Alaska Trip

ALASKA!

We headed out on our adventure on Thursday May 27th, with Paul's youngest Sister and her husband Ray.  After a couple of games of cribbage at the airport, we boarded a FULL plane at 3 something in the afternoon (CST) and landed in Anchorage at 9:30 pm AK time, I think it is 3 hours earlier than Hastings, it was 9:30-10:00 pm and the sun was still shining!

We got our van and found our hotel.  Nice looking place in a not so nice looking area,  but what the heck!  They charge 10 dollars a night to park your car, in THEIR lot and another 10 bucks a time for WI-Fi, this could be expensive!  The beds were really comfy, we'll give them that!

On Friday we were up early and ready to see this "Last Frontier", we decided to head south and see Whittier and Seward.  We got about 45 miles and our van with 3 miles on the odometer, died.  Thankfully in a beautiful spot, we called National and they dispatched a tow truck with a different van on it and took the broken one away to be fixed.  We were fortunate that Carol had talked us into a cheap cooler and sandwich stuff and fruit and snacks.  She is such a smart little sister :-)

To get to Whittier, one must go through a 2 1/2 mile tunnel that is shared with the Alaska Railroad.  This is the only tunnel of it's kind in the world and is quite interesting!

The village is lovely, but isolated.  Mostly fishing and tourists.  We did our part!

We proceeded to Seward which is a cruise ship port and also a fishing port and tourist stop.  Again, we did our part and found a place called Ray's that had some awesome seafood, right on the dock.

We wound our way back to Anchorage, by this time it was late, but still lots of sunshine.  The sun does not set early in AK, nor does it rise late!  We played cribbage in the lobby and watched people till about 10:30 and I finally crashed.  (NOTE) I played more cribbage on this trip than I have played in the 50 years Paul and I have been married!  I never heard of cribbage till I met him.

You will see a cutout Moose in some photos, he is Flat Seymour", a thing that the City of Anchorage promotes to help promote tourism.  I got him on-line and decided he would be our mascot!

On Sun. we would be facing the long drive to Fairbanks, so we decided to just hang around Anchorage on Saturday.  We took a bus tour of the city and went to a flea market/festival thing they do on summer weekends.  We went to the ULU KNIFE factory, the ULU is a native knife used to clean fish and just about every thing else.  One can watch them being made.

After dinner at a place called "Humpy's", after the salmon that grows a huge hump before dying, we went back to the hotel and, you guessed it, more cribbage!  The really nice thing about the eatery, besides the food, is the manager chatted with us and before we finished eating, picked up our food tab!  Sweet!

On Sunday, in the rain, we headed North to Denali and Fairbanks.  To make a note, it rained 5 of the 6 days in Anchorage.  Not a heavy rain, but it rained!

Fairbanks is roughly 350+ miles North and that sounds fine, BUT, the road is 2 lane, lots of tiny towns to slow you to a crawl and mostly no passing zones, the whole way.  The roads are not smooth and by time we go to Fairbanks, none of us were comfortable.  My hip was screaming for mercy and Ray was complaining that he had a square butt!  Denali is beautiful and I guess could be exciting if one is a trekker, camper.  It is not geared to day trippers.  It was too cloudy to see Mt. McKinley that day so we found our hotel.

They had us booked into the Comfort Inn in Fairbanks, not a good choice, thankfully we were only booked for that night so we proceeded to find other accommodations for the next 2 nights.

We were again playing cribbage after dinner when the building moved, a lot, the water in the pool got wavy and we learned what a 3.8 earthquake feels like.  THAT is more than enough for us, thank you!  It was our 1st and hopefully, our LAST earthquake.

The next day we moved our belongings, did some laundry and then headed out to a Gold Mine.

It was very interesting and I now know why gold is so expensive.  None of us would want to do this for a living.  It is back breaking work, even with the modern methods they use now days.

We did get to pan for gold and keep it.  We took anywhere from $9 and change (me) to $13 and change (Ray), fun!  The people were fun and answered a lot of dumb questions from all of the people and still smiled at us and shook hands and joked with everyone.  They also gave us free coffee and cookies.  We stopped and saw a part of the Alaska Pipe Line and got lots of useless info on it.  It is fun stuff to know, but I can't imagine when I will use this in a conversation!  It was and is quite and engineering feat!  We found some food for dinner and it was back to the cribbage board.  The new place we found to stay was called Wedgewood Resort and it offered small condos in lieu of rooms and so we had a small condo each for less than a hotel room.  We could play cribbage in comfort :-)

We went on a Paddle wheel boat trip the next day and it was beautiful weather for it.  It is an historic boat ride, down a river with lots of interesting stops, the kennel that is run by the husband of the late Susan Bucher of Iditarod fame, some very interesting housing choices, lots of float planes and finally a working native Alaskan village.  They also gave us free coffee and donuts.  So you notice anything about the FREE food?

The next day , on the drive back to Anchorage, we finally got our 1st look at Mt. McKinley, this was the highlight of the trip!  It is spectacular, no picture will ever do it justice but, I managed to snap about 40 anyway!  We also went through Wasilla, AK. unheard of till Sarah Pallin ran for VP.  She wasn't home so we didn't get to say "Hi".

We arrived back in Anchorage at the same hotel (part of the airline package)dumped our stuff went in search of food and then back to the lobby table to watch the people and play cards.

We spent our last 2 days as follows:

A trip to the Kenai peninsula, fishing heaven for those who choose to do that :-), would love to, but can't afford it!  Went in search of Mt. Redoubt, the volcano that has been threatening the area for months, again, too much cloud cover.  We think we spotted it, the locals told us that the mountain was it, but they may have just been humoring tourists :-) it sure looked like what I have been looking at on-line for months, so I choose to believe it is so.

We stopped at a nature preserve to see some of the animals we could not find or at least get close to on all the drives.  We saw where the 1964 earthquake took out a whole housing area, we saw eagles and moose, Ray saw a bear.  We did not see the salmon run (too early), whales (we were assured they were there, but we did not see them.

All in all, Alaska is BIG and BEAUTIFUL and can give Texas a very good run for their money on bragging rights and they have tee shirts that say so, in some pretty colorful ways.

The flight home was smooth, half empty and quiet so we could nap!  Got home to Hastings on Sat. night about 11ish and crashed.

I developed an inner ear problem and spent Monday morning in the ER while they moved my head around, a lot, and decided it was a minuscule grain of calcium loose in the inner ear and it would fix itself.  Whod'a thunk it ????

I am assured it had nothing to do with flying, a good thing, because I am off to Washington, D.C. on Monday the 15th with Ann and the 2 boys, another blog!

The photos: Paul and Carol @ airport, Ray and Carol @ our breakdown spot,Alaska RR coming around the bend,Whittier tunnel,Cook inlet,Flat Seymour@Seward, his twin in downtown Anchorage, near the airport,J&P near a glacial lake, panning for gold, near the Alaska pipeline, The kennel owned by Susan Bucher's widower, Mt. McKinley(awesome), photo op at a shop near the boat ride, Mt. Redoubt, us, Anchorage sky line from earthquake park!