Rushed Valdez Trip
In May, the Mensa chat corner got an e-mail from a young
man who turned out to be Jozef Kahan of Slovakia. The subject line
of the e-mail was "You are my last chance", and in the narrative, he explained
that he had a job in Cordova, Alaska, and had arranged for transportation
from Slovakia to Anchorage and from Valdez to Cordova, arriving in Anchorage
at 10 PM, but that he needed a place to stay in Anchorage for the night and
a ride to the Ferry in Valdez by 5 the next morning.
Well, you can't do that. In that time frame,
it's either/or, not and. It's 300 miles to Valdez from Anchorage,
and the roads are mostly far from freeway. I gotta hand it to Susan
- she didn't say, "Do we really want to do that?" We just looked at
other ways to try to get them there within the allotted parameters.
Plane, private plane, ferry. Nothing. The only possible way
was to drive like a maniac.
We got to the airport to pick them
up and had to wait an hour for a late flight,then had to wait for their
baggage, then had to spend 1/2 hour to report lost luggage, then we hit
the road....in the rain.
Before we made it to Glenallen, we hit rain, fog,
more rain, and...did I mention rain? What about the fact that Alaska
nights aren't very dark that time of year unless it's overcast. Well,
usually with rain comes overcast, and the night was as dark as a spelunker's
arm pit.
We got to Glenallen, saw that we were making pretty
good time, and decided that we might make it. The sun was coming up,
but before we got to Valdez, and while we were in Valdez, there was fog
so thick that an hour after we went through it there was a small tunnel through
the fog showing where we'd been. The "race" through Valdez to get
to the ferry was hampered more than a little than by visions of drunk pedestrians
bouncing off the front of the car or the front of the car bouncing off a
drunk moose.
We were 5 minutes late.
I had previously looked up Valdez on the intenet,
and had found a restaurant that opened at 6. We found it, about
the time it opened, and, over breakfast discussed the options that were available
to the two Josefs. They could try to catch a ride on a tender, try
a charter service, or go back to Anchorage and catch a flight from there.
We drove them around town to weight possibilities, and they wound up working
at a cannery in Valdez, doing exactly what they were expecting to
do in Cordova!
The trip back was more leisurely, and we took our
time, stopping frequently.
Susan points out that this trip was, in fact, the
most memorable thing we did all summer.