1025 (or Fjell Blikk Hytte)
30 - 31 July, Ian
Over the past couple of days we've moved from a
cabin in a north eastern coastal state to a cabin out here in the far north west
of Alaska. When I wrote my last blog entry I had views out over the lake; now I
have a wide view through the glazed doors just over the table, across the
veranda and then over misty grey-green woodland, predominantly formed of tall
thin silver birch and darkened with coniferous stretches, to the Tanana river in
the middle distance, dissolving hazily and indistinctly beyond that. Outside
there is a smokey tang to the air, which, according to a resident we met at the
airport yesterday, comes from forest fires two hundred miles away caused by
lightning.
Our drive from Maine to Boston took us around four hours. We listened to a couple of radio programmes: Car Talk, by a couple of Italian Americans, which was hilarious, and a News Quiz equivalent, which wasn't (it was as strained an attempt at topical humour as the Radio 4 show). I don't know how funny Car Talk would be if you listened to it all the time but I may see if there's a podcast on cartalk.org so I can find out.
We're getting pretty good at the one night hotel thing. Again we showed up at a decent hotel with a confirmation that we'd booked a room on Expedia for two adults and two kids. Again they had no knowledge that we needed a room for four and railed against Expedia, implying that it was our fault or Expedia's if they couldn't honour the booking. Again we ultimately ended up with a great room, this time a junior suite.
Our Boston stop ended up being more functional than touristic. Paula bought some new sunglasses, I got a new camera (a Nikon Coolpix 7900 to replace my jamming Minolta as a pocket camera - best feature: it's black) and had my first sushi/sushima since we left (okay, not top quality), and we checked in with a couple of questions at the Apple store. In the evening we had dinner at Legal's round the corner from the hotel. In the past Legal's has been a great Boston standard; now it seems to have lost its edge of both service and quality. Some of my first experiences of perky serving staff bouncing up to the table, proudly introducing themselves and singing through the day's specials were in Legal's; at the time this was unlike any experience I'd had in England (it was before they'd invented Australians). On Friday, though, my wood-smoked fish and scallops tasted of fuel and the jaded over-worked waiter brought the wrong drinks. It would be great if places like this (Smith and Wollenski in New York is another) continued to be excellent every time but I guess as owners and staff change it's virtually impossible for a volume business to keep standards high. Even so, Boston remains a charming city and I could happily spend more time there (hopefully we will again one day). After a month in Maine it was noticeable how diverse the place is. Maybe not quite in the way that Cape Town is, but there were French and Italian people struggling quaintly with their English, a black guy doing a funky drum routine with cans and pots on the corner by the public library, restaurants offering a variety of Asian cuisines...
We got up at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday (I think?) and zipped over to Logan airport, catching our first flight before Starbucks opened (infuriatingly there was one girl there early but she couldn't start serving until someone else showed up). I read the first hundred or so sides of Word Freak, a book about pro Scrabble players that I bought for Paula (a chore for today: buy a Scrabble set) and listened to Democracy Now on my IPod. We had an easy transfer at Chicago's O'Hare (adjoining gates) and then flew from Chicago to Seattle, where we had just enough time for a sit-down lunch. On my one or two previous trips through Seattle it's struck me as potentially being one of those feel good places where it might be nice to live (though probably for other people rather than for me). But I've only passed through it, never stayed. As the plane banked over the city and we made our approach Heidi, looking down over the sunny expanses of blue water and the houses scattered amongst the trees, said a couple of times that she wanted to spend the next month there. The airport was clean and new-looking, though there were those work-in-progress boards ominously springing up, which seem to be permanently sealing off large areas of the busier US airports, like the never-completed roadworks that encircle them, making you suspect that there's an entrenched mob racket running the show. Hopefully at Seattle the boarding really is for genuine new development that will finish in finite time, rather than an early sign of the JFK malaise of being structurally unable to service the volume of traffic passing through.
At Seattle we had a break: our flight to Fairbanks was non-stop direct, bettering our Trailfinders schedule, which showed an intermediate stop at Anchorage. And when we arrived, four of our five bags, which had all been checked right through at Logan, turned up on the carousel. A baggage handler I spoke to seemed to think that four out of five was a terrific result, which was borne out by the guy ahead of me in the (long) baggage handling line, who knew by heart the airport ID numbers of his (missing) bags, and claimed that they got lost every time he came in to Fairbanks. As we spoke to the cheery staff at the luggage counter we were overlooked by numerous stuffed bears in cabinets and moose heads glowering down from the high walls. Perhaps they help: we had a call in the middle of the night to say that our last bag came through on a later flight.
