North to Alaska: Almost over!

Our B&B is very nice. The rooms are lovely and the beds quite comfie! There is a big deck with a hot tub overlooking the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet. We are all intrigued with the Turnagain Arm - it is about 45 miles long and about 15 miles wide at the mouth. When the tide is in twice a day, the inlet is filled with sea water up to 40 feet deep - deep enough that beluga whales hunt there. Then twice a day the tide goes out - and out and out! The entire arm empties leaving huge eroded looking mudflats - it is amazing and trying to describe simply does not do it justice.

The sunset from the deck overlooking the Turnagain Arm.

Monday morning after an amazing breakfast at the B&B, we climbed in the car for another great road trip. There are very few highways (or even roads!) in Alaska - there is one that went north to Denali and there is one that goes south to what is called the Kenai peninsula. The first part of the trip went all 45 miles back down the Turnagain Arm - the tide was in (last week when we came in from the cruise ship the tide had been out and mud flats extended for as far as you see. Once we rounded the Arm we started to climb into the mountains - there are more snow covered mountains than you can imagine in Alaska. We drove all the way to Seward and shopped a little bit. Just north of Seward is Exit Glacier (pictured above) and we hiked back to the glacier. There is a place where you can actually walk up and touch the glacier but because of the spring run-off the streams at the toe were too deep for us to cross so we hiked up to the side area.

We thought we were pretty hardy hiking back to the glacier until we ran across a group of much younger people who had hiked all the way across the icefields - over 40 miles in 9 days - they had sleds that they pulled their supplies on.

Seward harbor with the mountains in the background

I should mention that one of the reasons we hiked to the glacier was that we knew we were going to return to Seward for a dinner we had to do while in Alaska - King Crab Legs! They were amazing!

The scenery on the road to Seward and back was incredible. I am finding I keep using all these descriptive words over and over -- there is so much that is almost defies simple words. Our weather has been beautiful and it helps that it stays light practically all night - we didn't get back from our drive until almost 10:00 and it could have been 5:00 in Kansas. At 1:30 last night it was light enough to see clearly outside.

Tuesday

Today we had a mission. K & G had to get packed up as they were to fly home tonight. We had both packed a box to send home and had to find a postoffice to mail those things from. Then we had some last minute shopping done. Gary wanted an Alaskan Railway shirt so we headed downtown to the station and got that taken care of. We went to Ship Creek which runs through Anchorage where people were salmon fishing. It is just the beginning of the season and it didn't seem that anyone was catching anything. We shopped for a bit and had a reindeer sausage for lunch. Then we went to the Alaskan Native Heritage center and spent several hours learning about the different cultures.

Haida longhouse at the Alaskan Native Heritage Center

There was a pretty neat end to the day. The B&B had a book of interesting things to do in Anchorage and when we went back to get K & G's luggage, I saw that included on the list was the Old Anchorage Hotel. When Bob and Betty got married, there was no married couples housing on Elmendorf Ari Base and they lived in the Anchorage Hotel for a number of months before being sent back to the states. So the four of us went back down town and found the hotel (which is still an active hotel) and they let us wander the halls a bit because there were old historic framed photos lining the walls so photographed the ones from that WW II era. Kind of cool!