The flight was fairly uneventful and having deposited Rosemary into the care of one of her fifth cousins three times removed we found Whiskers who had driven the hour or so from his house to pick us up and take to the hotel. To say it was a squash getting all six of us with enough luggage for two weeks into Whiskers’ car is an understatement but we managed it somehow. We dumped the bags at the hotel but even though it was four in the morning proper British time it was not yet bed time local time, so we convinced Whiskers (not that he took much convincing) to go to a bar.

The bar he decided on was called the Bull Pen. Apparently it used to be called the Spanish Castle and Bob Dylan once wrote a song inspired by the place but now it is a Karaoke bar. Feeling a bit stir crazy I decided to express my pleasure in being back in America through the medium of Karaoke and signed up for my first ever Karaoke performance. I don’t know if it was divine intervention or not but half way through ‘with a little help from my friends’ (and Whiskers was up on the stage helping) the laser disk started skipping and so the fellow that was running the show decided that we would sing... Dammit I can’t remember what the hell we were singing but I am sure it sounded wonderful. That’s one of the beauties of being the unofficial Handlebar Club Web site foreign correspondent. To everyone else it might well have sounded like a banshee castrating a pig in a jet engine testing centre, but it is my version that is recorded for posterity and therefore becomes the truth.

When the hotel told us that breakfast started at five in the morning I thought they must be mad but for some reason I was up with the larks (in fact well before them) glugging coffee and making a mess of the waffle cooking machine by ten past five. I didn’t bother going back to sleep and joined the others for breakfast over a five hour period. At about ten Whiskers turned up and we drove to the Mount Rainier National Park. The photo says it all really - it was one hell of a view. A fair old drive to get there, but if you want to see these things, they are not going to come to you. There was a place called Paradise within the park. I tried to get a sew-on patch for my suitcase saying Paradise but they didn’t make them. A marketing gaff if ever there was one in my view.

We went straight from there to a sort of buffet/party at Scot and Tia’s house (Tia being Whiskers’ daughter). It was good to see them and Mrs Whiskers again and for the first time meet Eli, Whiskers’ son. I knew of him and had met his wife Stephanie before but he had managed to avoid me up to then. There were a couple of other of Scot and Tia’s friends there, the food was great (particularly since I had eaten nothing much other than waffles all day), the booze was flowing freely and it was a great evening. Dan wanted to show Mrs Whiskers, and anyone else that was interested, the video of McHalbert addressing the Haggis at Edinburgh so we went down to the ‘theatre room’ and plugged the laptop into the six feet wide high definition surround sound home cinema. McHalbert has never looked so good hehe. Back to the hotel then and a bit of an early night as we were all still a bit jet lagged.

The next day after breakfast we set of for Canada. Rodders and I were in Greg’s Pontiac and the rest (including Mrs Whiskers) in the people carrier. After a brief stop at the Boeing centre we headed north and even having stopped for dinner it did not take long before we were at the border. The first thing we saw in Canada was a big sign saying ‘Welcome to Surrey’. Dammit I thought I had left there two days ago. Many of the place names were familiar - there was even a Croydon in Surrey. Rather than staying in a normal hotel, Whiskers had organised a bunch of ‘time share’ apartments in Vancouver and very swish they were as well. Greg and I shared a two-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor with a superb view over the city, a kitchen, two bathrooms and a dining room that was smaller than the toilet.

After settling in for an hour or so we drove to a bar where we were supposed to meet Ronnie and his group who had just flown in from Belgium. Only just, in fact, because when Rodders called them to ask where they were, they were still at the airport. There was a huge ice hockey game on the TVs in the bar, the local team, the Vancouver Canucks (whatever a canuck might be) were playing the Chicago somethings in the Stanley Cup playoffs. There was lots of yelling and hooting (and drinking). Unfortunately Vancouver lost but it was a great game and just after it finished Ronnie and a dozen or so other members of his club (including wives and girlfriends) turned up. More beer! One of the more memorable conversations that night was when I was telling Mrs Whiskers that I had a brand new costume for the competition and the only person that had seen it was Bo. I explained that she could use as many thumb screws and metal spikes as she liked but she would never drag the information out of him. I thought that was quite a generous offer on my part but I am not sure Bo saw it quite the same way.

