Alaska: Land Tour

At Seward, we left the Radiance and boarded a tour bus for the next part of our journey. We met our Tour Director, Joanna, as well as John, our Driver.

The first leg of the trip was the drive from Seward to Anchorage, about 120 miles. This area is within the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and we made a stop at an animal rescue center along the way. This center cares for animals which are orphaned or injured and not able to live on their own in the wild. We arrived at Anchorage by lunch time, and pretty much just puttered around town. Anchorage is the largest city in Alaska at about 300,000 people, and while interesting, it is not what we came to see.

The next day, we started the trek to the interior of Alaska by making the 120 mile drive to Talkeetna. Along the way, we were blessed with a clear view of Denali, aka Mt McKinley, the highest peak in North America at over 20,000 feet. Denali is covered by clouds most of the time, and it is said that only 20% of the visitors to Alaska ever see the peak. The lodge at Talkeetna was fabulous, and we were happy to stay there two nights.

We boarded the train at Talkeetna on the 11^th day of our trip, and set off into Denali National Park. These were magnificent train cars, with comfortable leather seats and panoramic windows. It was too bad that the dining facilities were on a lower level, because the view was much more constrained.

After arriving at Denali village, we set off on a Jeep excursion into an area on the north of the Denali village. It was a little lame, with no real serious four-wheeling involved, but I have no complaint with getting to spend time outdoors in a place like this.

The next morning we took a ride into Denali Park on a park bus. We saw caribou and Dall Sheep. We learned that caribou and reindeer are the same species, with the only difference being that reindeer are domesticated. And once more the summit of Denali showed itself above the clouds. In the afternoon, we boarded the train toward our final stop, Fairbanks.

On our way to the El Dorado Gold Mine, we had the chance to stop at a place where the Alaska Pipeline runs above ground along the highway. I was hoping that we'd get to see the pipeline. As interesting as the line itself was, there is a place across the road where a guy had collected various pieces of equipment no longer needed when the pipeline was completed. One was this enormous transporter vehicle that carried sections of pipe. He had taken one of the trailers of this transporter and made it into a deck for his house. Utility comes before aesthetics in the north country.

One thing which surprised us all – it never gets dark in Alaska in the summertime! I think we all knew that north of the Arctic Circle, the sun never sets on the summer solstice. Fairbanks is only about 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, so while the sun did set (at about 11:15pm), it remains twilight until the sun fully rises again just five hours later. We all said that we were looking forward to getting back to dark nights.

On the last day, we needed to have our bags out at 3am, and ready to board the bus to the airport at 4am. We sat in the plane on the ground while the mechanics confirmed that a hatch was latching properly, and then the toilet needed to be unplugged. We barely made our connection in Seattle, and then only because they loaded us up into three electric carts for the long trek across the airport. Next was a relatively short hop into Salt Lake City, and then another long flight home. We landed around 11pm only to find that our luggage didn't make the connection in Seattle. It was finally delivered to our home at about 5pm the next day.

Glad to be home, but thrilled to have taken this trip.

Alaska: Aboard Ship

The first leg of our Alaska trip was aboard the Radiance of the Seas, a massive cruise ship operated by Royal Caribbean. Our group of five couples had adjacent balcony staterooms on the starboard side, Deck 8, just below and aft of the navigation bridge.

This was the third cruise for Terry and me, and quite different than our prior voyages in the Caribbean. The obvious difference was in the latitude: there would be no sunning on a deck chair through the afternoon this time around, although we did have some warm days were we could sit on our private balcony and enjoy the sun. Southeastern Alaska is rainy and chilly, similar to what many of us think of Seattle. The capital city, Juneau, is one of the wettest cities in the country.

The cruise began when we boarded the Radiance in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We had never been in Vancouver before, and our first impression was of the rattier parts of town on the route between the airport and the harbor. The Cleverleys have friends who live in Vancouver, so they came out a couple of days before to visit. Their impression of Vancouver was that it is a beautiful city. As is always the case in a big city, there is wealth, and there is poverty. At least everyone has access to the healthcare system in Canada. We sailed in the early evening.

