We always planned to travel to Alaska in our third
year and here we are. It was a 5am start from DC and 10 hours of flying through
Seattle to arrive in Anchorage. The views coming in were gorgeous and a sign of
wonderful things to come. Anchorage is the biggest city in Alaska with a population
of about 300,000 and the total Alaskan population is 735,000. Alaska was the 49th
state to join the US back in 1959 and is the biggest US state by far. Anchorage
has really wide roads and is quite spread out, it’s like a huge country town. I
have to say, the people have been the most friendly and helpful of all our US
travels to date.
We arrived late afternoon quite tired after the
long day of travel and had an early night. It was daylight until at least 9pm
so we didn’t know how long the daylight lasted until the first night of the
cruise (read that later). I had heard there isn’t much to do in Anchorage and
most people say to go to Denali National Park which is about 4 hours drive
north. However, we only had one full day to explore and Denali wasn’t feasible
and we were literally on the start of the summer season so some tours and roads
were not even open just yet.
We filled our day with a 1 hour trolley tour around
the city and this was good for $20. It was run by young people and had a great
feel about it. Some interesting points of note are that an earthquake of 9.2 on
the richter scale hit Anchorage in 1964 and is the 2nd biggest
earthquake in the world behind Chile I think. It was Good Friday apparently and
only one person died. Likely to have been worse if not a public holiday.
Anchorage was founded by our Aussie founder Captain James Cook back in 1779 and
there is nice statue of him near the water. A similar one exists in Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne if ever you’ve
been there. Interesting history of the railroad being built, gold rush days and
of course oil is big source of its economic success behind tourism.
We went past a huge airfield called Merrill Field
which is the biggest small plane airfield in the US. It was full of small
planes and with 75% of the state inaccessible by road, a lot of people have
pilots licenses to get around. Our tour guide said that many kids around 15
years old fly planes to school and they don’t have licenses.
In the afternoon we joined a small tour that drove
out of town to the Turnagain Arm beside the water. It was a good tour where we
got to see eagles soaring, fishermen on the waters edge hunting hooligan fish,
beautiful snow capped mountains and drink some fresh glacier water. The
highlight of the tour was visiting the Wildlife Conservation Centre which is
home to many wildlife that have been injured and brought here to recover and
often live out their days. We saw black and brown bears up close feeding,
wolves and moose. Fantastic to see these wonderful animals. It is not a zoo and
these animals have wide natural habitats to roam around and are well cared for.
The last part of the tour took us to see some glaciers up on the mountains
which were quite pretty and we can’t wait to see the glaciers on the cruise.
We enjoyed a wonderful meal at Simon and Seaforts
and I indulged in a nice clam chowder followed by a seafood salad platter with
some Alaskan crab on the side. My sister is the crab queen and she said it was
nice crab to eat but nothing beats our mudcrabs at home. I enjoyed the meal as
I don’t get to eat fresh seafood very often.
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