Canada to Alaska, Family Moves, and New Storylines

Some journeys begin as holidays and end up rearranging the furniture inside your head.

That is how Canada and Alaska felt to me. I set off expecting mountains, glaciers, good food, and the particular pleasure of unpacking only once on a train or ship. I came home with all of that, yes, but also with a quieter cargo: thoughts about family, home, time, and the stories we carry with us.

There is something about travelling through vast places that makes your own life feel both tiny and strangely clear. A train edging through the Rockies. A ship slipping out from Vancouver towards Alaska. Mist on the water. Snow still holding on to the high ridges. Long conversations over breakfast. Sudden silences when everyone simply stops talking because the view has taken over.

And, somewhere between one coastline and the next, I found myself thinking about the patterns that keep appearing in our lives, in families, in memory, and in fiction.

The Rockies have a way of making every window seat feel like a front-row seat.

Riding the Rocky Mountaineer through a world of green and stone

The Rocky Mountaineer was one of those experiences I had heard about for years, usually from people who lowered their voices slightly when they described it, as though naming something sacred.

Now I understand why.

There is a gentle rhythm to train travel that suits reflection. You are moving, but not rushing. The scenery arrives without you having to chase it. One moment there are rivers flashing silver below the tracks, the next there are forests that seem to go on forever, then a great wall of mountain where clouds drift low enough to touch.

The service was warm and calm, which helped. Meals appeared at civilised intervals. Coffee arrived when needed. Fellow travellers compared notes on wildlife sightings, and whether it was better to sit glued to the window or occasionally look across the carriage and remember there were human beings on board too.

I failed at that last part more than once.

I kept returning to the window because the views changed constantly. The mountains did not feel static. They shifted with the light. In the morning, they looked blue and distant. By afternoon, they became sharp and almost theatrical. Every bend in the track seemed to offer a new version of the same lesson: pay attention, because this moment is not coming back in quite this form.

One memory stays with me. The train slowed, conversation stilled, and everyone seemed to turn towards the same stretch of forest. It made me think of how easily we fill our days with noise, and call it living.

On the Rocky Mountaineer, there was nowhere useful to hurry to. That may have been the greatest luxury of all.

From Vancouver to Alaska, where the scale keeps changing

After the train came Vancouver, and then the cruise north to Alaska. Leaving Vancouver by ship has its own drama. The city recedes slowly, not all at once. Glass towers, wooded slopes, small boats, bridges, open water. It feels like a departure staged in chapters.

A cruise is a different kind of movement from a train. On the train, the world passes at eye level. On the ship, you become aware of distance and weather. The sky matters more. The mood of the sea matters more. You start reading clouds as if they might be sending messages.

The passage towards Alaska brought those wonderful blue-green days when the horizon nearly disappears. Mountain shapes hovered through clouds. Waterfalls appeared like white threads on dark rock. At times, the ship seemed to be travelling through a painting that had not quite dried.

Then came the glaciers.

No photograph really prepares you for them. A glacier is not only ice. It is time made visible. Layered, compressed, scarred, blue in places where blue should not seem possible. Standing there, I felt that familiar traveller’s contradiction: the wish to take a thousand pictures and the knowledge that the best thing to do was to put the phone down.

A shared awe with strangers. The cheer when someone spotted humpback whales, dolphins or bald eagles. The simple pleasure of returning to the cabin after a long day and finding the bed waiting, turned down ready for sleep.

Travel can sound grand when you summarise it, especially a route like Canada to Alaska. Yet what I remember most are the details that made the journey immense. The mass of humanity wanting to experience the wonder did not detract from the wonder and beauty of the natural world all around.

Alaska seemed to arrive slowly, through mist, water, and silence.

Family, distance, and the question of where to live

Of course, travel has a way of loosening thoughts you have kept neatly tied up. Mine kept circling back to family.

There is a difference between loving people from a distance and being close enough to share a birthday tea, or help when life becomes awkward in the way it often does. Phone calls are precious. Messages matter. Video chats have saved many of us from feeling entirely absent. Still, they cannot replace the ordinary nearness of being there.

That thought has become more pressing lately.

Relocating to be closer to family is not a small idea. It touches almost everything: routines, friendships, familiar roads, the comfort of knowing where things are, and the quiet identity that grows from a place you have lived in for years. Even when the move is wanted, it takes courage.

I have found myself making mental lists, then abandoning them.

What would I miss? What would I gain? Which parts of my present life are rooted in habit, and which are true anchors? How much of home is geography, and how much is relationship? With the death of my mother, there is no reason to stay other than familiarity.

The older I get, the more I understand that some decisions are not made only with logic. Practical matters matter, of course. There are houses, costs, health, work, transport, and all the dull but necessary details that keep life going. Yet beneath those questions sits another one: what kind of life am I trying to make room for now?

Being closer to family would change the shape of my days. It would mean more chances to be useful. It might also mean letting go of a version of myself attached to my current home.

