The Brown sofa

........course I did 
The FA was very sweet, saw my bright red face and got me a drink of water as everyone was boarding, she even came to the back of the cabin to ask me what I would like for breakfast before anyone else so I got my first choice- 
gotta love the Dutch breakfast why I dont just make it at home I dont know Al and I are into the dried up , speckly and frazzled looking meat in the "deli meats pack" something we have only just discovered , tastes good though.

............Home at last.

Getting back to school was pretty nerve wracking, everyone telling me what to do, schemes of work changed so I dont really know what I am doing, Interesting to see the breakfast and crunch bar lessons making a return after 10 years- goodness know where they came from
........Then it dawned on me that the yellow folder of Schemes of work that Sue left me as a souvenir was out in the office, clearly dated 2003!  Since then we have gone electronic and the schemes are stored on the school drives so no one could even think it was the current one. Then I remembered the Head berating me for my schemes of work and realised that this is exactly what has happened!!!! 
Oh well, nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy as they say.
 I will save the fab National Curriculum scheme I wrote while I was off for a rainy day.

The very best time I had in school was when I asked for extra cover, reminded of what the head told me to do what I was good at and teach, being back in the classroom with the Kiddies was a good reminder of the reason I stay in teaching. Not everyones cup of tea and for me now, certainly no chance of a career any more but as a vocation it'll do!

Soo, when you want to travel, your feet itch, what itches when you want to decorate your whole ground floor in a week flat?... your fingers looking on the internet for ideas, I have some mad idea about a brown leather sofa with legs and a cream carpet with a rug.
I always put it off because Max wasnt getting any younger or any less blind so I didnt want to change his environment and confuse him but the old boy wasnt himself when I got back from Alaska and despite a couple of days in cat hospital he hadnt really got much better, I had him home and cuddled him, he managed to get onto his favourite chair but had a full on seizure. Twitching that much had to be painful and seizures are never a good sign so I took him back to the vets and had him sat on my lap cuddling him as he drifted off to somewhere free of pain.

Back to the garden, new edging finished, floor in workshop finished and mortar between slabs I hope Al is proud of me, it was a superhuman effort but I wanted to set a good example.

Just in time for Dennis's birthday the Gladioli flowered, I have no idea why he grew a row of Gladioli every year but I bought them on a whim in April and have waited ages for them to come up nice tall structural plants I think I will grow them again next year too

The stressy sisters are happily (well grumpily) sat brooding in their coop, they were fighting over who was supposed to be sitting on the eggs and getting rough so I gave them a couple of potatoes each to sit on which has kept them quiet. I throw them out once a day to eat and drink and share the potatoes out again so they have 2 each, someone always has them all over one side having stolen them from under her sister!

Poor Felipe, it was his own private palace until the stressies took it over, I guess they must keep him up with their grumbling because he has moved to the  top of the big coop, the Brahmas are sleeping in the Brooder coop and no one is in the big coop overnight at all.

Offto Jersey for a days socialising with the FT group, no we're not plane spotters, Plane spotters have anoracks and notebooks and dont leave the ground. Some people find it funny though, quite a minority interest maybe ..................but 2 flat bed business class seats to Philly for me and Al at £580 plus miles, yep we thought it was hilarious!

2 nights in one day

The motel in Moose Pass is in a little street that seems to contain all the village essentials, a church nearly opposite the motel, a restaurant bar part of the lodge, a school and a railway all in the tiny street.
Its great sitting on the porch in the morning watching the swifts as they dance and swirl around in the warming day .

I made sure to sleep in as late as I could because the flight home leaves at 1.40 am and I need to stay awake until then but eventually I had to hit the road north 

I stopped off to get some photos of places I had missed on the way down, normally when you take photos of mountains and scenery, you get home and find they didnt look that interesting after all but Alaska is different, stunning scenery at every turn, sometimes all I could do was grab the camera and take a shot out of the windscreen as I was travelling.

For some reason rocks featured heavily on the list of "things to bring back from Alaska" Lisa started it then others joined in with requests, I had some but stopped again at Bird creek to find some more blue looking rocks, I limbed down a staircase to no where and scrambled over the rocks and was rewarded by a great view, you would never have seen this from the road either!

Funny that the one image I am going to get enlarged for the wall is the last scenic photo I took!

I wouldnt have seen it if it wasnt for the "rock search"

On to Anchorage and some shopping in the only J C Penney in Alaska, not much really, a couple of T shirts, shirts for Al and a pair of shoes to replace the ones now smelly from the river paddling, finally in a town there was more than one petrol station, for a state with so many RVs driving about, I wonder what they do for petrol there arent that many petrol stations out on the roads and those that there are are packed with cars and people, I got some looks when I parallel parked the little red car to go in and buy junk food, I dont think anyone parks backwards here, all the roads and car parks are set up to swing a giant car in forwards.

Getting bored around 9pm I dropped the little red car off and wandered into the airport to wait to check in.

  People watching in Alaska is a good passtime, a state where people think nothing of walking round a store with their big waterproof boots on and their fishing waders just rolled down to the waist, only the tourists are dressed casually for the rest, working clothes are the order of the day 

  People come off planes in saggy hoodies, rucksacks, towing grubby suitcases, home from working away no doubt, collected in 4wd pick ups.

