June 26, 2018

New Up North Record

This is our last day to be heading north. We don’t have far to go to reach our destination of Fairbanks so spend some time looking at the mountains and depleting the coffee supply of our B&B.  Breakfast is an egg stuffed pastry with a couple slices of bacon, again prepared well in advance.  Our little server’s patter is to announce the breakfast and you either want it or you don’t.  Some of the other guests are hanging out and chatting but zero interaction with owners/hosts.  We have not seen anyone who might be in authority since Bubbly Dawn at check-in.  Some people have the hospitality gene and others own a B&B in Healy.  We always say you don’t have a B&B experience if you aren’t hugging at departure.  We pack and leave with no check-out and no hug.

It is about a 2-hour drive to Fairbanks.  As we go north we are moving away from the Alaska Range and work our way down through foothills until we reach a fairly level treed plain.  It reminds Mary of the drive between Brainerd and Walker back home without the lakes. About an hour in the road starts to rise and we find ourselves riding a ridge among deep wide valleys in both directions.  The mountains are still in the background and we have some nice views from the side of the road.

Fairbanks is the second largest city in Alaska with a population of 32,500.  The last 500 is important because Juneau (the capital) is 32,200.  We ran into some folks in Anchorage who recommended the “Cookie Jar” restaurant which is our destination for lunch.  This is our second day in Alaska since arriving 2 weeks ago that the temp has reached 70-degrees.  This time of year, as you go north into the interior the temperature goes up.  The sun is shining, and we get a nice table on the patio.  Mary has a great chicken salad sandwich on home baked bread and John gets a Prime Rib Cheese Steak sandwich in which chunks of prime rib are tossed with bacon and three types of cheese, all melted together.  It isn’t a Philly but it is very good.  The service is outstanding which is a rare treat for us.

After lunch we take a drive further north to Fox for a pipeline viewing.  This is of course the Alaskan Pipeline that runs 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay in the north to Valdez in the south.  It is capable of moving millions of gallons of crude oil a day and is kept moving by 8 huge pumping stations.  It runs above ground in some places and below ground in others depending on soil conditions, animal migration routes and permafrost considerations.  Quite the engineering feat.

Just to say we did, we drive another ten miles north on the Dalton Highway, the rough ice road we all see on TV moving people and supplies to the oil fields 400 miles further north.  It is paved here so it isn’t much of an adventure, but we wanted to have bragging rights (who will care?) and we wanted to reach the 65th parallel north.  This is our northern record and 47-degrees south (Slope Point, New Zealand) is our southern record, neither of which will ever be broken by us.

We return to the Visitor Center in downtown Fairbanks.  It is a joint venture by the state and city tourism people and is very well done.  We surprisingly spend an hour wandering among the displays of the history of the native Athabascan people.  We have been constantly fed this type of info since the day we landed and through repetition it is slowly being beaten into our brains.  We have a deeper understanding of the history of this part of the world.  It is after 4:00 which means we have earned the right to check into our Best Western Hotel and take a nap.

After our big lunches we opt for bar food tonight and Yelp tells us that the Oasis has the best pub food and is 5 minutes away from our hotel. The high tables are full so we grab a couple seats at the bar where we are soon joined by Cheyenne, Brian, Luke and bartender Aron.  We share stories, drinks and food for a couple hours and we know everything there is to know about Fairbanks, Alaska, the Army Band, jewelry, secret defense installations and European trips.  In fact we are now within one degree of separation from knowing everyone in Fairbanks according to all of our new friends who feel, between the four of them, they know everyone.  Mary has a turkey melt and John has ribs but the real nourishment is our fun conversation.

It is pushing 10:00 when we get back to the hotel and ready for bed.  There are thunderstorms roaming around the area and it feels more like a midwestern summer to us.  Oh, except the sun is still high in the sky.

Todays new bit of knowledge:  We now know almost everyone in Fairbanks.

June 25, 2018

Northern Wilderness

Today is one of those days with a circle around it on our itinerary.  We are taking an 8-hour bus ride into the interior of Denali National Park, perhaps the biggest tourist attraction in Alaska.  We hemmed and hawed about the five hour vs. the eight hour before we made the reservations (the twelve hour never made the conversation) and decided that you do the most you can do after traveling this far.  Eight hours it is.

