There is so much to write about my week in Alaska so before you start you might want to use the bathroom, get a cup of tea, put on your slippers and light a pipe, or whatever you do to get comfortable. Feel free to read it in instalments as if it were serialised in a popular newspaper. Maybe that will even happen one day! Be sure to check out the three photo albums that go with this blog entry. I'll start my tale in Seattle airport where I caught my flight to An...

I'm in Seattle now and I just had the longest and worst bus ride of my life! It started in Rapid City, South Dakota and my bus was an hour late arriving. But we managed to make up nearly all of the time by Billings, Montana so so far it wasn't bad. It was midnight at that point. Then at Billings they called my bus, which was slightly late, but said there were two buses, because there were so many people, and they called out the destinations for the first bus, wh...

My overnight bus journey from Billings, Montana to Rapid City, South Dakota went well and I arrived at breakfast time. My first task was to pick up my rental car so I got a taxi to the airport. I had the best/weirdest taxi driver ever. He seemed like some kind of hippy on speed. He was very energetic and kept talking about things I needed to do while I was in the area. The airport was several miles out of town but he didn't run out of ideas. And when we got there...

It was a long drive from my hotel in West Yellowstone to Glacier National Park. It's the entire height of the state and about 400 miles. I made good time and got to my starting point of Kalispell, Montana. That is a town a short way from the western edge of the park. My plan was to stay overnight then drive through the park west to east on one day, stopping as I wanted, and then stay on the eastern side of the park, hopefully in one of the hostels. The reason fo...

My time in Yellowstone is a tale of two days. The first was 28th July, when I drove from my previous night's stopover in Billings, Montana to the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park. The park itself is huge, so I decided to split it into two days' worth of exploration. On the first day, once I'd got to it, I would go down the east side of the figure-eight loop road. And, since I was staying outside the west entrance of the park, on my second day I would ...