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My Latest 8 diary entries:

Pete's Churchill Odyssey 2005

6th Oct 2005
Leaving Canada .... by boat

Thursday, 6th October, 2005
Woke up at the usual time; about 7am and brought the various internet bits and bobs up to the mark. We packed and stashed the bags in the luggage room at the hotel and decided to have another ‘go’ at Duncan while we still had the car and took a drive up Highway 1 for about 60 km. It had looked mildly promising in Victoria first thing but as we went north, the rain increased and by the time we were in Duncan and in search of Totems, it was raining.
The Duncan totems were quite disappointing, I suppose not helped much by the day. In themselves they were quite distinct and beautiful works of art but the setting was very distracting … but may be a deliberate way of integrating traditional culture into the 20th Century.
We returned the car at about 1 after just about 300km in the few days and got ourselves dropped once again back at the hotel to further re-group and then wander into town for a final look around.

Anne decide to walk us the scenic route to the ferry so we went a block up from the waterfront trundling our roll-along luggage as we went. I was in the lead with two tow-alongs. Steadily we gained ground on a girl walking along in front of us. She had quite a tight skirt on and there was little she could do to speed up but did her best to keep ahead of us. Steadily I gained …. rumble … rumble … from the wheels of the roll-along. She quickened her pace, I kept up with her, expecting her at some point to ‘pull in to the side’ to let us past ... but no, she kept going, both of us chatting away right on her shoulder. I could literally have reached across and touched her but she kept going …. fast …. eyes fixed on the next junction, still a hundred yards or so ahead.
We embarked through customs at about 5 this afternoon, with a sailing time of 6. Although we were all booked up we were inevitably some of the last passengers to get to the terminal and … so we were the last to embark and consequently didn’t have completely first choice of the seating. We sat opposite a large American lady reading a book called Burial at Sea by Paul Garrison … I was imagining that its about a large American lady who smothers her poor hen-pecked husband on a ferry between Victoria and Seattle and throws his body over the side to feed the killer whales … but then again it may not be …. she didn’t look the sort who was going to get into either irony or humour.
Anyway, that's the Canadian soujourn over ... The rest of the North American phase takes place in The States.
We crossed a couple of wakes in Puget Sound but apart from this it was a smooth crossing. We shared a ‘Salmon Basket’ from the café; a coarsely smoked chunk of salmon served with a pot of Philadelphia cheese, a bagel and a bag of fresh apple segments. Duly scoffed and washed down with a bottle of Molson’s, as Anne said, ‘to settle the stomach’.
Docked on time, but with checked baggage, we were then in the last swathe permitted to leave the ship.
Spied Nicolette through the wire, but it was another fifteen or twenty minutes before we’d picked up our bags along a snake of a queue through the luggage room and then answered the young custom’s officer his questions.
This time it was ‘the eyeball’ that was interesting; he must spend hours in front of a mirror perfecting his blank, unblinking stare. You meet his eyes and wonder in the seconds that pass whether hes just asked you a question. You return his stare and that makes him think of one; ‘Do you have a problem, Sir?’ So you avoid his gaze … but, it doesn't make his concern for whether you have a problem or not go away.
In order to avoid maintaining his eye contact, I decided that his haircut was far more interesting than his eyes and studiously flicked my gaze around the clean shaven sides of his head and even glimpsed the polished back of his head. The only place where hair was allowed to grow … and not for very long even there, would be on the skyward facing surface. He looked like a slightly chunky, clipped and less yellow version of Bart Simpson.
The ‘home’ we thought we were going to stay at with Nicolette (which was a matter of minutes walk from the ferry terminal) was sold a couple of weeks ago … so now we shifted to forty five minutes the other side of Seattle, it was really kind of Nicky to come and collect and chauffer us across town.
A welcome cup of tea and a luxurious old fashioned bed were all we needed tonight.

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The clipper Ferry

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