Apart from being Election Day the next day it was also part of National Bike-to-Work Week. We knew this because on the two block walk to the Café de France (which must have been a little lost) for breakfast we came across two canvassing politicians and a cyclist that had been run over by a taxi. Greg was heading back home because his hip was giving him some gip so the remaining eight of us went in the people carrier to Stanley Park. Because there were only seven seats in it Mrs Whiskers had to travel in the trunk. Of course I would never be so ungallant but due to a comment from Dan, she now answers to the name of ‘The Baggage’. Stanley Park is one of the places that Vancouver is known for. There were some great views, a horse-drawn carriage, plenty of flowers (if you like that sort of thing) and most interesting for me, a pretty good collection of totem poles. We pottered about there for a couple of hours finishing up with lunch at a very nice restaurant by the Lion Bridge (which in spite of Mrs Whiskers’ assertions to the contrary is not made out of real lions).

Back at the hotel I had a bit of a siesta whilst most of the others went out shopping or wandering about. In the evening we walked to Gas Town, another of Vancouver’s well-known tourist areas where Dan had somehow found a sort of pub within a pub. It is strange but true, you have to go through an Irish pub, out the back, down a small alley and you come to another bar, and there is no other way to get there. After a few beers we went to find somewhere to eat. I ordered the bison (for anyone that is not sure, the difference between a buffalo and a bison is that you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo) and very nice it was too. I would imagine that most people that read these reports know Rodders so I would suggest that you don’t ask him for his opinion on whether or not service should be included in the bill unless you have at least a couple of hours for the reply (which can be summarised by the word ‘no’).

The next morning Rodders had somehow managed to contract swine fever, which I suppose should not have been too much of a surprise, after all he is a self-acknowledged piggy. We went to Granville Island market for breakfast and then back to the apartments to pack. Mrs Whiskers had offered to help me pack because she wanted a sneak preview of my costume for the competition. We left the bags at the apartment office and I bought the world’s most expensive e-camera battery (both of mine having decided to pack up). Meeting up with Whiskers, Bo and Dan to pick up the bags (the rest of the rabble being in a bar opposite the cruse ship terminal) it struck me that I could not remember packing my passport. We rang Mrs Whiskers (who was with the boozing contingent) and she didn’t remember packing it either. Oops! Panic! One of us must have though because it was at the bottom of one of my bags. We met up at the terminal and said au revoir to the Whiskers who we going to drive the car back to Seattle and fly to Anchorage.

The next day, looking at the cruise newspaper, the one event I wanted to go to was a wine tasting on the top floor. Dan and Sam were also signed up so (against my better judgement) I joined them for a couple of beers before the event. After the wine tasting Dan was prostituting his moustache to Australian tourists for one beer a photo and then we went to the ‘party’ in the theatre where we dressed up posh and met the captain for free cocktails. A couple of lime daiquiris and whiskey sours later and I could not feel my teeth and it was only about eight in the evening so what with a bottle of Toasted Head Chardonnay with the lobster and a few beers during the comedy show afterwards, Thursday was not really a day to be proud of.

A new-born whale can put on up to eight pounds a day. There is only one mammal that can exceed this record and that is the cruse ship passenger. It was not all boozing and scoffing however. There were various stops on the cruise.

Friday morning we woke up to find ourselves moored in the old gold rush town of Ketchikan. At Breakfast, Beardy Olsen gave me a map of the place so Rodders, Ted and myself headed out for a potter about. We had a nose round the museum. There was some interesting old (by American standards) stuff there, not least this 1905 fire engine. They certainly don’t make them like that any more. We explored a bit more and I got another patch for my suitcase and because my hip was giving me some gip I let Rodders and Ted zoom up the hill whilst I took the short cut past the salmon run to the local brothel. Well it was not a brothel any more but a museum celebrating the life of Dolly Arthur, Ketchikan’s most notorious ‘lady of negotiable affection’. She even sold gift vouchers. Another point of interest was that at nine and a half stone she was considered somewhat on the large side for a female. Things have changed a bit round here since her time I can tell you. After a bit more exploring I headed back to the ship, wrote a few postcards and pottered about in the swimming pool and Jacuzzi and read a bit more of my book and generally just had a lazy afternoon and evening. The weather was astonishing. I had enough warm clothes for a tribe of Eskimos and people were sunbathing on the deck!

