Tag Archives: tourism

Trouble on the Tundra

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Or why I will never use a travel agent again.

I’m in Alaska right now, writing this from the comfort of a “junior suite” cabin on Radiance of the Seas. Outside my window, ten stories below me, is the Pacific Ocean, stretching as far as the eye can see. I’m sitting in a comfy chair with my feet on an ottoman and my little old PowerBook on my lap. Van Morrison is playing from my iPod through my iFusion’s speakers. Mike is reading on the sofa. Life is good.

Finally.

The past six days have been a mixture of hell, heaven, and earth, with more hell than anything else. Don’t believe me? Here’s an outline of what we’ve been through.

Day 1: Sunday

  • Our flight out of Phoenix was delayed 2-1/2 hours. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that it was a 6:30 AM flight and we’d woke up at 3:30 AM to catch it. We could have slept in.
  • When our flight finally arrived in Seattle, we were told that we have to switch planes. (Our flight was supposed to be direct, with just that one stop.) They’d sent another plane to Anchorage on time and we missed it. At first, it was unclear whether they could put us on another flight. They finally handed over boarding passes for a flight to Anchorage, just as they’re making their final boarding call. Mike and I couldn’t sit together on the overbooked flight. At least I got a window seat.
  • Although we arrived in Anchorage, our three checked pieces of luggage did not. (We would not see our luggage (or the clean clothes and toiletries they contained) until the next day.)

I realize that I cannot blame my travel agent for Alaska Air’s shortcomings. But I will think twice before flying on Alaska Air again.

Day 2: Monday

In AnchorageWe spent the day with Francis and Barbara, our friends in Anchorage. We were staying at their house. After picking up our luggage at the airport and showering, we had a very pleasant day that included a trip to Whittier and some time spent in and around Anchorage.

No travel agent or airline involved; no problems. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Day 3: Tuesday

  • Alaska RailroadOn arrival at the Alaska Railroad terminal, we were unable to get a boarding pass with seat assignments for the train. Turns out, the train car we were supposed to ride in was overbooked. They put us and two other couples on an empty train car, warning us that we may have to move when they pick up passengers at Talkeetna. It was actually quite pleasant having this whole dome car to ourselves, although we didn’t get regular service from the staff because they expected that car to be empty.
  • Although we paid for an upgraded seat on the train with the understanding that we’d get service similar to an airline’s First Class service, we’re still required to pay for drinks and the food-like substances they served downstairs for breakfast and lunch. Nothing is cheap; nothing is good.
  • On arrival in Talkeetna, there were seven more passengers than seats in the car. The staff told us we may have to move. We (and the couple immediately behind us) refused. They relocated all 7 of the extra passengers to another car on the train.
  • On arrival at the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge, we were told that our room had two beds rather than the king sized bed we requested. The travel agent had not passed on any room preference. We were given a key to our room and told that if a room with a King bed became available, they’d let us know. We should call them at 7 PM. I told them that I seriously doubted whether they’d move us. (Of course, they didn’t.)
  • We wound our way through the maze of two-story motel-like structures on the Princess property and found our room. It was a tiny, cramped, poorly-ventilated room that reminded me of a Motel 6 room I stayed at once while driving cross-country. The two full-sized beds (not even queens!) were crammed in so tightly that it was impossible to walk around one of them and the table and chairs included in the room were right up against the side of the other one. The television got about a dozen channels and four of them were more static than picture.

Please note the description on our travel agent-provided Itinerary:

The Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge, situated high above the Nenana River, is the premium riverside accommodation in the area. Enjoy a soak in the outdoor hot tubs. There is a restaurant and lounge in the hotel and many others close by.

