Alaska: A long long time ago… but still June 28th

So when I was a kid, I had the opportunity to go on a trip through Canada and on to Alaska and (sort of) back through the US. This was a big deal in my house, I didn’t get sent away to camp for the summer (maybe a week with scouts) or even on my own for any trips, this was huge for me. My Mom knew I was interested in Alaska from books (all I can think of off hand is The Hardy Boys – The Mystery at Devil’s Paw), television and school, she saw a newspaper article about this local teacher who did a tour every summer with seniors and teenage boys. I grew up with my single Mom who worked her butt off at a local grocery store and while this trip was a decent price, I still understood it was a lot of money; plus, I had to earn and pay for a third of it (or a quarter?). But the trip looked amazing, it was clearly one of those once in a lifetime opportunities and was probably supposed to build character helping the seniors with their luggage and other things.

This is that story of that trip. I’ve got photos (actually, mostly slides that were recently scanned) some (sometimes poorly written) journal entries by a 15-year old me and some other odds and ends that I’ll include. I might make a mistake or two with photos in the wrong order and me having to make some of my best guesses (but I’m pretty sure I’d kept the photos in order). Keep in mind that I don’t have as many photos as the cRaZy number that I would take these days since they wren’t digital back then.

The trip started on June 28 at empty parking lot in Pleasant Ridge where we all met and got on the bus to Windsor, Canada where we would catch the train to Toronto, Canada. My experience on busses were probably limited to school trips (maybe something with the boy scouts?) and I probably hadn’t ever been on a train at this point in my life.

We had a few hours to kill in Toronto while waiting for the train. So we wandered around and saw a few things and spent some time at an amusement park called Canada Place, the weird thing is that I don’t really remember Canada Place from any of my trips to Toronto the following few years and it looks like it’s still around.

I promise the adventures get more exciting after the first few days since they are mostly transportation to get to other places and I didn’t do much with my journal the first 5 days…