The next day was spent at sea. It was sunny, warm and smooth. We were accompanied part of the way by Dall's porpoises, who apparently get a kick out of surfing in the wake of the ship. It was formal dinner night, when we got to meet our waiter, Darko (no kidding). He was a tall and intense Croatian man who I thought would make a good Count Dracula. Compared to the waiters we've enjoyed on other cruises, this guy was humorless. His assistant was a Bahamian named Leaford who spent most of his time getting ordered about and criticized by Darko. Nonetheless, the ten of us had a table to ourselves, and enjoyed the food and company each night. The evening closed with a stage show and a stunning sunset.

Our first port of call was Ketchikan Alaska. We arrived in the early morning, escorted by a Coast Guard patrol boat on which the forward 50cal machine gun was manned and ready. We never learned why we got this escort, and it was the only port in which this happened. One can understand a cruise ship being a juicy terrorist target, but I'm not sure Alaska is a primary target area. Who knows in this crazy world. Ketchikan is just a tourist trap, with most of the businesses owned by Royal Caribbean as we understand it. We walked around the block and came back aboard the ship.

The next day, we arrived in Juneau. Although it is the capital, Juneau's population is only about 30,000. An interesting fact about Juneau is that it cannot be driven to; one must go there by either air or sea. In the morning, we rode a bus out to the Mendenhall Glacier. When we booked this excursion, we didn't know that we would later be seeing the Hubbard Glacier from the ship. The trip to the Mendenhall wasn't a waste by any means, but these land excursions are kinda pricy, and on that basis I don't think I would recommend spending the money if you are going to see the Hubbard anyway that is.

The afternoon was spent whale-watching with Barb and Jim, and we had the opportunity to see several mother-calf pairs of humpbacks. Afterwards, we looked around town a little, and stopped for a snack of reindeer sausage at the Red Dog Saloon – a fun place to go.

We arrived at the tiny town of Skagway to find three other cruise ships in port. This is an amazing thing since Skagway has a permanent population of under 1,000, while each cruise ship carried around 2,000 tourists. The high point of this trip was the ride to the White Mountain Pass on a narrow gauge railroad. After the ride, we stopped in the Red Onion Saloon for lunch, another fun place.

Next was Icy Strait Point, where the Hinkles, Cleverleys and Krzykowskis rode the mile-long zip line. They said it was a blast. We looked around the little village which had been constructed there just to host cruise ships, and hopped back aboard.

After working our way out of the Inside Passage, the Radiance sailed to the Hubbard Glacier. This was by far the most spectacular part of the cruise. The glacier is massive, with a face several times the height of our ship and six miles wide. The weather was clear and sunny, and the captain was able to maneuver us within a few thousand feed of the face. Every few minutes, we would hear a rumble. If you were quick enough, you could see a hunk of ice fall from the face into the ocean.

From here, we sailed due west toward Seward, the terminus of the cruise half of our journey.

Home from Alaska

Our two weeks of travel in Alaska is over, and we're back home in Ohio. It's a shame that wonderful vacations like this start and end with the aggravation which is air travel today, but soon the memories of the crowds and inconsiderate fellow passengers fade and the good times are what sticks.

It was a blessing to be able to take this trip with friends from our church: Steve and Lynne Krzykowski, George and Cindy Hinkle, Bill and Linda Cleverley, Barb Hix and Jim Murdoch. We participated in many activities together, yet went on our own at times to pursue our own interests. This is a great way to travel, and I hope we have other opportunities like this in the future.

One goal of mine was achieved on this trip: after visiting Alaska, I have now been in all fifty states of our union, and Terry is missing only a handful. While each one has something special to offer, I am partial to open country, away from crowds and development. West Virginia will always be our homeland, and the southeastern part of the state my favorite part of it. But for sheer beauty, Colorado has been number one on my list -- that is until this trip.

Alaska has it all: the highest mountains, the ocean, unspoiled rivers and glaciers, and miles of vistas with no evidence of human impact. At Denali National Park, the rangers make a point of telling folks that there are no trails because they want to maintain this aspect. They tell you to make a new trail, and there is a chance you will walk where no human has walked before. Awesome.

One term we heard frequently is that there are many people in Alaska who live 'off the grid.' This means they have no public utilities; no water, sewer, electricity, gas, telephone or cable TV. There were folks who live this way within the city limits of Fairbanks. They get their water from creeks or water stations, use outhouses, and heat and cook with wood. We saw homesteads where the only means of supply was the Alaska Railroad, as there are neither roads nor navigable streams. And we heard stories from young Native Alaskans who came from villages north of the Arctic Circle where the hunting of whales and seals are key to survival.

