My mom wanted to recreate this picture, but alas we were not flying out of the airport on our trip. Today, we disembarked from our cruise ship after having traveled over 500 nautical miles! So we said bye bye to our boat after 7 nights…
Apparently it was super sunny for Whittier which is technically the cruise ship terminal for Anchorage. About an hour from Anchorage, Whittier is a year round ice free port while Anchorage cannot handle the large cruise ships and needs continuous dredging.
To get to Anchorage from Whittier, I had booked bus transfers and we had to travel through a narrow one way tunnel built in 1942 - we were lucky we didn’t have to wait to enter as there were long queues on both sides:
We traveled through Portage and saw a few hanging glaciers. According to our driver Brad, there are only two seasons in Alaska: winter and construction. The roads need year round maintenance due to the extreme cold weather.
We drove through Turnagain Arm, a waterway in the northwestern Gulf of Alaska, passed the Chugach mountains, and could look across the water to see the Kenai Península. Some photos from our ride:
We spotted some trumpeter swans that mate for life:
And even some Beluga whales that bop for salmon. As our driver said, “look for white marshmallows”! I included an arrow below and although we saw many, it was hard to take a clear shot in the moving bus:
There were many excursion and bus transfer options offered, but I had opted for the drop off in downtown Anchorage. It was closest to the car rental that had both a minivan and would let me do a one way rental. The civic center is where our luggage was waiting for us from the night before. They can hold your luggage all afternoon and we could even check in smaller bags, so you could explore the town more comfortably while waiting for flights and etc.
300,00 people live in Anchorage which is about 40% of the state population. Coincidentally, they are planning to have Hamilton and a Korea friendship concert at the downtown performance hall soon:
We had two hours to kill as I didn’t want to pick up the rental car too early based upon our Monday flight out of Fairbanks or we would be charged an extra day. Here’s a sign showing Anchorage as being a crossroads of the world with an Incheon and New York sign!
After walking around downtown, we chose a Korean-owned Japanese restaurant called Kumagoro. Kuma means bear in Japanese. We had super fresh sushi with local Alaskan crab and salmon and several of us enjoyed Kimchi ramen and yakisoba or fried noodle:
After lunch, we picked up our white Toyota Sienna minivan and was able to pack the 7 pieces of luggage and then headed north! Our license plate even has a bear:
Two hours in and roughly halfway through our ride, we stopped in historic Talkeetna. Apparently, it was a town established while the Alaskan railroad was being built. We were in search of restrooms and coffee, but due to the midafternoon slowdown, we could not find any caffeine. Some photos of the town:
We did snack on tasty salmon cakes with maple syrup and chowder from scratch:
Then we piled back into the minivan and on our way to Denali, we saw the Denali train and beautiful mountains of the Alaska Range:
After getting off the highway, we went up some hairpin turns and arrived at the Grande Denali Lodge and successfully checked in. They advised seeing the Northern Lights was likely tonight, but we told and showed them photos of what we saw on our last night of the cruise. They were impressed with our images and how clear it was.
For dinner, we ate at the hotel and surprisingly, the food was very good. I ordered the “Northern Lights” cocktail which had blueberries which are very local and also enjoyed by bears. We shared a Caesar salad and various pastas:
After dinner we took some photos of the night sky and went to bed early after a long day of traveling north:
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