I thought that I had better split this post into two different notes. This one will be the Alaska adventures from camping, then my second when I get back to 'the lower 48' will be the rest of the trip! I started my journey by arriving at my mom's house in Sandy at 2:20am Thursday morning and waking up at 5:30 to get to the airport on time and catch my plane. Since Alaska is practically a different country, they don't fly here often. I had a 5-hour layover in Seattle, which I slept and played on my computer for the time. I arrived in Fairbanks at 4 local time. Robert picked me up from Fairbanks airport and took me to the hospital to get Sabrina bc she was having a baby check-up. We grabbed lunch at the local Subway and we were off to Denali National Park!!
We camped one night at Denali and saw a lynx, bunch of birds and squirrels that wanted to eat out of our tent, a rabbit that was trying to camp in our fire pit, and most of all, bear prints on the bathroom wall!! We didn’t see a bear but we went on a couple of fun hikes before we left town. We also got to see the big hotel that Desaray worked in for a summer! We took the time to stop for pictures and see every free tourist center we could! I had a hard time knowing when to sleep because the sun never went down. That is a new experience. The longer I'm here the more I'm learning, you just go to sleep. But the sun is starting to go down about midnight for a couple of hours so it's helping.
After Denali we went to Anchorage and stayed with Robert’s great-uncle Merlen. They were really nice and it was great to be able to take a shower and not use an outhouse! Which we realized there was real toilets right beside our campground right before we left. We had been walking up the road to outhouses! Ha-ha, that was bittersweet. Anchorage was great, we hiked tabletop the first night and it was sure cold and windy!! At the top of Tabletop you can see the whole valley and ocean. It was a neat sight.
Off to Seward! We stopped at every touristy picture stop we could while driving the Beast, big red truck. Some were really neat and others were cold… okay let’s face it; I’ve been cold pretty much the whole time I’ve been here. Blasted lower 48 ha-ha. We camped at the Seward Military Resort. It was quite the feat finding our assigned tent spot but we did and we loved camping there! It didn’t stop raining hardly at all but we had access keys to a really nice bathroom with showers and hot water!! We toured Seward and Robert and Sabrina went fishing for a while so I played on my phone. I’ve never been fishing at a license for 3 days is 35 dollars, so I watched. Robert caught a big dogfish! Sabrina has pictures on her site of that. Robert took us driving around just looking at scenery, which was great because we happened upon fjords National Park, which had a glacier, Exit glacier, that we hiked to and did some exploring. We got to get up close to a couple of glaciers on our trip, that was
really neat!! We also went on a boat tour of the Alaska Gulf. We saw a lot of birds, sea lions, some otters, but no whales or orkas. We were a little bummed about it but we had fun.
After a couple of days camping we decided to head home. Robert drove us straight through the night and made a deal that he would if, and only if, Sabrina and I stayed awake with him. I lost badly…. But he stayed awake and kept driving! We had so much fun playing and touring Alaska! Now it’s to experience what Sabrina’s life is like up here in the Last Frontier.
This last photo was the middle of the night, all of that sunlight!!