The Denali Princess is on a bluff overlooking the river, but very few of its rooms have any kind of view whatsoever. Ours looked out over what appeared to be a pumping station. There was a wooden porch that ran the length of the building, and when we opened our curtains, anyone walking by could look right in at us, so the curtains stayed closed. There was also a gravel walkway and we could hear people crunching by on the gravel in the mornings and evenings. The place was absolutely packed with Princess Cruise passengers, most of whom where pushing 70. The hot tubs — there were 3 of them — were overflowing (literally) with overweight midwesterners. The only redeeming feature of the hotel was the King Salmon restaurant, which served decent meals at an expectedly high price. Our first night waitress was very nice — the first person we’d met in three days who actually seemed to care about service. But how they could call the place a “wilderness lodge” is beyond me. It’s false advertising, plain and simple.

Side story here. The next evening, while coming back from dinner at the Denali Grand’s restaurant in a shuttle bus, another Princess guest on the shuttle claimed that he liked his room at the Princess. He added: “But you need Fort Knox in your back pocket to eat at the restaurant there.” Obviously, this is the kind of person Princess is serving: people on package tours, who are more concerned with price than quality.

You can bet I’ll never stay on another Princess property or take a Princess cruise.

Day 4: Wednesday

In Denali NPWe spent the day taking the shuttle bus deep into Denali National Park and doing some hiking around the park. It was a pleasant day out. More in another blog entry.

Day 5: Thursday

Following the instructions provided by the Princess people, we tagged our luggage for the return trip to Anchorage on the train and left the three bags in front of our room. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same thing. But when we arrived at Anchorage at 8:30 PM, only two of our bags were at baggage claim. One of our bags had been lost.

The head of baggage claim for the Alaska Railroad and Mike each spoke to people at the Denali Princess. They all said that it was not their problem. They even tried to insinuate that they’d never handled any of our bags because they didn’t have a record of the tags on them. They couldn’t satisfactorily explain how two bags they’d obviously handled had shown up in Anchorage. Thank heaven Mike took care of this. I would have completely wigged out. But he kept working on them about it, even going so far as to take a cab to a hotel where it might have been delivered with other Princess guest luggage.

Of course, the bag was mine. It contained, among other things, my eyeglasses and spare contact lenses; all cables and chargers for my cameras, cell phone, and computer; the manual for my new camera; and a few pieces of clothing I rather liked. We’d moved all our dirty clothes to Mike’s bag. We still had the big bag we’d packed with the cruise clothes, which we’d hoped to check at the train station but wound up lugging around with us.

We checked into a suites hotel near the train station and I did the laundry while Mike tried desperately to track down my bag. Of course, the hotel didn’t have quarters, which I needed for the coin-op washer and dryer, so I had to walk to the Hilton a block away in my pajama pants to get change. (Thank heaven for today’s fashions — no one seemed to notice my attire.) That’s also where I managed to spend $9.50 for two small cups of ice cream. (Got another two quarters in change, at least.)

By midnight, the laundry was done and Mike was back with $100 in cash from Princess to start replacing items. But my bag remained MIA. Or should I say MBP (mishandled by Princess)?

Day 6: Friday

We headed over to the train station where we got the final knife in the back by our travel agent: our reservations for the train were for August 6 (8/6/07) rather than June 8 (6/8/07). (And no, we didn’t use a European travel agent.) The train was completely full and there were no seats available for us.

At this point, I broke down. I’d simply reached my limit. Alaska obviously hated us and was doing everything it could to make us hate it. Or, more likely, our travel agent was completely inept and this was just more proof.

Train to SewardThe folks at the Alaska Railroad took pity on us. They already knew about our missing bag. So they gave us a boarding pass that put us in one of the domed cars and told us to take any seat up top. Other people would have to take turns going up there, but we could stay up there for the entire trip. That was nice — our seats at the front of the car looked up the length of the train to the domed car a few cars up — but the seats weren’t very comfortable. It was a reasonable tradeoff, however, and I thank Alaska Railroad for offering it to us and, thus, saving the day.

At noon, in Seward, Mike started calling Princess again. Good news: They’d found my bag at their Denali property. It had never left the place. Now the challenge was to get the bag to Seward — about 300 miles away by car — before our ship departed at 9 PM.

