Documenting my journey through the mental health system

We got to Fairbanks Tuesday night, June 23, excited for our land tour. And it was spectacular.

Because Alaska is gorgeous. Sometimes it looked like home, but then on steroids. We had clear sunny weather. On the first day we actually ordered in some items from Walmart we couldn’t grab on our way out because of the rushed nature of our exit. Walmart delivered to our first Princess lodge. We got medicines, primarily. Mom was using the diuretics hard.

We got to be near Mt Denali for two nights which made packing easier. At the airport they took our boat bag and sent it off to the ship. The other was our land bag, and every night we would leave it outside our room doors and they would take it on to the next lodge for us, and we would have just our backpacks with the important stuff. There were instructions and color coded tags for every step.

It must be noted we looked great. A lot of investing – we wore new waterproof shoes and had waterproof trenchcoats and mireno wool hats and gloves we barely used because the weather was so nice.

The 6 hour train ride to the ship leaving for Whittier from the last interior lodge at Mt Denali National Park was really cool too. I was bummed there was no smoking car, but there was a club car with a bar. The entire train was made of glass walls and ceiling, totally see through. This was my first time on a real train for travel.

I got a good buzz in the club car after they fed us lunch. We were so hungry we ate it even though it wasn’t that good. After a long several hours, we finally got off the train to a long line onto the boat and mom wanted to smoke of course. I wanted my vape pen too. We were the last in line after that smoke, and they even said as we got on we were the last to board the boat. That tends to be how we prefer things. We were last off the boat too.

The land tour had been incredible – great weather, mostly clear skies, and some incredible pictures. I’ll post those next.

Things started to go awry the second day in Denali. Mom twisted her ankle in a little depression in the pavement – rolled it good and she fell hard. Scraped up her other knee. She still went on the tour we were about to go on. But we later had to cancel our kayak excursion on the cruise ship about a week later – her foot was purple. So she was already bummed about about that and how she couldn’t wear her new shoes for formal night because her foot was swollen. She was walking fine but unable to stand more than a minute.

Things weren’t looking much better on the boat. We were so excited to get on it but it was late and all the restaurants but the buffet had closed. I wasn’t really bothered by this but she was – in her mind, because we had paid for premier, we should never have to eat at the buffet. We had all the specialty restaurants included. I noticed on the ship app I couldn’t reserve a single restaurant for any day that whole week – and the next day had to argue about it with them. Why pay for Premier? They got us into the Crown Grill – the fancy steak restaurant – that night.

The boat was its own whole adventure/fiasco. The land tour had been so great, mom’s foot notwithstanding. But the ship had changed for the worse.