Travels with Samantha Slide Show Page 18

With a small harem surrounding me, I drove off the Alaska Marine Highway at 10 am. Although Alison, Elke, and Jo-Anne each managed to make do with one backpack, the minivan was now stacked to the gills. In fact, it was riding so low that we couldn't drive over a crush-proof cigarette pack without a sickening dragging sound. As we headed up the Interstate toward the Canadian border, I noticed how much easier it was to travel with three companions rather than one. I didn't have to make conversation, just drive and listen.

More...

My last ride on the Alaska Marine Highway lasted for about 40 hours

[BIG] and brought me to the Jewish nose research center in Vancouver.

Yet another gratuitous Canadian tower affords a panorama of the city [BIG].

Jim treated me to gelato in a chic West End cafe, right next to a high-rise apartment block known as "K-Y Towers" (this is the area of town popular with homosexuals). As we walked back to the car along the dark seawall path, it was nice to see how many young women were still out. This isn't Central Park in terms of either crime or fear of crime. Drug dealers and gangs kill each other (mostly with knives), but the average Vancouverite is able to enjoy the city at all hours and in almost all neighborhoods.

"Strip joints in Boston are really grimy and you feel sleazy going into one. You have to see how different they are here," Jim pointed out. ...

More...

Victoria, the capital of British Columbia,

[BIG] wouldn't have been half as much fun without Jo-Anne and Elke, new friends from the Alaska Marine Highway

[BIG].

Victoria really wasn't my cup of tea, although world-famous Butchart Gardens doesn't disappoint [BIG] .

The clash of cultures on the front lawn of the British Columbia parliament building is thought-provoking. On the basis of weight, the native culture would appear to be losing by a factor of about 100,000:1.

It is a sad day when one has to say goodbye to Canada [BIG] and take another ferry ride [BIG] over to the Olympic Peninsula.

Elke shattered some of my misconceptions about East Germany. I'd thought of Communist East Germany as a drab, grey, joyless place full of people dying to get out and move to the West. Elke had been perfectly happy growing up under the old regime and isn't particularly fond of the new system.

"One thing I have trouble adjusting to is the concept of property. We didn't go walking through people's front yards, but everything else in East Germany was public. You never had to worry about whether you were trespassing because everything belonged to you in some sense."

More...

[BIG]

That was one part of Olympic National Park. Here's another: [BIG] [BIG] [BIG]

The third part of the park is a snow-capped ring of mountains, but they were socked in by rain and fog, so I drove back along the Olympic Peninsula [BIG] toward Seattle .

Slide Show Cover Page