We boarded the ship at 4 PM. Everything there was as we expected — at least the travel agent hadn’t screwed that up.

And when we returned from dinner at 10:30 PM, my missing bag was in the cabin, waiting to be unpacked.

Why I Blame the Travel Agent

Although I can’t blame the travel agent for the Alaska Air problems, I can blame her for reservation problems and booking us in a hotel that obviously wasn’t up to our standards. We communicated, from the start, that we wanted a “deluxe” vacation and she should have been clued in by the amount of money that we were willing to spend that cost wasn’t a major concern.

The round trip from Anchorage to Denali on the upgraded rail car and two nights at the Denali Princess had cost us a whopping $1500. For three days and two nights that included only transportation and lodging! We’d expected first class train service and we got fancy coach. We’d expected luxury accommodations and got Motel 6 quality. We feel ripped off. And the travel agent is responsible for selling us this bill of good.

People use travel agents to make things easier for them. We used a travel agent because we simply didn’t have time to do the research we needed to arrange our trip. We figured that a travel agent would know the options — or be able to get information about the options — because that’s what she does for a living. It’s her job.

But we were wrong. She obviously doesn’t know how to do her job responsibly or reliably.

If people less capable of dealing with problems while traveling had booked a trip like ours and it had as many screw-ups as we suffered through, those people would have been completely lost. As it was, I was at the end of my rope. On Friday, when it didn’t seem as if we’d get to Seward on the train, I was ready to go home. Go home! In the middle of my vacation!

What kind of a vacation is that?

Things are Good Now

Hubbard Glacier from our CabinBut things are good now. We’re sailing down the coast of Alaska. Today, we got a pretty close look at a glacier, dodging small icebergs along the way. The captain even turned the ship to put the glacier on our side, so we could watch it from our balcony for a short while. I got lots of photos with my new camera, then spent some time reading through its book, learning more about how it works.

I’ll write more about the highlights of the trip when I find time. Now its time to dress for dinner. It’s formal night and we still need to hit the martini bar.

Let’s hope I don’t have anything more to whine and complain about.

Fort Lee, NJ

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We spend some time along the retreat route.

Fort Lee, NJ is a town on the Palisades of the Hudson River. It’s known primarily for two things: the George Washington Bridge crosses the river at Fort Lee to the upper end of Manhattan island and George Washington’s retreat route runs right through it.

Of course, there was a fort. It sits high on the Palisades, just south of the bridge. There isn’t much left of it, but there is a nice park with paved paths and lookout points with benches. The Americans used the fort to lob mortars onto British ships sailing up and down the river.

Until the Americans ran away.

I’m making fun, of course. Back in those days of the Revolution, the American army did a lot of retreating. What’s weird is that there are signs along the retreat route proudly proclaiming that they ran away right past where the sign now stands. But we did win.

We had some time to kill before meeting my sister and brother and some others for dim sum, so we went for a walk in the park. And we got a few treats.

Fife and DrumThe first treat was the re-enactment stuff going on. I don’t know if they do this every Sunday or if we just happened to stop by on the right day, but there were men in revolutionary war uniforms doing the kinds of things the soldiers did back then. Like marching around with a drum and fife. Or with guns. Or setting up a camp near the mortar lobbing area. Or building a shelter without any modern tools.

camp I don’t know why these guys were there, but they were definitely into it. Their outfits looked great — but a lot cleaner than they would have been 230 years ago. Sadly, there weren’t many spectators. The park was pretty empty. It was as if they were performing for themselves. Maybe something was going to start later on. We didn’t hang around. We had dim sum to eat.

George Washington BridgeWe also spent some time at one of the lookouts, watching the bridge and the river flowing beneath it. I took some pictures (of course). And I can recall some of the facts that I’d read about the bridge while in my hotel room.