It is a semi-pretty morning with a hint of sunshine and high clouds that aren’t threatening.  Our B&B continues to unimpress with pre-made breakfast items, but the coffee and juice are good and get us moving for the day.  We have time to kill.  Our tour starts at 1:40 this afternoon and will end eight hours later.  We spend some time on the computer and with our books, all while looking out at the mountains.  No moose this morning.

Our first stop is the local grocery store in Healy.  We are encouraged to bring food on the tour.  They will provide a snack box but if that doesn’t get you through all 8 hours you better bring something else. What is really interesting at the little local Healy grocery store is that about 20% of the items are Kirkland.  They also have large containers of many products and full cuts of boxed beef (rib roasts, full strips, etc.).  We conclude that they are the local supplier of many of the local restaurants and resorts and supplement their inventory with weekly truck trips to Costco.  Something about necessity and invention here.

Our next investigation is the huge prison like building right off the main highway through town.

There are a lot of young people wandering about and when we spy the “Employee Shuttle” bus parked in front of the entry we think we have solved the mystery of all the eastern European young workers in the area. There are probably a lot of American kids on a summer adventure as well, but you do what you have to do to find enough help in a seasonal business.  The park provides a lot of lodging for its employees as well as those of their contractors, but everyone else who makes a living off the park needs employee housing where a lot of people don’t normally live. The grocery store is one block away and there is a brew pub two blocks the other way so no car required.  Bubbly Dawn at the B&B said the brew pub gets raucous late at night and now we know why.

We kill the rest of our time poking around the public areas of the park and along the park road. The public is allowed to drive the first fifteen miles of the 100-mile long park road.  That was a compromise reached back in the 70’s when the park service intended to close all road access, and the locals wanted full access.  Now the only way to access the interior of the park is with a special pass (with stringent requirements) or through one of the park shuttle buses or a contracted tour bus.  The number of buses allowed in, while significant, is tightly managed.  Our contract tour bus

will be the 35^th of the day and there are a few more scheduled after us, so at 52 people per bus there are a couple thousand folks doing what we’re doing.  Double that number with the park shuttles and it is easy to do the arithmetic to conclude that there would be thousands of cars going through the park with open access.  Those who have experienced traffic jams at Yosemite or Yellowstone will appreciate the difference.  80 buses evenly spaced throughout the day is very low impact.

The big deal of course is that limited access with trained operators is the ultimate protection for the wildlife while still allowing people to get inside.  Our driver, Mike, gets us loaded up at 1:45 for our long afternoon adventure.  He is an amiable fellow from Washington DC who has been doing this for seven summers.  He is a historian by trade and is deep into explaining the history of the park and the road.  This is the only National Park that was created to protect wildlife, specifically the Dall sheep. There are a number of mammals who make the park home, notably moose, bears, Dall sheep, caribou, wolves, wolverines, lynx and a bunch of little critters that serve as prey for the bigger ones.  Because of the sub-arctic climate and tundra terrain, a lot of land is required to support each large animal which makes them harder to find.  We are instructed to shout “Stop!” if we see a beast of interest and Mike will pull over to film and discuss what we’re seeing.  When the bus is moving Mike keeps up a fairly constant chatter which portends a future in talk radio.

The road is unpaved for the last 85 miles and rises to an elevation of 3980 feet.  There are a lot of

switchbacks and drop offs as we hug cliffs that provide great views of valleys and rivers below and mountains and glaciers beyond.  The glacial melt forms the rivers and silt from the glaciers is constantly filling river beds and changing river paths hourly.  These are referred to as braided rivers as you see strands separate, go off in their own direction and then rejoin again downriver.  Then do it all over again.

This blog would be many pages long if we went into detail about the whole day so here are a few highlights: we saw a lot of caribou including one that joined us moving down the road for a period of time; we had a close encounter with the elusive Dall sheep that is normally spotted as white dots on the mountainside.  In our case they crossed the road in front of the bus so we could almost touch them out the window; at the end of our road (62 mile marker) we finally got a look at the bottom half of the monster 20,000+ foot Mount Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley).  Very few people actually see the whole thing as the top is almost always shrouded in clouds; on our return trip we finally get our Grizzly, a big boy wandering through the brush a couple hundred yards away who entertains us for ten minutes. No Moose!  Mike is a little miffed because the moose have been hanging around the visitor center (as we saw yesterday) rather than out here where only the tour operators can show them off.  He is going to speak to the Head Moose about their behavior.  Here are a few pcitures from our crappy phone camera of our adventure today.