Goodness only knows how they get children to go to sleep in the summer, even at midnight there is still loads of daylight, my chickens wouldnt know what to do, I know that they get up at dawn and with the longer summer days they sleep quite a bit in the sun before regrouping for a run about in the afternoon and evening, here they would be totally confused, not that I am planning to take my chickens on holiday, they dont have passports, but just contemplating what they would do if it was daylight for 20 hours a day.!

finally after the intermidable wait its time to board the plane, armed with my $2,99 pillow to try and get more comfortable, I had to be woken up by the oldest flight attendant I have ever seen, (either that or the dry air is more damaging than I thought!) to be given a drink and a bag of pretzels.

Bearing in mind how successful the connections hadnt been on the way out, I was a bit wary of the short connections on the way back, 45 mins in Phoenix, an hour in Philly and an hour in Brussels, with the storms on the East coast and the usual lack of punctuality of US airways it could be an interesting trip. The result of the time moving forward as I fly East there are 2 overnight flights separated by a 5hr daytime flight- if that doesnt mess you up nothing will.. 

The flight from ANC-PHX was uncomfortable but I was out like a light and managed to sleep through most of it, the 45 min connection was more than enough time to get a coffee and a toasted bagel and mooch back to the gate, success so far, its all going suspiciously well................

Which continues as the hour is Philly is long enough to get some duty free tobacco, drink a pepsi and still get back through security for the flight, my ticket has TSA pre printed on it, I dont have TSA pre but wandered down the line anyway, turns out they just bleep your boarding pass and send you through the relaxed security channel, no liquids out of your case, no computers laid on the belt for anyone to steal, no shoes off, and just a metal detector instead of the body scanner, quite a cheery experience, a cheery experience I dont normall have at US airport security.

The 767 flight back to Brussels looks good, the plane is new ish and the seats are better but HARD, so hard that my back aches before take off and sleeping at a funny angle with a footplate to stop you sliding off the seat, not fun, not comfortable at all. The American owned airlines idea of food is quite different, something strange with gravy followed by a choice of 2 desserts both with cherries and chocolate- not a combination I like at all, why ruin a good chocolate dessert by adding fruit??? or why ruin a good fruit dessert by adding chocolate??? 

After a wholly uncomfortable night and an equally strange breakfast the plane lands a few minutes late, now all I have to do is wait for my case, go through Brussels passport control, go through customs, go up 3 floors, find the BA check in desk, check my bag in , go through passport control, go through security and walk nearly a km to the boarding gate for my flight (-the gate is 37 and they only go up to 40) all that in 55 mins 

Am I going to make it?.............

End of the Earth

Fairly glad to be out of the hotel this morning, its a bit too "historic" for my liking
The weather isnt too good and the sightseeing cruise was cancelled so it is up to me to make my own entertainment today after all!

I headed North in search of some glaciers of my own, not the huge ones I would have seen on the cruise but never mind. Glaciers drop bits into the water over time as they move, you can hear them cracking as you stand there like a loud tree branch snapping noise .

 Calving is the name for dropping chunks of ice into the water and even some of the smaller glaciers on lakes do it, when the glaciers out at sea do it you get icebergs, when the glaciers on lakes do it you get little icebergs, its amazing how blue they look inside, I am not sure the camera can capture it properly so you will have to use you r imagination a bit.

The area I stopped in to look at the mini icebergs was marked out like the waiting lanes for a ferry and I soon discovered why when I drove further up the road- waiting area for the Whittier tunnel.

See that little entrance in the hillside, well thats the tunnel entrance, a tunnel only one lane wide, everything going to Whittier has to go through that tunnel, trains, cars, boats (on trailers obviously!) there is a system for getting through the tunnel since you cant have 2 way traffic. Going to Whittier you go through the tunnel on the half hour and coming back you go through on the hour- seems to work fairly well, its a 4km tunnel so it only takes a  few minutes at 25mph , the scariest bit is that its wet in there, you end up driving on the railway tracks because there isnt room for a separate car lane. I didnt get many photos because to be honest I had enough to contend with driving in a narrow rock tunnel on slippery railway tracks !

Whittier is truly end of the earth stuff, the whole place feels like the end of a cul de sac, enclosed one side by Mt Mackintosh and the other side by mountains with a few passes through to Prince WIlliam Sound, it just feels enclosed and end of the worldish.- oh and it sells what must be the largest cinnamon rolls in the world as well.

There is an old US army base built in cold war days as a complete town under one roof for 1000 odd soldiers but i 1964 it was damaged by and earthquake and they moved out and left it . If the army had stayed longer, perhaps they might have funded and built another tunnel.!

Since I havent been North enough or into the wilds enough to see bears and moose, and the Salmon run is so small this year that I could have sat by the river all day and only seen a couple, I decided to visit the Alaska Wildlife centre instead, these are some of the animals I saw there

moose safely behind a fence, these things are mean

A rescued Eagle inside
and a wild one keeping it company outside

Everyone keeps telling me that the bears in Alaska are ok because they are black bears, means nothing to me but the ones above are brown bears and the one below is a black bear, if anyone knows the significance, let me know!

The Bison (Buffalo) are being bred to re introduce them, this herd is going to be released in 1025, at the moment they are being trained in "being buffalos"

Aww

The lynx and her sister were rescued as well, they seem to be very happy, any cat owner knows that face

South For a change, to Moose Pass Motel , I overshot a bit but drove back down to use the booking I already had
Another evening-when-it-should-be dark shot of the lake at Moose Pass