Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

When it comes to vacations I do have to admit to remaining happy to let my parents arrange things and go along with them. When they looked into a cruise that would travel up the coast of Norway and return to its starting point via Scotland, I agreed to join them. Some of the ports of call were now familiar, but we were going further north than before, over the Arctic Circle and all the way to a tourist spot called North Cape.
( Seventy-one degrees north )

Not all that many months after we’d made it back from our first cruise in years, my parents presented a short list of upcoming cruises to me and asked which seemed the most interesting. I said that I appreciated in a certain way that they’d noticed a “circling Japan” voyage, but the cruise that promised to observe the upcoming total solar eclipse would be something that wouldn’t happen again.
( Money paid and chances took )

A few months ago, I stopped in at last to a hobby shop that I’d been passing for a while. Noticing it sold flying model rockets among other things to assemble, I took a closer look at what was available, then started thinking about just perhaps getting back to one more pastime.
( Blasting off once more )

As spring has worn on into summer, “online fan conventions” have kept streaming. After sampling one of the first of them, though, I more or less lapsed into letting them pass me by the way I let in-person conventions pass by in healthier years. With the way my spare time evaporates, I suppose watching “commentary videos” seems a bit tricky to fit in whether they’re on demand or “now or never.”
( Being closer to hand seems to help )

In my scattershot “I haven’t signed up for this service but I will look at these feeds” way, I managed to see announcements of an “online anime convention for quarantine season.” That did get my attention. Last year I managed to work up sufficient motivation to lift myself out of a comfortable enough yet very familiar weekly routine and make a day trip to a major anime convention in my area for the first time. Perhaps I shouldn’t dwell on getting around to sampling a bit of what so many other anime fans make a big deal of one year before those mass gatherings started being cancelled as that considerable amount much unhealthier than before; it risks being another “personal inconvenience dwelt on where so many others have much bigger problems.” Still, a “virtual convention” seeming more convenient than travelling, much less checking into a hotel to make it more than a day trip, was a thought, and as the schedule filled in and some genuine “industry panels” appeared on it I decided I could certainly spend some time tuning into the stream.
( Sitting quietly out of the way )

Getting “home for the holidays” gave me a chance to see the stars from the countryside. Even with less light pollution in the way, though, I’m still not that good at identifying constellations: after recognizing the asterism of the Big Dipper and following the pointers to the pole star, I was pretty much limited to spotting Orion, although if I’d looked for it I think I could have found Cassiopeia.

It took getting back from vacation and looking at the astronomy sites I follow, however, to see notices of the red star in Orion Betelgeuse fading. This news has been punched up a bit by reminders Betelgeuse is close in astronomical terms to going supernova, even if there are reassurances it’s far away enough to not threaten life on Earth. At the moment I’m wondering more if the star will be brighter again when I next get out into the country.

Instead of being stuck with my own contemplations and taking in perhaps too many online comments, on seeing the regional science centre was holding a special day of events to mark the anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon I decided to head into the big city. It wasn’t until I’d got there and parked at a shopping mall with a transit hub at one end (to get to which now entails going outside and around where Sears used to be) that I realised I’d left my fare card behind, but fortunately I was able to buy a round-trip ticket card from a machine. Traffic was heavy around the science centre (itself fifty years old), so I felt content taking a bus there.

While exhibits at the science centre turn over slowly enough that most of what I saw was familiar from my most recent trips there, I spent most of my time going to talks. Bob Thirsk, a Canadian astronaut who’d gone into orbit on the space shuttle and a long-duration flight on the space station, made a presentation by himself and then participated in a nation-wide hookup with David Saint-Jacques, an astronaut who’d just returned from the space station. I then tried an “IMAX version” of the recent Apollo 11 documentary, although on a curved screen some of the up-and-down lines of some shots looked kind of skewed. A screening of a shorter documentary about a Canadian engineer who’d bounced back from the end of the Avro Arrow project to work on lunar module design was a bit easier to take in. After that, I had to catch a bus back to my car and get on the road again. It was a full day, but a solid enough way to mark time’s passing.

It turned out that as my cruise around northern Europe continued, ports of call where shore-based wireless access was convenient to the ship when I had the time to make up another post became hard to find. Getting back from the cruise left me jet-lagged and trying to get over a cold I had picked up in its second half. Still, I got through the whole thing, and saw many interesting things as the ship continued to Norway and Scotland. I am glad to be back, but I'm conscious all over again of how fast time can vanish in a day just by running through a regular routine.
( Pictures within )

Without the prompting of my family I might well wind up content at the end of a year to have used up my vacation taking lots of long weekends, but when they started asking me what I was planning to do this year I did get to thinking. With foreign exchange rates what they were the thought of going somewhere inside the country seemed compelling. I'd been east not that long ago, so going west came to mind. Almost as soon as I started thinking about British Columbia, where I'd got off the cruise ship and on an airplane at the end of my cruise across the Pacific five years ago and spent a few more days there two decades ago, though, the idea of travelling that much further and heading north as well began to fire my imagination. I've read Pierre Berton's Klondike more than a few times; even if travel isn't anywhere near as challenging in the Yukon today as it was for the gold rushers at the close of the nineteenth century, it still seemed interesting to go.

With that vague thought of "going" and "seeing what I'd find" expressed, my brother decided he'd go as well and got to work researching details. Before too long we had an RV rented for a road trip that would take us on the "circle route" through the territory with a short leg over the border to Alaska. From the sights (and services) of Whitehorse to the edge of Kluane National Park to the austere, winding heights of the Top of the World Highway to the sudden sight of Dawson's City deliberate quaintness, and from there to jog north to Tombstone Territorial Park (which a cousin in Vancouver told us about) and back south again made for a full week of travel.

Among all the things I packed, I did once more overestimate how much I needed to bring just to keep myself diverted. Out of the books stuffed into my carry-on bag and the videos I loaded on my iPad (which did pick up cellular signals on the outskirts of the major settlements), I only looked at a few of them, concentrating instead on real-world sights and perhaps winding up thinking there was something worth considering to that juxtaposition. As well, though, while travelling in an RV was a lot more comfortable than the tenting that had me "camped out" by the time I was out of Scouts and quicker than setting up and taking down a trailer, it was a noisy ride in the passenger seat and demanding as a driver, especially as the road got bumpier in the permafrost zone. It all made for a great change of pace in any case. The thought of going back, even if at a different time of year to perhaps try and see the aurora, is certainly there.
( Pictures are ahead )

A while ago, I happened to hear about a new exhibition of Star Wars memorabilia travelling through my own country, but the first few locations on the schedule seemed too far away to travel to just for the sake of seeing it. I sort of left it at that until this summer, when I was looking at a tourism flyer in my newspaper only to see the exhibition at an aviation museum close enough to think about going to. Making an extra-long weekend of it, I took the train to see, among other things, "Star Wars Identities."
( An illustrated post )