hotel to crash for the night. At the hotel entrance, we heard someone yell “Sexy, Sexy!” We turned around and the woman from the bar was leaning against a wall a couple buildings down from our hotel. I did the only rational thing I could think of at the time which was to grin like an idiot and wave my hand uncontrollably like a kindergartener waving goodbye to his parents on the first day of school.
The next 2 days weren’t that exciting. We woke up, again taking advantage of the continental breakfast, and took off around the dock area to see what the tourist shops had to offer. It seemed like there were intervals of jewelry shops mixed with souvenir shops. There weren’t really any shops of substance anywhere to be found. We ate lunch at a little shack on the docks that supposedly had the best fish in town. The Alaskan Surf Fish & Chips was spot on with the assumption. Johnny and I split a Halibut platter that was some of the best fish I’ve ever eaten. The fish was so good it made me reconsider my diet to incorporate more fish. After our delicious meal we felt the need to top it off with some dessert so went to the only ice cream place we could find called the Little Dipper. Their Peanut Butter Chocolate milkshakes are where it’s at. They are super thick and super peanut buttery because they actually use real peanut butter. We killed some more time walking around town through seemingly the same shops before making our way back to our hotel. With the free HBO the hotel offered we watched that week’s True Blood before trying our luck at another local bar known as Arctic Bar. We went with another round of Alaskan beer and sat outside on their porch to hopefully catch a glimpse of the aurora borealis. Since the sun doesn’t fully set until 12:30 we didn’t get to see the northern lights but we didn’t get to meet a rather disgruntled gentleman who was sitting in my seat talking to Johnny when I came back from the bathroom. This man was close to being the most intoxicated I’ve ever seen someone. He was shouting about how he was going to Vegas the next day and that the bartender wouldn’t serve him anymore. He kept screaming that he had a cab coming and when the bartender came up to ask him if he would wait outside she made the mistake of putting her hand on his back. He then took his anger up to a new level and kept screaming a mixture of “Paula wouldn’t like you touching me like that!” and “Paulanna wouldn’t like the way you’re touching my back!” After he agreed to leave, the bartender came up to us and gave us two tokens for free beers for the trouble that had a stamp of two bears doing it bear-style. We were starting to get tired so we started to make our way for the door but not before seeing the same crazy cowboy from the night before sitting at the bar. Making sure we didn’t make eye contact with him we put our heads down and made our way through the exit.
The next day was filled with even less excitement. We wanted to see more of the city so we hopped on the city bus for $2 where we met the aforementioned man and his family. We went to the very last stop on the bus and rode it back to the ferry terminal to see what time they opened. We were hoping they opened early so we wouldn’t have to spend the money on another night in a hotel. Thankfully they opened at 2 so our decision was to tough it out until they opened later that night. On our way back to the docks we walked through the town mall. I think they use the term mall very loosely as there was only about 8 shops in this place none of which carried anything of real value except the furniture store on the bottom level. We spent the rest of the day hanging out on the docks watching the cruise ships depart. We talked to the harbor master for a while as the cruise ships left who told us everyone there basically works for 5 months and then hangs out for the other 7 months of the year. We got another couple of the fantastic milkshakes from the Little Dipper to pass the time. We went back into Annabelle’s to have another conversation with Mike paired with a last round of Alaskan beer before making the trek to the ferry terminal to wait outside. We got there around midnight and used the benches outside to our advantage by sleeping in them with our packs draped over us like a couple of hobos. The rest of the morning was a blur of hazy memories. I barely remember being in the terminal, going through customs or getting on the ferry. I only remember waking up in my sleeping bag on the floor of the same ferry room we had been in on the way there. Getting back to our morning routine we snagged a couple of coffees from the cafeteria and I used the time to listen to some new podcasts from the weekend. We again went through Canadian customs after getting off the ferry but this time I needed to know if they would stamp my passport. After all, one of the things on my 30 list was to travel outside the country. A lady behind the counter told me that they didn’t stamp passports from North America. Dismayed, I walked back to the car to gear up for the arduous trip back through British Columbia.
We hadn’t been on the road for more than an hour before we came across a rather long stretch of highway. It was on this stretch that the most exciting part of the trip happened. As I was driving, I noticed something coming out of the woods on the left side of the road. Johnny exclaimed “BEAR!” as the full grown black bear came lumbering out onto the road. I swerved over to the right onto the shoulder but the bear kept coming. The bear smashed head first into the driver’s side door, a mere 6 inches away from my elbow. In what I’m sure was a shock to the bear, he pulled one of the more graceful spin moves I’ve seen and kept on his path across the road into the woods. By the time I could pull the car over to the side of the road, he was gone. I was preparing for the worst. The door must have a dent in it the size and shape of the bear’s head. We got out to assess the damage and were shocked to see that there wasn’t any damage. The only thing the bear had done was wipe away the dirt on the door leaving a 2 foot long clean swipe under the door handle. We took some pictures of the swipe just in case there happened to be more damage than we could see at the time and got back in the car. Johnny was ecstatic. When we got back into the car he was grinning from ear to ear and kept throwing up his hand wanting a high five and screaming “We just hit a bear!” My reply was simple. “We didn’t hit a bear, he hit us.”
We took a different route getting through British Columbia, this time making sure we went through Vancouver. The view however was the same with not much needing to be described. We went through the border patrol at Vancouver, the same city where the Pakistani men had alluded customs. We drove up to the border where a man asked us our purpose for coming into the country. He looked at our passports and told us to have a nice day. We had made it back to the United States in one piece. We drove south another hour or so just north of Seattle to spend the night in a Travelodge in Everett, WA where the third and most troublesome part of this story takes place.
Part 3 to be continued…