We also saw what I call the Disney World version of Alaska. In Fairbanks we toured the El Dorado Gold Mine, and got to pan for gold. We took a ride on the Riverboat Discovery, and visited a staged Indian Village. All while be herded around with a couple thousand fellow tourists. It was the last day of our two weeks, and the complete antithesis to the days we spent in Denali. I guess it was a good preparation for the gauntlet of airports and airplanes the next day, but I would have preferred to spend the time just gazing into one of those endless Alaska vistas.

We took nearly 600 pictures and video clips during the trip. The cool thing about digital photography is that you can just snap away and never worry about wasting film or developing costs. I shoot at the highest possible resolution, yielding 2MB image files. In total we have 3GB of images. We'll post a few here, and a few on the family website, but to see them all, you'll just have to come visit us.

Paul & Terry

Alaska: The Day Before Departure

We're off to Alaska in the morning (leaving the house at 4am!!) with a group of friends from our church. Here's our route

Light blue = flights
Red = aboard ship
Green = bus
Purple = train

I've decided not to take a PC, so no pictures or travel diary as we go. But expect a trip report when we return!

Disappearing Middle Class

Our satellite TV service includes a bunch of educational channels, including one from the University of California at Berkeley. A faculty member there named Harry Kreisler hosts an interview program called "Conversations with History" which I record, and often watch. I very much enjoyed one a few weeks back with Cosmologist James Peebles from Princeton. Another good one was with philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. A complete list of Kreisler's interviews are available via the link above.

The interview this week was with Elizabeth Warren, a professor of Law at Harvard. She has done extensive research and writing on the topic of personal bankruptcy in the US, and has been an advisor to some public officials on this topic.

Professor Warren said she went into this area of research with the assumption that most people who declared bankruptcy were undisciplined consumers who spent well beyond their means and used bankruptcy as an easy way to dump their debts. What she found was that the skyrocketing backruptcy rates were being driven by two elements: a) the dependence of families on two incomes because of the rising costs of goods, especially housing and education; and, b) the relaxation of consumer protection laws relative to credit which have been enacted as a result of extensive lobbying by the financial services industry. The consequence is that families are using more and more credit to fund middle class lifestyles, and when any burp in income happens (layoff, sickness, etc), the credit terms are so oppressive so as to drive people quickly to bankruptcy.

By the way, she tells an interesting story of an encounter with Hillary Clinton. When she was the First Lady, Mrs. Clinton invited Professor Warren for a brief chat about some of her research. The professor quickly made her point about the potential damaging impact of the new consumer financing bill working its way through Congress. Mrs. Clinton understood, and presumably expressed that concern to the President. When the bill made it's way to President Clinton's desk, it was vetoed. However, later as Senator Clinton, she voted for the same bill. As the professor said, it was dispairing to see that the power of lobbyists and the campaign contributions they direct, could cause this kind of behavior in a US Senator (trust me, this isn't a Hillary bashing -- this happens in politics all over our country).

She made a connection I hadn't thought of: people are spending a lot of money on housing because the price of the home you buy often reflects the quality of the school system. In other words, if you want your kids to go to a good school, the price of admission is an expensive home. This dynamic is widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots in the society. While there is a growing number of families who can afford upscale housing in nice school systems, and still be able to build wealth and send their kids to college, an exploding number of families are barely able to afford their suburban homes, are building little wealth, and must send their kids off to college with student loans. Many of today's children will start their adult life already tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and their parents will be of little help because they are also strapped.

Professor Warren makes the case that the future of America depends on having a well-educated workforce, meaning through college, and that these dynamics are threatening that. I'm not so sure this is exactly true, although I believe we must have a competitive workforce in terms of skills and labor rates.

But I completely agree with her on one thing -- the middle class of our country is in danger of disappearing, and it is the middle class which currently funds just about everything in our society. As the economies of the world begin to normalize, the equalibrium point is only a little higher for most countries, but way below the standards Americans have enjoyed for the past 50 years.

Finding an Old Friend in Philly

I'm just back from a two-day 800 mile road trip to Philadelphia with pastor and friend Kevin Snyder. We were visiting his home church, First Baptist of Collingswood NJ to see if we could help them with some planning and organizing. On the morning of the second day, Kevin and his brother Jeff got up very early to get in a round of golf, and I decided to run back over into Philly. As we had crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge the evening before, I saw what looked to be a current vintage US Navy destroyer tied up to a pier, and hoped they were giving tours.

