Anchorage Done Right!

After spending four great days in Anchorage, it was time to begin our tour and spend another. Although we drove here in order to spend some time in the Dakotas and Canada, our tour began as if we were flying into Anchorage.

Top floor at the Hilton

We repacked everything to be able to travel lighter and meet the weight requirements on some of the bush planes and dropped our car off at a long term parking lot. We wouldn’t be seeing her again for another 3 weeks.

View of Anchorage from our room

A taxi took us to the Hilton Anchorage Hotel for our first night on the road. Upon arrival we had two pleasant surprises. One, we were upgraded on our room and had deluxe accommodations on the top floor overlooking downtown Anchorage with a spectacular view of the Chugach Mountains serving as a backdrop. We weren’t in the McKinley suite which looks out toward Denali National Park and Mt. McKinley, but our view was pretty cool.

Mt. McKinley, 175 miles away

Our second surprise was a gift basket of all-Alaska products compliments of our travel agent. She is so sweet, but most importantly she is very good at what she does.

Thank you, Diana!

Putting together a custom package to get us to all 8 national parks is not the easiest thing to do (our voucher and itinerary paper stack is about ½” thick!), and we sometimes felt guilty asking questions and requesting explanations from her which she would have to go and research. And she gets us a present. Thank you Diana!

After we got settled in we decided to go for a walk. Our first destination was Ship Creek to see if we could spot any salmon. We understand that king salmon run in Ship Creek from early June to mi-July, so it was likely we would see some.

Fishermen on Ship Creek

Ship Creek runs right through downtown Anchorage and fishermen can park in a municipal parking lot and walk to their fishing spot.

Catching the action

We saw several people fishing, but the water was high, running fast, and murky, and we didn’t see any fish or anyone land one in the 20 minutes we were there. We walked back toward our hotel just as the Alaska Railroad train was arriving from Fairbanks.

Alaska Railroad train

We will be riding one of the domed cars on this train from Fairbanks to Denali, N.P. and on to Anchorage later on our tour. Just opposite our hotel was an Alaskan Market Festival that they have every weekend until it turns cold. Naturally, Jane can’t pass up anything with market or festival in its name, so this would like scoring a double word in Scrabble.

Ship Creek

There were lots of vendors hawking their Alaskan made products and Jane bought a few things, but we are limited to what we can carry around with us (thank God!).

But can they make salmon jambalaya?

It was getting near suppertime and we were hungry, so we had a delicious Alaskan dinner of fried halibut, French fries and corn fritters with honey butter. We wandered to the downtown district of Anchorage to roam through all of the tourist attractions. Jane was drawn to the fur shops and we did see some awesome fur garments.

At the festival

She told one salesperson that she couldn’t get anything because Capt. Larry said we were restricted on our weight. The clerk cheerfully announced that “we can ship it anywhere,” much to Capt. Larry’s chagrin. He relented and told her to get whatever she wanted, but she declined because she said  she wouldn’t get the chance to wear it in the south and she hardly wears what she has now. Thank God for global warming!

The Anchorage visitor's center

We continued on our excursion of downtown Anchorage, stopping at the visitor’s center before returning to our room for the night. We reviewed our next day’s itinerary and schedule and turned in for the night, or at least twilight. It’s hard to get over how much sunshine the plants and trees get up here, and how light it can be at 3:00 a.m. It is really an awesome place to visit.

Alaska Railroad Headquartersw

Downtown Anchorage at 3:00 a.m.