One of the things I really wanted to do on this trip was whale watching so when the opportunity arrived in Juneau, even though it was pretty expensive I leapt at the chance. Rodders and I booked an excursion on the dockside and since it did not start for over an hour had a swift half in the Red Dog Saloon where there was proper sawdust on the floors and what was apparently Wyatt Earp’s genuine pistol behind the bar. We presented ourselves at the tour office at the allotted time and took a fifteen minute bus ride to the harbour. For some reason Rodders was convinced it was not the right time of year for whales but less then five minutes after the boat left harbour there was a cry of ‘There she blows!” and I got my first glance of a forty foot hump back whale. We saw about five whales in total as well as a bald eagle catching fish, some otters and yet more spectacular scenery, including the glacier that Beardy and some of the others were investigating on foot. It was a three and a half hour trip and it was nowhere near long enough. The thing about whales is that you see a spout, a hump and a tail and then have to wait for about seven minutes before they come up for air again so the three and a half hours was over in a flash. It was definitely the highlight of the trip for me thus far though.

Leaving Rodders in Juneau I went back to the ship where I found Ted lying in his bed. It transpired that after having visited the glacier he went on a tour of the local brewery where they were not shy about handing out free samples. There was another free liquor tasting in the shopping area and we all arranged to meet up there. I had no trouble finding Ted there but there was no sign of Rodders. Ted and I ‘sampled’ everything that was going, some more than once until we became personas non gratia and we were more or less shooed out of the place before Rodders even arrived and we did not see him again until dinner. After dinner there was a pretty good comedy magic show in the theatre and whilst the others went to bed I went upstairs for a pre-breakfast pizza and got boozing and chatting with Beardy and a bunch of other Beard Team USA members till the wee small hours.

Sunday we were in the old gold rush town of Skagway. One of the tours that the cruse ship was trying to push was a train journey to the top of the pass. At about a hundred quid, however, it seemed a bit unnecessary and even though it was possible to hire a car and get there much cheaper (which is what Rodders, Ted and presumably some of the Swedes did), I just took the shuttle bus into town, had a ‘breakfast’ beer in the Red Onion Saloon which was another ‘authentic’ house of loose morals, took the tour (I am somehow becoming a bit of an expert in houses of easy virtue) and got chatting to a couple of Americans that we met on yesterday’s whale-watching excursion. After that I watched a film in the local tourist centre about the gold rush and did a bit of shopping (and was pretty pleased with myself for managing to buy some ‘shoe goo’ because one of my shoes was making an unsettling flapping noise when I walked). I then headed back to the ship for a bit of a siesta.

Man the lifeboats! Monday we went to a place called Sitka but because we the port was too shallow for our ship to dock we had to go ashore via the lifeboats. There were various points of alleged interest in the small town including a cathedral but the best bit by far was the so called Raptor Centre where there were loads of eagles and owls and other birds of prey. There was a talk and some videos and it was only when I met Ted in there that I realised I had managed to bypass the ticket office and gate crashed the place.

Tuesday was all at sea, there were no stops but on deck we had been asked to dress up and put on a bit of a show for the fellow passengers. I think my new Biggles costume went down quite well. After that there was a ‘secret party’. Because Beardy had booked so many rooms there were various ‘rewards’ available and he (absolutely correctly) selected the "hour's free bar" in one of the minor bars as one of his rewards, where we took full advantage. We actually arrived in port that evening but were not allowed off till the next day. The last bar to close is on the open deck and even at two in the morning it was not really dark. Granted the snow on the mountains helped but there is very little night-time in Alaska in spring it seems. In fact we were really lucky with the weather all trip, there were people that had been in the port many times and never seen the mountains because it is usually raining. We were totally blessed with the weather all cruise.

We arrived in Whittier on Wednesday. School buses were organised to take us from the port to Anchorage. We threw our stuff in the hotel and went exploring for a while. Later we were all bussed to somewhere or other (never did find out where) for a barbeque with free beer and some really good food, including caribou sausages. I was very pleased to see Leo there again, he is a member of the Handlebar Club but last time I met him (in Seattle last year) he had signed up for the Navy who were going to make him shave his moustache off. He got one last competition in before then and goes into the Navy in a couple of weeks. It was packed and I have to admit that my initial impression was that they had grossly underestimated the number of people that would be at the competition and on Saturday the judging would not finish till three in the morning! Amongst the madding throng we discovered some more Handlebar Club members from England such as Jock, Lewis, Keith and Richard. There was also one member of The British Beard Club there, Fraser Coppin. Because our illustrious President had forgotten to bring the Handlebar Club banner, so come the parade on Friday we marched under the Union Jack flag together with the British Beard Club banner.