The George Washington Bridge — or GWB, to the locals — was once the longest single span suspension bridge in the world. It’s still one of the 15 longest. (It’s about 2 miles across the river.) It was built in the 1930s and was originally designed with two levels of roadway, but budget cuts kept the bridge to just the upper level until the early 1960s when the lower level was added. It’s the primary crossing from New Jersey to New York — I can’t remember how many millions of vehicles cross each day. The bridge’s original design called for the towers to be faced with local stone so it matched the Palisades on the New Jersey side. That plan was nixed along the way and the bridge is painted regularly. They just finished doing some rennovation on the towers — you can still see some of the scaffolding on the New York side in this photo.

When I was a kid, my family had a small motor boat. We kept it at home, on a trailer. We’d go boating in the Hudson River. The boat ramp we used is just south of the tower on the New Jersey side. We’d go on day trips around Manhattan island or past Ellis Island (before they fixed it up) and the Statue of Liberty. The water in New York Harbor was always rough; the water in the Harlem River was always smooth. Hells Gate, where the rivers came together with the Long Island Sound, was a crapshoot.

Leaves and SkyAnyway, I also took some time to lay back on the bench and look up at the sky through the leaves of an oak tree. It was nice to be among trees that were a good deal taller than I am. The area is lush with vegetation, like a jungle waiting to reclaim the land.

And just beyond it is I-95 with traffic and exhaust and the sound of cars and trucks.

We left the park right around noon and headed into town. Fort Lee (or Fort Ree, as we sometimes call it) is known for another thing: good Asian food. With a huge Chinese, Japanese, and mostly Korean population, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Want some of the best dim sum in the New York metro area? Go to Silver Pond on Main Street in Fort Lee. You won’t be disappointed.

And if you have time, check out the Fort Lee Historic Park. Maybe those guys will be camped out again.

It’s Not Just Sand

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I have to explain to passengers that the desert is more than sand dunes.

I had some passengers on a helicopter flight a few weeks back who were just visiting the Phoenix area from somewhere back east. At sometime during the flight, they told me they were hoping to see the real desert.

My DesertI was confused. Wickenburg sits in the Sonoran desert. That’s the desert with the big saguaro cacti all over the place. It rains, on average, less than 8 inches a year. The desert can’t get any more real than that.

My passenger clarified. “Well, where’s the sand?”

The sand, unfortunately, is all over the place. In washes, in my front yard, in my shoes and cars, and in my hair and eyes during a dust storm. Sand (and dust) is a part of life here.

But not the kind of sand my passenger was thinking about. He was thinking of sand dunes. You know. Like the kind in movies that take place in the Sahara desert.

I began to understand. His mental picture of the desert included the rolling sand dunes from the movies. The same sand dunes that had hazards like quicksand and oasises with palm trees and ponds of water.

I explained that there were sand dunes in the southwest desert, but they were only part of the desert landscape — not the whole thing. I told him about the big sand dunes west of Yuma on I-8, and the small sand dunes west of Blythe off of I-10 (I’m not even sure if you can see those from the road, but I see them from the helicopter when I fly that way), and the medium sized sand dunes in Death Valley.

Then I put on my tour conductor voice and gave him a summary description of the Sonoran desert landscape, including information about its cacti, trees, animal life, and other features.

Of course, all this has me wondering how many people think the desert is just a big sand dune.

Monument ValleyOne of the things I love about the desert is its diversity. There are so many kinds of desert, each with their own little ecosystem. Drive 50 or 100 miles in any direction and you’re likely to be in a whole different kind of desert. For example, if you drive up route 93 from Wickenburg, you’ll enter another kind of desert where there are no saguaro cacti, but plenty of Joshua trees. Drive up to Monument Valley and you’ll see the layers of underlying rock exposed in magnificent formations, with scrubby trees and bushes hanging on for life in the fine red sand.

