It is Saturday morning and we are preparing to leave Edinburgh, our last stop in Scotland. We arrived here early Thursday afternoon after our last train pass journey from Fort William, via a change in Glasgow.
On June 10th Sandy and Lauren are going to Scotland for 10 days. Our itinerary calls for stops in four cities, where we plan to mix historic sights with the natural beauty of the area.
Since we last wrote, we left the hacienda north of Quito on Wednesday and made our way to Cotopaxi National Park about 50 miles south of Quito. We hired a driver to take us between the two destinations, which included a stop at the equator itself, about 15 miles north of Quito.
As I write this, Sandy and I are making our return trip upstream on the Rio Napo (Napo River) from the Sacha Lodge back to Coca, Ecuador – a distance of approximately 50 miles. We stayed at Sacha for the last four days.
Sandy and I are currently at Ishasha Bush Camp in Queen Elizabeth National Park, just a few minutes from Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The camp is perched on the Ntungwe River which is fast moving and deep brown in color.
Fairbanks was the first stop on our Alaskan journey. We visited a gold mine, the Trans Alaska Pipeline and took a riverboat cruise.
We spent three days in the Denali National Park area, including stays at two different lodges. The highlight of this time was a bus tour on the only paved road inside the park.
Traveling across the USA by train is an unique way to see and experience the variety and scale of the country. We broke up the journey, stretching it into a 17 day trip in August / September 2004, by stopping at Glacier National Park for five days and visiting Chicago before reaching New York City.
To begin this cross country journey, we went north by train to Oregon, where we had to resort to taking a replacement bus to meet our connecting train that left Portland before we were due to arrive. Once on the next train east, we made our way toward Glacier National Park.
After spending time in national parks, arriving in a big city like Chicago was a big change. During the three days we spent here we visited several museums and saw a Chicago Cubs baseball game.