Our car for the month is a Ford Taurus. It has neither the broken parts of our Moroccan car nor the embarrassing styling and colour of the croissant van we had in Corsica. But it's a step down from our GMC Envoy. It has all of the Envoy's infuriating binging (it was technically impossible to listen to the radio with the door open without being harassed by this censorious noise) and, as with the Envoy, you, as a mere driver, are not trusted with responsibility for controlling the lights (they're always on, the vestigial light switch is just there to make you feel better). But the Taurus astonishingly, for a car made by Ford for US consumers, lacks both infra red and central locking. Anyhow... it's good enough as an A to B device, as Martin Amis might say.
Finally we arrived at our cabin. It's fabulous. Compared to the last place (which was cozy) it's like a cathedral. And it's furnished beautifully. We met the owner briefly, but we encounter him more revealingly throughout the house. I love the wood from which it's constructed, most of which is in the form of 15" thick lightly treated hand-peeled Douglas Fir logs, many of which have ends exposed in split profile. The wood is pegged nicely too. The lounge has a two-storey pitched ceiling and there's a small gallery landing over, leading to the upstairs bedroom. No opportunity has been missed to provide picture windows or use glass doors to bring light and landscape inside. In fact, in the master bedroom there are huge windows that have no curtains or blinds, and considering that there is next to no night-time darkness this time of year we'll have to see how well we sleep.
There are many beautiful artefacts and it's clear that the owner decorated the place for himself rather than to rent - having done the same at our cottage we know the difference. In fact, it seems as though he just upped and moved out about five minutes before we arrived. There are groceries in the fridge and prescription pills in the cupboards. Pretty geometrically patterned quilt covers hang on the walls and are in use on the beds. The bedding is perfect: Egyptian cotton sheets, lovely bedspreads, pocket-sprung mattresses. Elegant shelves are stacked with a elegant books. These are mainly to do with ballet (he was wearing a ballet t-shirt when we met him and there are ballet photo's that I'm guessing he took himself on the walls) though the bookshelves also offer evidence of other interests (there is a Buddhism book by Alan Watts, a Zen book by Suzuki, a book on Haiku and a slim volume on the Zen approach to tactics that predates the airport book popularisation of the theme). There is a little selection of lovely cookery books in the kitchen. The books may not be my choices (though our Zen/Buddhism collection overlaps) but it's totally admirable. If anything, it's all too coherent. There are no novels, for example, nothing extraneous to a certain restrained aesthetic.
There are ticking and chiming clocks and a loud cuckoo clock: we've long planned to get a grandfather clock for home but I now also like this new idea of having a number of clocks, each with its own voice.
And what is missing is equally telling: there is no book of advice, rules or instructions for guests, no visitor's book, no exhortation to use this place as our (home from) home. I thought that the place is called simply 1025 rather than Forest View or Lazy Days or Shangri La, but it turns out that there is a name: Fjell Blikk Hytte (or Mountain View Lodge).
Well now we have to go get our bag from the airport and find out a little of Fairbanks. More next time.
Our drive from Maine to Boston took us around four hours. We listened to a couple of radio programmes: Car Talk, by a couple of Italian Americans, which was hilarious, and a News Quiz equivalent, which wasn't (it was as strained an attempt at topical humour as the Radio 4 show). I don't know how funny Car Talk would be if you listened to it all the time but I may see if there's a podcast on cartalk.org so I can find out.
We're getting pretty good at the one night hotel thing. Again we showed up at a decent hotel with a confirmation that we'd booked a room on Expedia for two adults and two kids. Again they had no knowledge that we needed a room for four and railed against Expedia, implying that it was our fault or Expedia's if they couldn't honour the booking. Again we ultimately ended up with a great room, this time a junior suite.
Our Boston stop ended up being more functional than touristic. Paula bought some new sunglasses, I got a new camera (a Nikon Coolpix 7900 to replace my jamming Minolta as a pocket camera - best feature: it's black) and had my first sushi/sushima since we left (okay, not top quality), and we checked in with a couple of questions at the Apple store. In the evening we had dinner at Legal's round the corner from the hotel. In the past Legal's has been a great Boston standard; now it seems to have lost its edge of both service and quality. Some of my first experiences of perky serving staff bouncing up to the table, proudly introducing themselves and singing through the day's specials were in Legal's; at the time this was unlike any experience I'd had in England (it was before they'd invented Australians). On Friday, though, my wood-smoked fish and scallops tasted of fuel and the jaded over-worked waiter brought the wrong drinks. It would be great if places like this (Smith and Wollenski in New York is another) continued to be excellent every time but I guess as owners and staff change it's virtually impossible for a volume business to keep standards high. Even so, Boston remains a charming city and I could happily spend more time there (hopefully we will again one day). After a month in Maine it was noticeable how diverse the place is. Maybe not quite in the way that Cape Town is, but there were French and Italian people struggling quaintly with their English, a black guy doing a funky drum routine with cans and pots on the corner by the public library, restaurants offering a variety of Asian cuisines...