It turns out that the ship was the USS Winston Churchill (DDG-81). It had been in Philly for Navy Week, but sadly when I got there Tuesday morning, she had cast off and the pier was empty. So I thought I would just drive on down the waterfront and see what I could see at the Phildelphia Naval Yard, where there is a decent sized mothball fleet. Suddenly I saw the funnels (smokestacks for you landlubbers) of a large passenger ship. It was the SS United States!

I hadn't thought about this ship in years, but there was a time when I thought of it every day. When I was a kid, we had a model of the United States that was about three feet long, mounted on a stand. It was lit from the inside by a single white Christmas tree bulb. It sat on the chest of drawers, just a couple of feet from the foot of my bed and constantly visible from my upper bunk. The light was usually left on as a night light. Over the several years we lived in that place, I'm sure I looked over every feature of that ship a hundred times.

At some point, we moved and the ship didn't make the transition. I wonder what happened to it...

Anyway, it was a thrill to see the grand old ship again, even as a rusting hulk. The website says that it is now owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines, and they have plans to restore it to service. NCL did this once before, bringing a contemporary of the United States, the Isle de France, back to life as the SS Norway. The Norway sailed for many years. My mom sailed on her once, when cousin Cindy Swisher was the cruise director, and we saw the Norway once in Miami when we were sailing on another cruise ship. Today's mega cruise ships dwarfed what was once one of the largest ships in the world.



Unfortunately, the Norway suffered a boiler explosion a few years back. Few if any modern passenger ships are powered by high pressure steam turbines, and it sounds like a boiler room crew just made a mistake, which unfortunately cost them their lives. NCL has decided it wasn't worth repairing the ship. The rumor is that it sits off the coast of India waiting to be scrapped.

So I hope NCL does decide the bring the United States back in to service. I think I might make an effort to sail on her if she puts to sea again.

Good seeing you old girl.

Sharing America, Saving America

An old friend sent me a link to a presentation about population growth and immigration. This point of this presentation is simple: American cannot allow immigration to continue at current levels and maintain our way of life.

Some would say this is an outrageously selfish viewpoint. America is a land of plenty, these people would say, and we have a moral responsibility to share the bounty with the rest of the world. While I understand that perspective, I doubt that there are many people who really want to practice it. I expect that the Great Depression would seem like a time of plenty compared an America after a sudden massive influx of immigrants.

The current population of the More Developed Countries (MDCs) is 1.2 billion, of which 300 million, or 25% live in the United States. The natural population growth rate of the MDCs is 775,000/yr (0.6%), but net immigration is nearly 2 million, half of which is coming into the United States.

The population of the rest of the world, the Less Developed Countries (LDCs), is 5.4 billion, with a natural growth rate of 77 mllion/yr. This is 1.4% annual growth, or 22 times the rate of the more developed nations. Net immigration in the LDCs is negative 2 million, as one would expect.

How many of those 77 million new people each year should be allowed to come to the United States? If we're taking half of all immigrants now, should we be taking 38 million or so new folks each year? This would increase our annual growth rate to 3.21%/yr, or 50-fold. Meanwhile, the growth rate for the rest of the world would be lowered only 50%.

Let's put that in perspective. This 38 million is about the same as the population of the entire state of California. Or New York and Pennsylvania put together. It is more than three times the population of Ohio. Per Year.

Can you imagine what America would be like if an influx of this magnitude were allowed?

One of the characteristics of MDCs is a stable population. For many reasons, family sizes are smaller in MDCs, to the point that some countries are projected to have negative growth. For example, Sweden's natural growth rate is projected to be -0.1% by 2025. Even China, after a few decades of purposeful population control, is projected to achieve a natural growth rate of 0.2% by 2025.

Meanwhile, the people of the LDCs continue to pump out kids. While women in the US bear on average 2.1 children and in China 1.7; in Somalia the average is 6.8 and the natural population growth rate is 2.9% per year.

The mission of America is to not let the rest of the world pull us down unto poverty. Rather, I believe it is our mission to practice some tough love. For a country to get our assistance, I believe it must show that it has taken the appropriate steps to bring its population under control. China figured out how to do it -- it just takes the willpower.

All population data is from the US Census Bureau International Database.