On the way back we spotted a loose moose (by which I mean it was at large, I have no reason to question her sexual propriety, although on the other hand she did think nothing of taking a dump in full view of a coach load of tourists) and took lots of photos and somehow ended up in a bar in downtown Anchorage. I knew it was going to be one of those nights when Rodders was ordering beer by the pitcher full and Mrs Whiskers ordered a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon all for herself, just to keep up.

Partly due to the previous night’s excesses but also because for the first time in a week we had comfortable beds, everyone missed breakfast the next morning. We were up at about ten and wandered into town with no real plan. I bought a set of (genuine) moose plop earrings for Mrs Whiskers and we went on a trolley ride through Anchorage. Anchorage itself is not the most interesting of places, the most notable thing we saw was the area where the earthquake of 1964 knocked the ground level of part of a forest down thirty feet, but the best bit of the tour was the guide/driver who was full of anecdotes such as the time she went to her sister’s wedding and it was minus sixteen degrees. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like much until you realise she was talking Fahrenheit and minus twenty seven centigrade is no weather to be wearing a dress. When we got back I left the others feeding their faces and went back to the hotel for a splosh in the pool, a bubble in the Jacuzzi and a short nap.

On Friday was the World Beard and Moustache Association meeting followed by the parade. As I think I mentioned somewhat prematurely, a certain Warthog Sandwich (HBC President) forgot the banner. We had snuck in a few pitchers of the local beer before the parade so some of us were dying for a pee when it ended. The local khazi was in a federal building. You need I.D. to take a pee in a public building now. Land of the free my old ring! Luckily there was a bar not too far away so disaster was averted. A certain banner-forgetting fool was laughing about that for the next three hours though. We ate and drunk until the so called ‘Mr Fur Face’ competition, the point of which I would have to admit was largely lost on me. There was an Australian band there called ‘The Beards’ who were OK. If they lacked anything in the talent department they more than made up for in volume and there was plenty of beer.

Saturday was the competition proper. First, the pre-jury, I did not have too much of a problem with it actually. I brought a book and did not move when I was told to and when everyone else had been sent to the wrong place I swanned straight in and was registered in no time at all. After that there was some media thing going on at the local market. I might have bumped into them earlier but Jeffo and Dame Judy (Rod’s sister and brother in law) were there as well as Jeffo’s brother and his wife, Pat (Pat for some reason being unable to keep her hands off my tummy). After that I ended up in a bar with Jörg and Margit until the competition started at 2 o’clock. The places are already up on this web site so I will not bore everyone with that, other than to state that even though my Biggles costume was quite a hit with the crowd I still maintained my customary last position (last equal in this case because if you didn’t get a medal then you were awarded fourth place). My fears that the event would go on till three in the morning were totally unfounded and it was very well organised. I would (and do) question why Burke (the hippy) Kenny didn’t even place in his class but them’s the breaks.

Somehow I lost Rod and the Swedes after the competition and ended up in a bar with Leo, Richard and the British Beard contingent and when I rolled back into the hotel at about one or so, the room had been turned into a bar and Whiskers, Mrs Whiskers, Dan, Rod, Ted, Jorg, Greg were on their second bottle of scotch. Well if you can’t sleep through it... join them hehe.

On Sunday there was an organised trip and we all gathered at the allotted meeting point and were bussed out. First we went to see a Glacier. They are interesting things Glaciers (frozen rivers that still flow) but most interesting was that we saw this glacier from a huge boat, in fact the boat took up nearly half the lake and made it from one end of the lake to the other in about a minute. After that we went to a wild-life centre where there were bears and eagles and bison. Then we went on to a place called something Creek where there was a hillbilly band and Rodders and Dan got gold fever and hired all the gold-panning palaver and managed to gather about half a milligram of gold between the two of them. It was a great trip with free (or at least pre-paid) food and beer and an ideal way to end the excursion.

Monday we departed, meeting Rosemary at the airport and she was good enough to do some artwork for my latest project www.bestofabadbunch.org.uk (hehe lets see if The Dade edits that gratuitous plug)
Hmm - It looks as though you could do with my services anyway... Ed.

As usual I would like to finish by thanking those concerned: Whiskers and Greg for driving us all the way from Seattle to Vancouver, Beardy for coming up with the cruise idea, pretty much everyone that was there for being such good company and particularly the Alaskan Beard Club for a job very well done.

 Andy
 

Text © Andy Lear / The Handlebar Club MMIX