Final Day in Alaska

One of the quirks about dining out in Alaska is that there is no sales tax. I didn’t notice it until my last dinner in Anchorage, which means I scored high on the “duh” meter there. I also didn’t have a chance to explore the reasons behind that feature, but one might guess that the tax revenue from oil just might have something to so with it. Or the desire to be a business-friendly city.

My plan for the final day in Anchorage was to get out of town. I checked out of the hotel about 8am and drove to Whittier, to cruise on the Prince William Sound. The drive has some amazing scenery (no shortage of that in Alaska), and an interesting transportation choke point. Just outside of Whittier is a one-lane tunnel that’s shared by road AND rail traffic. For much of the day, road traffic gets through in one direction for a half-hour, and then switches to the other direction for the following half-hour. Late in the day, the schedule starts making room for the trains. Driving through a 1500 foot-long narrow tunnel is challenging enough, but add rails to the road bed, along with water (it had been raining), and you have one crazy ride.

Whittier is, from certain perspectives, just beautiful(see the photo). But it’s a remote town, and many workers live in dorms that look like they were designed by the Soviets. The cruise that I took ran about 6 hours, and the boat had about 75 people on board. There was a group of Korean tourists (ok, that’s redundant; we were all tourists) that arrived on a bus, and they made up more than half of the passengers. Nearly every passenger had at least one camera, and one couple had extra long lenses, a tripod, and a stylish garbage bag camera cover. That proved useful, as we were rained on a bit.

If you ever have the chance to take a glacier cruise, I recommend it highly. That’s just breath-taking. Some of that is because of the cold, so dress appropriately (I didn’t exactly). One of the cool moments was seeing a small black bear grab a fish from the water and snack on it. We also saw lots of birds, sea lions, and sea otters. And small icebergs.

After returning to shore, you have to decide quickly whether to see the small town, or get on the road. The cruise is timed so that you can get back through that one-lane tunnel if you depart quickly. Otherwise, you’re stuck waiting for a train to pass, plus opposing traffic. I chose to head on out, back to Anchorage for dinner, and last-minute photography.

One of the other cool features about Alaska (unnerving to those of us from the Northeast) is the overall friendliness of people. I had dinner alone that last night, and I was wearing a Penn State hat. The couple at the next table used that as an excuse to start a conversation, as they were from the Pittsburgh area. They were on a two week vacation, which included Alaska, British Columbia, and Seattle. And a ridiculous return flight, which took them from Seattle to Las Vegas to Phoenix to Philadelphia before finally getting them to Pittsburgh.

That’s a good way to segue into an essay about my return trip, which included a scheduled five hour layover in Los Angeles. But that’ll have to wait for another day.

Alaska: Day 2

If there’s a good thing about the time zone difference and body clock issues associated with being in Alaska, it’s this: when you’re up at 4 or 5am, you can get a lot of work done and still have much of the day to enjoy Alaska.

That’s how it went for me. I’d get up very early, do the usual morning routine, and work at my computer for a while. I took the afternoon and evening off on Thursday, and drove to the town of Talkeetna. Supposedly, Talkeetna was the inspiration for the town in the old TV show “Northern Exposure”. From Anchorage, it was a drive of roughly two hours.

Talkeetna has what can be best described as a smattering of businesses. There are a few restaurants, a number of souvenir shops, a couple of small grocery stores, a couple of eco-tour operations, and rooms to rent. It’s apparently home base for people looking to fish and hunt. Town was a good place to grab lunch (salmon quesadilla) and walk around while deciding whether to do an eco-tour.

The decision was more like which among the several to choose. You can’t go that distance and not venture into the woods. I did a jet boat tour (no propellers), where I accomplished one goal: I saw a bald eagle in the wild. On land, the tour took us to recreations of a Native American encampment and a trapper’s lodge. It was weird (as a city guy) to see the tour guide, a woman of about 20, toting a shotgun through the woods. It seems that the bears aren’t really tame.

Wildlife on this trip was scarce. We saw the eagle, and a few river otters. I still had live salmon on my checklist, but that would have to wait. After the tour, it was back to Anchorage for dinner and a little more work before it was time to call it a night.

Alaska: Getting There & Day 1

Because I had a complimentary ticket on Alaska Airlines, I was limited on choices for my departure. With the tight window for travel, I ended up with only one choice: flying out of Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. Alaska Airlines also flies out of Newark, but that was not an option on this trip.

I had a 5pm flight to Seattle, where I’d connect on to Anchorage. Given the three hours or so that it would take to drive to National, I decided to meet up with my friend Ed in Baltimore, for lunch. Ed’s an old newspaper guy, and is currently the managing editor of the daily record, a business newspaper. Ironically enough, Ed and his family had just returned from an Alaskan cruise.

National Airport wasn’t hard to find or navigate through, but the Alaska Airlines ticket counter was all by itself, in a hard-to-find corner. Walking the entire concourse almost got me sweaty enough for the full TSA search that I had on my Philadelphia-San Diego trip.

The flight to Seattle took off a bit late, but was otherwise uneventful. It actually landed early, which gave me time to buy a real sandwich before boarding the flight to Anchorage. Unfortunately, that flight left late and arrived late.

There was no midnight sun when we arrived in Anchorage, although it was about 11:45pm local time. So, same as in so many other cities, I got the car and drove to the hotel. Given that my body clock registered 4am, and that it was dark, and I’d never been to Anchorage, getting to the downtown Marriott was quite simple.

Wednesday morning came pretty early for me, what with the body clock thing. After breakfast, the gym, and some email work, it was off to Anchorage. The downtown is pretty small, and very tourist-driven. I took a bus-trolley ride through town, just to get oriented. Later on, I took some time to but the items I knew I’d have to take home. I did meet up with the President of the Alaska Professional Videographers Association (Karl Augestad) for lunch, then it was back to the hotel to prepare for the meeting.

My presentation was well-received, and the meeting drew more than their typical number of attendees. The association generously provided me with a couple of very nice parting gifts of smoked salmon (see photo, with Karl), and one attendee gave me jarred salmon that he had caught. It had been a pretty long day or two, so after the meeting it was time to walk back to the hotel (that was convenient) and call it a night.

There were two more days in Alaska, plus an interesting trip back to Washington. Those stories will be coming up soon.

South to Alaska?

I know the cliche uses "north" as the correct direction for reaching Alaska. In order to get there using the about-to-expire ticket that I have, I needto fly out of Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. Since that's south of here, I've got to go south to go north. Well, west and north.

I'm off to Anchorage to do a presentation to the Alaska Professional Videographers Association (APVA) on Wednesday. So it's a 3-hour drive to DC, a 5-1/2 hour flight to Seattle and a change of planes, and another 3-1/2 hour flight to Anchorage. That's about 12 hours if travel. Fortunately, there's only a short scheduled layover in Seattle.

That gets me to the Anchorage airport about 11:30pm local time, which is 4 hours behind the east coast. It's a long day of travel (it'll be worse coming home), but it's a first: no outside organization has addresses the APVA before. And another first is that I've not yet been to Alaska.

It should be an interesting couple of days. I'll try to keep current.