July 1, 2018

So This Is What Alaska Looks Like

That is Mary’s line this morning as we stick our heads out on a perfect mountain morning.  The sun is well up at 6:30 when we crawl out and is shimmering off Summit Lake.  The temperature is probably in the low 50s with promise of warmth to come.  We have been mired in clouds and fog with only peeks of sun for so long that this, our last full day of the trip, is when we get the full Monty.  Better late than never.

Breakfast is included with the cabin and the restaurant is full service only for guests.  Mary gets a very nice omelet and John has the eggs, reindeer sausage and home fries.  We meet Marty, the owner, this morning as he is hosting in the dining room.

He was born in New Ulm MN but has had this lodge for 30 years.  He is ready to retire and has two daughters (Meagan from yesterday’s check-in is one of them) ready and willing to take over with their husbands and little kids. They grew up in the business and want the same experience for their kids. Outside of cabins instead of Lodge, this is Manhattan Beach Lodge all over again.  Marty’s 30 years in the business is pretty darn close to when we started 28 years ago.  His dining room furniture is Old Hickory and he had his cabin furniture made by a company in Nisswa, MN.  Just so happens it is the same company, run by our pals Matt and Jeff, that made our lodge furniture.  Small world.  We could have had long conversations about the business but he was working and we weren’t.  He kept coming over to the table whenever he had a minute.

This is a top ten Alaska day.  We only have to get back to Anchorage to turn in the car and check in at our airport hotel, so we have time to dawdle for a while.  We walk around the property for a while and spend a few minutes on the lake shore.  The temps are low enough that the mosquitoes are staying in bed which is an additional treat.  There are a bunch of employees who live on site and they are all scurrying around ready to tidy up cabins as the sluggish guests get ready to leave.  They’re all young folks who clean, bartend, cook, wash dishes and wait tables as needed.  And, of course, there are a couple Uzbeks and Czechs among the group.  Thanks to tour guide Marc who talked us out of last night in Soldotna and forced us to find this place.

Mary hops behind the wheel this morning.  We are giddy about our abundance of gas as we can clearly get to Girdwood and maybe Anchorage on our lawn mower allocation. The drive through the mountains on the Kenai Peninsula and the along the Turnagain Arm is breathtaking.  Everywhere we look there are rivers, lakes, waterfalls and snowcapped mountains without low hanging clouds.  The highway is buzzing this morning with people heading both ways to enjoy the upcoming holiday week.  There is a lineup at the gas station in Girdwood but we decide to stop to grab a few gallons and then will top off at the Costco in Anchorage.

Since this is such a great day we decide to stop at Potters Marsh where we braved the cold and high winds a couple weeks ago.  We get out onto the boardwalk through the wetlands and stop at an outlet to the Turnagain.  Lo and behold there is a school of salmon almost tight underneath us sort of holding in place.  There is a monster on the upstream side with slightly smaller ones behind and the smallest in the rear.  Whenever the big boy moves all of the smaller ones scatter and get back into the right pecking order.  On our last Alaska day we have seen our first swimming salmon.  Amen brothers and sisters.

We are full of ourselves walking back to the other end of the boardwalk when Mary says, “stop.” Right is front of us is a Mama moose checking us out from 30 feet away.  Deciding that we were not friend or food she ducked back into the woods and left us with our final wildlife experience of the trip.  It is now Moose 6, and Whales 6 with a remarkable comeback at the last minute by the moose.

We continue to kill time in Anchorage, get gassed up at Costco and split a Schlotzky.  Our phones are suddenly non-functional which we later found was a limitation of our roaming capabilities on the ATT network in Alaska.  We are GPS-less.  We have to find the airport and our airport hotel without our security blanket.  The airport is pretty easy but we dance around in circles trying to figure out how to get to the hotel we can see from the highway.  We finally arrive, unload our 3-week’s worth of mess and make arrangements to get picked up by the shuttle when we return the car.

We can walk to dinner at the Lakefront Inn, right on Lake Hood, the seaplane base at the airport.  They have a very big patio with great lake views and on this most beautiful night they are absolutely slammed.  We are seated inside where a real Alaskan is playing the guitar and singing in the first of several dining rooms.  It takes 15 minutes for us to be acknowledged and finally the Assistant F&B director gets us a beer.  We place our food order at the same time in hopes of jumping the line a little. The beers and food arrive pretty promptly but Mary asks for mustard from the food runner and it all goes downhill from there.  John is eating his jalapeno chicken sandwich while Mary is waiting for her mustard.  A harried waiter shows up after another ten minutes apologizing for being tied up and Mary asks again for mustard.  Ten minutes later Mary has taken a couple bites of her sandwich with no mustard and we get the F&B manager again.  She says she will give us a credit and get us the check.  There is a $5 credit on the bill which Mary explains nicely is unacceptable.  Reluctantly the Mgr. takes off Mary’s food and the bill is finally settled. The restaurant in this case has screwed up at least three times on one table, the food is uneaten and they want to get cheap about it.  Say you’re sorry, comp the check (which might cost ten bucks in food cost) and move along.  Sheesh.

It is a nice walk back to the hotel, bad restaurant experience is in the rear view mirror and we won’t let it spoil this great day.

Last day conversation: We have immersed ourselves in the business of Alaska to have a sense of the place, a knowledge of the geography and a friendship with a few of the people.  What more can you ask from travel.

June 30, 2018

Beginning of the End

It is an early wake-up this morning.  Like any morning that the alarm is set early we both wake up every hour during the night so as not to oversleep.  When it finally does go off at 4:30am, the getting up is merely a formality since we have been laying awake waiting for our cue.  he car needs to be in the ferry boarding line at 6:00 for our trip across Prince William Sound from Valdez to Whittier.  We make some coffee in the room and John grabs a couple back-ups from the breakfast room downstairs.  Breakfast doesn’t start until 6:00 but they have coffee, rolls and cereal out for the ferry folks.

The ferry is about 2 minutes from our hotel and the line-up is an exercise in hurry-up-and-wait.  We’re near the front of the line but the loading managers have a different plan.  All of the big vehicles, buses, RVs and camper trucks are loaded first and we make it aboard at 7:20.  An hour and twenty minutes of our lives we will never get back.  The on-board seating is pretty lush, we have all of our electronic devices and our tuna Subway sub—life is good.

The weather is of course overcast with heavy fog as we roll out of Valdez Harbor.  It seems to us that some other ship had a problem here once but we make it out OK.  If there is some question of the score in the large animal race, it was 4 whales to 4 moose until Mary saw the moose on the road 2 days ago pulling them ahead 5-4.  We start getting a break in the weather about halfway across the sound and there is a whale sighting off the starboard side.  Sure enough there are a couple orcas playing about 100 yards out making the updated score Whales 6, Moose 5 in an unexpected comeback.  Only a day and a half for the moose to make a move.

We reach Whittier on schedule at 1:15 and get off fairly fast to make the 2:00 tunnel opening with

ease. Our car says we have about 50 miles worth of fuel left and we’re pretty sure there is gas in Portage, so we move quickly to the tunnel line. There is no gas in Portage, but we are pretty sure there is gas at the Hope junction.  Nope.  Then at the Sterling Highway.  Nope.  Then at Moose Pass.  Nope.  By now we are 15 miles past our lodging for the night, we have 10 miles worth of fuel left and 20 miles left to Seward with no phone reception.  We later learn that there is no gas on the Seward Highway, packed with cars, from Girdwood to Seward, a distance of about 70 miles.  Business opportunity???

The semi-happy ending is that we stop at the Fudge shop in Moose Pass for gas directions and the fellow there says he has a couple gallons in a can for his lawn mower that he would be willing to part with. Hallelujah!  We now have enough gas to get to our lodge for tonight and back to Girdwood tomorrow. We’re in such a tizzy about the gas that we aren’t enjoying a beautiful day to the fullest.

Our lodging for tonight is the Summit Lake Lodge right on the Seward Highway.  These folks have 16 cabins and 6 motel rooms on a very pretty lake tucked in the middle of nowhere.  There is a full service restaurant and bar with a pizza-ice cream-espresso shack off to one side.  Meagan, with ancestral ties to Minnesota checks us in.  Our cabin is beautifully updated with all the amenities.  It all looks very familiar with the pine log furniture and woodsy décor.

We get a couple free drinks for happy hour in the bar with chatty Kendall and a fantastic dinner with server Tom.  John has a ribeye with horseradish-demi glaze, deep fried brussels sprouts and garlic mashed.  Mary has a parmesan crusted halibut served over a pasta with cream sauce and we gulp it all down with a Joel Gott Cabernet.  Very civilized.  Very familiar.

It continues to be a beautiful evening for the walk back to our cabin and we would love to see a sky full of stars if the sun wasn’t still out at 11:00 pm.

Todays Observation: Valdez is the terminus of the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with huge storage tanks on the hillside across the harbor from the town.  In the fog this morning we passed the reef where the Exxon Valdez ran aground and could see it happening in pre-GPS days.