That is not a gloomy thought. It feels honest. Life keeps asking us to revise the map.

The patterns we inherit and the ones we choose

This is where my non-fiction project, The Woman Who Carried an Elephant, has been occupying so much of my mind.

The work continues, at times steadily and at times in bursts, as non-fiction often does. Some days the material feels clear and generous. Other days it resists me. I find myself moving pieces around, listening for the truer order beneath the obvious one.

At its heart, the project keeps returning me to patterns.

We tend to think of patterns as things we spot after the fact. Family stories repeated in different generations. Choices that look new but carry an old shape. Silences passed down, assumptions absorbed, acts of courage that echo long after the person who began them.

Writing The Woman Who Carried an Elephant has made me more alert to those repetitions. Not in a mystical sense, but in a human one. We learn ways of surviving. We inherit attitudes towards love, work, money, grief, duty, and risk. Some of those inheritances steady us. Some need questioning. Some need putting down.

The title itself still gives me a jolt. It suggests burden, strength, absurdity, endurance, and tenderness all at once. Who carries an elephant? Why? For whom? At what cost? Those questions keep opening doors.

What I am discovering is that a life rarely moves in a straight line. It loops. It doubles back. It returns to old rooms with new eyes.

Perhaps that is why the journey through Canada and Alaska lodged so deeply in me. Mountains reveal their patterns too. Rivers cut their paths over time. Glaciers carry what has fallen into them. None of it is random, though much of it may look that way from too close a view.

The journey followed me back onto the page.

Returning to fiction and the sequel to The Village of Whispers

While the non-fiction asks me to listen carefully to real lives, fiction is pulling at another part of my imagination.

The sequel to The Village of Whispers is beginning to gather energy, and I have to admit, this stage is one of my favourites. The story has not yet hardened into final form. It still has room to surprise me. Characters can make unexpected choices. A minor detail can suddenly become important. A path I thought was closed can open again.

Developing plot lines feels a little like standing at the edge of one of those Alaskan inlets, watching the mist shift. At first there are only shapes. Then a ridge appears. Then a shoreline. Then, if you wait long enough, you realise there is a whole route through.

I am enjoying the process of asking questions.

Who has been keeping secrets? Which whispers were misunderstood the first time? What happens when the past refuses to stay safely buried? Which characters deserve more trouble than they are currently getting?

That last question is one of the wicked pleasures of writing fiction.

The sequel is giving me the chance to widen the world of The Village of Whispers while keeping hold of the atmosphere that drew me to it in the first place. I am interested in what fear does to a close community, but also in loyalty, memory, and the stories people tell to protect themselves.

Again, patterns appear.

A rumour travels the same way through a village as an old family belief can travel through generations. One person speaks. Another repeats. A third changes the emphasis. Before long, a story has become part of the air. Fiction lets me follow that process with a freedom non-fiction does not allow. I can heighten, twist, conceal, and reveal. I can let the shadows lengthen.

And right now, that feels exciting.

What travel brings home with it

People often ask for the highlight of a trip, and I always struggle to answer. Was it the Rocky Mountaineer? The first sight of Alaska from the ship? The glaciers? The quiet moments when I felt completely outside ordinary time?

The honest answer is that the highlight was the combination. The train reminded me to slow down. The cruise reminded me of scale. Alaska reminded me that beauty can be stark and still generous. Family thoughts reminded me that love is practical, not just sentimental. The writing reminded me that stories do not stay politely in one corner of life. They travel with us, gather evidence, and wait for us to notice.

Some views seem to ask for silence before words return.

I came back with photographs, of course. Too many, probably. Mountains from every possible angle. Water in every shade of grey, green, and blue. Train windows, ship decks, plates of food, skies that looked different five minutes after I had already snapped them.

But I also came back with questions that feel useful.

Here are the ones I keep returning to:

• What patterns in my life are asking to be noticed?

• Which ones have served their purpose?

• What would it mean to live closer to the people I love?

• How can I make room for both rootedness and change?

• Which stories am I ready to carry forward, and which ones can I finally set down?

  
  

Those questions will no doubt find their way into the work. They always do. The non-fiction will absorb some of them directly. The sequel will disguise others in plot, character, setting, and whispers behind closed doors.

That is one of the great gifts of writing. Nothing is wasted. Not the view from a train window. Not the cool air on a ship deck. Not the ache of considering a move. Not the old family pattern that suddenly makes sense years later.

Life keeps handing us material. The task is to stay awake enough to receive it.

For now, I am grateful for the journey, grateful to be home, and grateful for the pages waiting to be filled. Canada and Alaska gave me grandeur, but they also gave me clarity. Family is calling me closer. The Woman Who Carried an Elephant is asking for patience and courage. The sequel to The Village of Whispers is whispering louder by the day.

And somewhere in all of it, a new pattern is beginning to show itself.