We got up at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday (I think?) and zipped over to Logan airport, catching our first flight before Starbucks opened (infuriatingly there was one girl there early but she couldn't start serving until someone else showed up). I read the first hundred or so sides of Word Freak, a book about pro Scrabble players that I bought for Paula (a chore for today: buy a Scrabble set) and listened to Democracy Now on my IPod. We had an easy transfer at Chicago's O'Hare (adjoining gates) and then flew from Chicago to Seattle, where we had just enough time for a sit-down lunch. On my one or two previous trips through Seattle it's struck me as potentially being one of those feel good places where it might be nice to live (though probably for other people rather than for me). But I've only passed through it, never stayed. As the plane banked over the city and we made our approach Heidi, looking down over the sunny expanses of blue water and the houses scattered amongst the trees, said a couple of times that she wanted to spend the next month there. The airport was clean and new-looking, though there were those work-in-progress boards ominously springing up, which seem to be permanently sealing off large areas of the busier US airports, like the never-completed roadworks that encircle them, making you suspect that there's an entrenched mob racket running the show. Hopefully at Seattle the boarding really is for genuine new development that will finish in finite time, rather than an early sign of the JFK malaise of being structurally unable to service the volume of traffic passing through.
At Seattle we had a break: our flight to Fairbanks was non-stop direct, bettering our Trailfinders schedule, which showed an intermediate stop at Anchorage. And when we arrived, four of our five bags, which had all been checked right through at Logan, turned up on the carousel. A baggage handler I spoke to seemed to think that four out of five was a terrific result, which was borne out by the guy ahead of me in the (long) baggage handling line, who knew by heart the airport ID numbers of his (missing) bags, and claimed that they got lost every time he came in to Fairbanks. As we spoke to the cheery staff at the luggage counter we were overlooked by numerous stuffed bears in cabinets and moose heads glowering down from the high walls. Perhaps they help: we had a call in the middle of the night to say that our last bag came through on a later flight.
Our car for the month is a Ford Taurus. It has neither the broken parts of our Moroccan car nor the embarrassing styling and colour of the croissant van we had in Corsica. But it's a step down from our GMC Envoy. It has all of the Envoy's infuriating binging (it was technically impossible to listen to the radio with the door open without being harassed by this censorious noise) and, as with the Envoy, you, as a mere driver, are not trusted with responsibility for controlling the lights (they're always on, the vestigial light switch is just there to make you feel better). But the Taurus astonishingly, for a car made by Ford for US consumers, lacks both infra red and central locking. Anyhow... it's good enough as an A to B device, as Martin Amis might say.
Finally we arrived at our cabin. It's fabulous. Compared to the last place (which was cozy) it's like a cathedral. And it's furnished beautifully. We met the owner briefly, but we encounter him more revealingly throughout the house. I love the wood from which it's constructed, most of which is in the form of 15" thick lightly treated hand-peeled Douglas Fir logs, many of which have ends exposed in split profile. The wood is pegged nicely too. The lounge has a two-storey pitched ceiling and there's a small gallery landing over, leading to the upstairs bedroom. No opportunity has been missed to provide picture windows or use glass doors to bring light and landscape inside. In fact, in the master bedroom there are huge windows that have no curtains or blinds, and considering that there is next to no night-time darkness this time of year we'll have to see how well we sleep.
There are many beautiful artefacts and it's clear that the owner decorated the place for himself rather than to rent - having done the same at our cottage we know the difference. In fact, it seems as though he just upped and moved out about five minutes before we arrived. There are groceries in the fridge and prescription pills in the cupboards. Pretty geometrically patterned quilt covers hang on the walls and are in use on the beds. The bedding is perfect: Egyptian cotton sheets, lovely bedspreads, pocket-sprung mattresses. Elegant shelves are stacked with a elegant books. These are mainly to do with ballet (he was wearing a ballet t-shirt when we met him and there are ballet photo's that I'm guessing he took himself on the walls) though the bookshelves also offer evidence of other interests (there is a Buddhism book by Alan Watts, a Zen book by Suzuki, a book on Haiku and a slim volume on the Zen approach to tactics that predates the airport book popularisation of the theme). There is a little selection of lovely cookery books in the kitchen. The books may not be my choices (though our Zen/Buddhism collection overlaps) but it's totally admirable. If anything, it's all too coherent. There are no novels, for example, nothing extraneous to a certain restrained aesthetic.
There are ticking and chiming clocks and a loud cuckoo clock: we've long planned to get a grandfather clock for home but I now also like this new idea of having a number of clocks, each with its own voice.
And what is missing is equally telling: there is no book of advice, rules or instructions for guests, no visitor's book, no exhortation to use this place as our (home from) home. I thought that the place is called simply 1025 rather than Forest View or Lazy Days or Shangri La, but it turns out that there is a name: Fjell Blikk Hytte (or Mountain View Lodge).
Well now we have to go get our bag from the airport and find out a little of Fairbanks. More next time.
Posted: Mon - August 1, 2005 at 11:44 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM