Going Virtually, Fiction

🏴󠁵󠁳󠁡󠁫󠁿 🖥️ 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁡󠁫󠁿

She slid gratefully into her car. It was Friday! Work was over for the week! Time to head to Alaska! She synced her phone and hit play on the audio book for Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier by Mark Adams (Dutton 2018). She could probably finish another chapter during her drive.

Of course, she wasn’t actually going to the frozen north. She had to be back at work on Monday for one thing. The cost, for another thing. For a final thing, she was capable of getting cold in the middle of summer. IRL Alaska was out.

Instead, she had arranged a weekend of multi-media Alaskan entertainment. She did this two or three times a year, for various places around the world. Little mini-vacations. Perhaps a hot bath with coconut bath bubbles and a book was not a hot spring Fiji, but it was much easier to come by.

She tried to get her friends to join her, either gathering at her house or watching separately and sharing on a group chat. More that one friend said they spent too much time in Zoom meetings for work and had no desire to do more of the same in their leisure time. True enough, but Alaska! Snow-capped peaks! Charismatic megafauna! She thought her friends lacked imagination. Her friends thought she had too much imagination. They probably all had a point.

Before each virtual trip, she investigated the destination as if she were going in person. Where to go. What to see. Read a few books on the place, such as A Lap Around Alaska: An AlCan Adventure by Shawn Inmon (Pertime 2017). Find blogs from people who lived there. She even picked flights and hotels.

Then, she made it virtual. Did the attraction have a virtual element? Perhaps a 360o tour? Photos from the top of an important site? If it was a big enough city, there were often tour guides who would do live virtual tours. She had done just such a tour of Audubon bird murals. Amazing what was out there.

She even picked a virtual hotel. The fanciest, most deluxe accommodation available. Since she wasn’t really staying there, she could spend many hundreds, even thousands of dollars a night. She’d pick “her room” and use it as her screensaver over the weekend.

Then she took the money she had budgeted for flights and a real hotel and used it for trip amenities. Food native to that area, even if it had to be flown in. What was the cost of shipping some King Crab when she wasn’t having to pay to ship herself out there? Plus she could buy that deluxe, but oh-so-heavy art book from the museum gift shop without having to worry about fitting it into her luggage.

She planned out everything, just as she would for a live trip. Then, she’d get all the chores done, all the laundry cleaned and folded, all the groceries shopped, just as if she was going to be gone in truth. No getting trapped by the mundane. She once tried packing a suitcase and working out of it, but that was too over the top, even for her.

Tonight, she would sit down to moose sausage stew and pick something to watch from the list she had complied of movies and documentaries set in Alaska. Probably start with the Food Channel, “Then he’s off to the final frontier for the northernmost fair in America, the Alaska State Fair. While there, Noah tries regional favorites like Umiak, Alaskan Sausage Sundaes and Alaska Sourdough Bites.” Food Network: Carnival Eats, Grill Bill or Food Network: Carnival East, The King Crab and I. Alas, Northern Exposure was not an option since it was filmed in Roslyn WA.

For bedtime, she would curl up with with either Sue Henry or Dana Stablenow’s Kate Sugak series. She had found lot of books nominally set in Alaska, where the setting was scenic window dressing, sometimes literally. A plot that could happen anywhere with pretty mountains in the distance. Books wherein it gets light early or late, but never had ramifications for the plot. Perfectly valid books, just not ones you would read for local color. Henry and Stabenow have so much local color that snow falls out of the pages when you open the books.

First thing in the morning, she would read the weather forecast, as she would anywhere. Then, a quick tour of traffic cams to see what the day looked like. Then, off to the Alaska Zoo to check out their polar bear cam.

The highlight for Saturday was watching the ceremonial start of the Iditarod. She had picked this particular weekend for that reason. The website cautioned about limited parking and suggested arriving early and/or carpooling. No concern of hers. No parking woes. No waiting around in the snow. She would have a front row view and warm feet.

One downside was no entertaining conversations with random strangers, which was part of the fun of being in the middle of a like-minded crowd. Did they have dogs? She had a dog. Had they tried dog sledding? She had not. Her dog was more of a couch surfer. And so on. Well, that was what fan pages were for.

The race was longer than one weekend, so she’d follow it online during the week, just as she would do if she had returned home from a trip. She wasn’t into the sport enough to engage in fantasy mushing, but she did enjoy watching the athletes & their mushers. Okay, she stole that one from somewhere. She looked forward to finishing Four Thousand Paws: Caring for the Dogs of the Iditarod: A Veterinarian’s Story, by Lee Morgan (Liveright 2024), while she watched the race next week.

She’d fill out the day with museums and tourist sites. Which meant another downside. Lots of sitting. Lots of sitting and staring at screens. Although, it was a mixed downside. Well, you can have mixed blessings, why not mixed downsides? Anyway, when she did haul herself out into the world, she loved to walk. She’d spent one morning in New York walking the three miles from the Battery to Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. You know that friend who says, Hey, we can walk over there and suddenly you have 10,00 steps for the day? She was that friend. By the last day of her IRL vacations, her feet were no longer speaking to her and everything from the hip joints down was on fire. So, sitting wasn’t all bad.

Saturday night was a dinner out. If the cuisine, or a close approximation, was served at a local restaurant, she go there. Otherwise, she’d pick somewhere she had never been, in keeping with the spirit of adventure. Her friends might think her virtual trips were odd but they were happy to join her for dinner. Companionship over food, another nice thing about virtual vacations. Solo dinners had their place but it was good to have the option if you felt like company.

Church was the highlight of Sunday. It was fascinating to see how the same service changed in a different place. For instance, the Passing of the Peace involved a lot more hugging in California that it did on the East Coast. Church was one place that she truly missed not being in person. The online service would have the words and the music, but you couldn’t feel the organ hit the deep notes, or smell the incense. A truly enlightened being could pray in the middle of Times Square, the old iteration of Times Square. She found she needed the surroundings to help her concentrate. But seventy-five percent of an experience was better than never having the experience.

Which was pretty much the motto of her trips. It beat the available alternative.

When the trip was over, she could stand up and magically be home. No airports. No crowds. Just boom, done, and time to walk the dog.

🏴󠁵󠁳󠁡󠁫󠁿 🖥️ 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁡󠁫󠁿

Inspiration

Just finished UChicago Graham School, Alaska: Indigenous, Russian, American.

Yes, I did type show instead of snow up there. Sigh. [Two More Books]

Onwards!
Katherine