Just don’t go down to Phoenix. There isn’t much of the desert left down there, with all the asphalt, golf courses, non-native plants (like palm trees, for heaven’s sake!), and irrigation.

Two Interesting Charters

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I find that there’s more to flying helicopters than giving tours.

Lately, I’ve been getting calls from folks who want to use my helicopter for more than just transportation or tourism.

The first good assignment I got came a few months ago, when I flew a camera crew around the a carmaker’s test track in Arizona. I wrote about it in another blog entry. This past week, I did two more.

The first, on Tuesday, was for a professional photographer hired to take aerial and ground photographs of the new bridge being built over Burro Creek on state route 93. There’s already a beautiful bridge there and the construction crew is building a twin on the north side of it (the road runs pretty much east-west there). Burro Creek runs in a deep canyon there and the Sonoran desert landscape is breathtaking. The site is also far from civilization — about 55 miles north of Wickenburg and perhaps 20 miles south of Wickiup.

It was a cold morning when we left Wickenburg, so I left the helicopter’s doors on. It took us about 30 minutes at my top cruise speed (110-115 knots with two on board and full fuel) to reach the site. I set down in a fenced-in area where the construction folks were storing cactus to be replanted after work was done. I took the passenger door off while my client got his camera equipment out — a pair of Hasselblad medium format cameras with three different lenses. A construction truck pulled up and my client got out to talk to the driver. He came back and told me that the next time I landed, I could land on the new road right near the bridge. It was closed to traffic and was smoothly paved. We took off and began circling the bridges from various altitudes. My client snapped away, cranking the camera’s advance do-dad after each shot. He was perfectly at ease leaning out the door; he’d flown in many helicopters before. After about ten of fifteen minutes of that, I set down on the road near the bridge and shut down. (I had to set down on the edge of the road, as shown in the photo below, because the road was banked for a curve and the only real level spot I could find was at the very edge of the road.) My client climbed out, filled a smaller camera bag with equipment, and walked off to take his ground shots.

I pulled out my iPod and a book and settled down on the side of the road to read. Cars and trucks drove by and I wondered how many of them were headed to or from Wickenburg.

He was gone about 90 minutes. When he returned and finished fiddling around with his equipment, we climbed back on board and I fired the helicopter back up. The light had changed, so we did another 10 or 15 minutes of circles around the bridge at all different altitudes. Then he told me to head back and I broke off circling and headed back.He took some more photos on the way back — using up extra film on shots he thought he might be able to sell the construction folks. Then we set down on Eric Barnes’s dirt strip, on route 93 near the Santa Maria River, so I could put the door back on. With the door off, it was loud and my speed was limited to 100 knots. With it on, it was quieter and I could get it up to 120 knots. When we got back to Wickenburg, I’d put 1.4 hours on the Hobbs. My client paid for that, as well as for some waiting time.

Two days later, I was in Aguila, doing a job for the maker of a “breadcrumb” communications system. Breadcrumb systems, as they were explained to me, create a wireless network that can be used for voice, data, or video communications. The folks who hired me had an impressive system they wanted to mount in the helicopter. The idea was to have me fly around with the system and a few techs on board to see how well the system stayed connected to other breadcrumbs on the ground and how well video that one of my passengers shot could be seen at ground-based stations.

As the photo here shows, I had to remove both doors on the pilot side so they could mount the unit’s antenna. The breadcrumb box itself was positioned at the feet of the passenger behind me; you can barely see it in this photo because it’s just a flat box standing on one end. Although the unit can be powered by batteries, my helicopter has a 28 volt DC port that looks like a cigarette lighter port. The breadcrumb had a cable that could take this voltage, filter it, and step it down to the 12 volts it needed. So they just plugged it into my DC port. The boss of the operation wasn’t happy about the positioning of the antenna — he wanted to dangle it somehow under the helicopter’s body — but we soon proved that it was fine.

