My husband and I were sailing to Alaska to visit our son's family, but once we reached Skagway, the pull of research was too strong. I had to take a little detour, a four-hour antique steam engine ride across the Canadian border to the Yukon. After all, one of the main characters in the sequel I'm writing to The Year We Were Famous goes to the Yukon, and how could I write about it if I hadn't been there?
Okay, I know I could have read some books about the Yukon, and I'm doing that, too. And if this research-as-an-excuse-for-an-adventure followed the pattern of the last fifteen years, nine-nine percent of what I learned would never make it into the book. But how could I not go when I was so close? And those books might never have yielded such delicious factoids and sensory impressions as these:
Each passenger car on the old trains was heated by a coal-burning stove in one corner, and the train rocked so heavily side to side I had a hard time walking down the aisle to get warm.
One house of ill-repute, "a house of negotiable affection," in Skagway was known as a B&B (as in Bakery and Brothel).
Because of glacial rebound, the land around the lakes on the way to the Yukon is ten feet higher than it was at the time of the gold rush of 1898.
Ale or tea made from Sitka Spruce needles wards off scurvy; the ale is still being made seasonally by a brewery in Alaska.
A couple weeks before we left home, White Pass had several days with temps in the 90's, and I had hoped to take a short hike on part of the trail 35,000 miners took back in 1898. The night before I arrived, however, it snowed and the wind and driving rain-almost-snow when I arrived was so heavy that the guide wouldn't take us. Oh, well. I got close.
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