One of the techs also had a GPS and, at first, they wanted to mount it on my tailcone. They claimed that in the work they’d done with RC helicopters, they’d found that there was too much interference from the main rotor disk for the GPS to get a good signal. When I told them that my handheld GPS worked in the cockpit cabin, they decided (to my relief) to give it a try. (For the record, I would not have let them mount it on my tailcone. That’s much too close to the tail rotor! We might have mounted it on a skid if we had to.)

My passengers climbed aboard and we took off, flying circles around their base of operations at Robson’s Mining World. One guy in the back did the video while the guy beside him kept reporting on the status of the breadcrumb: green, blinking green, green, green, etc. We kept in touch with other breadcrumbs on the system at all altitudes and even when we flew behind a mountain. We only lost touch once, and that was for only a few seconds. The video went down to the guys on the ground, who clustered around a laptop set up on the hood of a car in the parking area. We did this for about 20 minutes, then landed.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was done with my assignment. What followed was about an hour spent giving everyone there a ride. I took them three at a time and did a 4-minute ride around the base, climbing up the mountain behind Robson’s and descending back into the desert for landing in my designated landing zone. When everyone had their ride, they told me to shut down and have lunch with them. Some other folks would be taking photos of the setup while I was eating.

I ate outside, with the guys from Rotomotion. They build RC helicopter systems to be used for surveillance and unmanned observation. The company founder started the company when he got frustrated that he couldn’t fly an RC helicopter. (Having owned one for a while, I know exactly how he feels; I couldn’t fly mine, either.) He wrote a computer program that would fly the helicopter for him. His company now builds helicopters that work with his Linux-based software system. They had three helicopters with them: a small electric model (on the table in this photo), a medium diesel model, and a large model powered by a chain saw engine.

The software is extremely cool. Once the helicopter is airborne, the software takes over and can hold it in an absolutely perfect out of ground effect hover. You can also tell it to go to certain coordinates at a certain altitude and it’ll go. It uses wireless communications to control an onboard camera or other equipment. If it loses its radio control signal, it’s programmed to return to its home base. Although they have a routine for software-controlled take off, they need a reliable but small altimeter to judge distance from the ground before a good landing program can be written. I have no doubt that they’ll add this feature soon. These guys definitely know what they’re doing.

While the rest of the group went off to go shooting out in the desert, a small group of us remained to watch the RC helicopters fly. A police officer from Chandler had come up to get a demonstration and we just watched. He said that the system has many applications in law enforcement and he seemed excited about it.

I went home a while later and put my dusty helicopter away. I’d logged 1.6 hours for the assignment — not much, but enough to make it worthwhile. And the technology I’d seen while I was out there was well worth the time spent.

Success!

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I get my Part 135 Certificate.

The process started on October 18, 2004, when I sent a formal letter of intent to the FAA’s Scottsdale Flight Standards District Office (FSDO). The “PASI” form included with the letter notified them that I was applying for a Single Pilot Part 135 Certificate. On February 9, 2005, I received that certificate.

It’s a big deal. Without the certificate, my commercial operations were limited to conducting sightseeing flights within 25 miles of my origination point. Disembarking passengers was pretty much forbidden — I had to drop off my passengers the same place I picked them up. Although I managed to drum up a respectable amount of business with this limitation, it also forced me to turn down many more lucrative (and interesting) flights. That’s one of the reasons why I went after my Part 135.

The other, of course, was the real desire to make a career change into aviation. To do that, I had to earn more money. To earn more money, I had to be more flexible. The Part 135 certificate will make me more flexible.

I’ve already added a bunch of day trips to Flying M Air’s Web site. I’m working on developing more. I’m also working on getting necessary permissions to conduct commercial operations on BLM land, as well as certain private and state lands. And making relationships with organizations that can get me more work, including an adventure tourism company based in Scottsdale, a resort in Lake Havasu, and a tourist attraction in northern Arizona.

With this Part 135 certificate, Flying M Air is free to grow and prosper. I’ll keep doing my part to make that happen.