We arrive back at the parking area right at 9:35 so on schedule.  We didn’t know if this would be a fun day or torture and we both decided that it was moving and entertaining and well worth doing.  Our plan was to stop for a beer and burger at the brew pub in Healy, but we opt instead to go back to the B&B, fix ourselves a beverage and finish up the lunch parts that we didn’t eat on the trip.  We enjoy the sun on the mountain view until 11:30 and wrap up a long day.

Todays conclusion: National Parks are one of the things our government actually does really well.

Todays Fact: Many of the caribou we saw were laying or standing in snow patches because a.) they’re hot, and b.) the mosquitoes stay away from the snow.  A caribou will lose a pint of blood a day to mosquitoes.  Ouch!

June 24, 2018

Hi, I’m Denali

We really enjoyed our cabin experience in Talkeetna.  We chatted with our host Don this morning about the good and bad of the business.  His has a four-month season, period.  He has seven cabins and is building his eighth.  He does everything himself with part-time help from his Montenegrin helper and helper’s girlfriend.  Running the numbers, if he can generate a grand a night for 100 nights less helper wages, expenses and taxes he should be able to eat for the whole year.  He said he could make more with a job.  We compliment him on his attention to detail that makes life very easy for his guests.  Plenty of hooks in the bathroom, a work area and towel next to the coffee maker, lot of room and seating choices and plenty of amenities.

We hit the road at 10:00, backtrack down to Parks Highway and head north to Denali National Park.  It is spitting rain off and on (surprise) with occasional glimpses of brightness that make us think there is a sun up there somewhere.  The further we get up the road the more spectacular the landscape.  After an hour and a half of going north we swing to the east through a broad pass between two separate ranges. The pass is many miles wide with nothing but black spruce growing in the permafrost.  Bleak but beautiful.  Lunch is another Subway just outside of the Park entrance.  We had said earlier that if the local franchisee was smart there would be a Subway at the park entrance, and sure enough, there is a line out the door.  No tuna????????

This is our get-acquainted day with Denali.  As we first enter the park there are two moose grazing on the side of the road among plenty of bus and car traffic coming and going.  Cue the Moose is our first thought.  In scoring large wild beasts, we are now at Moose, 4 and Whales 4.  The moose will probably win.  Our first order of business inside is the introductory film in the information center theater.  We sit through an artful 20 minutes of sights and sounds of wildlife in Denali and then a half hour film of dealing with Denali hiking, camping, getting lost, wading in rivers and interacting with the critters who live there.  There are great educational displays of the flora and fauna of the park and instead of animal pictures there is one of each stuffed and mounted so there is no mistaking sizes.

A number of trails start from the information center.  The desk ranger has given us a couple suggestions and we pick one that is about a 2-1/2 mile round trip.  The trails are smooth wide gravel and easy walking.  We are wearing the same attire that we would have on strolling down Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis while many of the folks we encounter are dressed for a safari.  We all look strangely at each other.  This area close in to the visitor center is pretty normal National Park stuff.  Woodsy paths, rivers, wonderful natural beauty and an occasional animal sighting.  Tomorrow we do the guided bus trip into the interior of the park that is all tundra and mountains

There is a drop in elevation as we walk to the first of two rivers that we will cross.  There is a log bridge across the first and about a quarter mile farther on there is a pretty fancy looking suspension bridge across the second.  Both rivers are roaring with snow melt which makes for a full sensory experience with the mountains in the background.  On the return trip we encounter a fresh pile of moose poop on the trail that wasn’t there 20 minutes ago.  Our alert levels go up a couple notches but we don’t see or hear any movement.  There is almost sunshine as we finish our “hike” and we are right on the 2-1/2 miles as promised.  For a trip to Alaska we aren’t getting a lot of exercise.

We pick up our bus information for tomorrow afternoon.  We will be leaving at 1:40 on an 8 hour ride through the interior of the park.  There will be a lot of leg-stretching stops along the way. Our B&B for tonight is about 16 miles north near the town of Healy.  It is a couple miles off the main road and a very pretty setting. We are greeted at the door by bubbly Dawn who shows us the ropes and our little room off of a common area.  The designer touches are very well done with Keurig coffee machines, pretty finishes and lots of art on the walls.  In our tiny room there is no TV (only in the common area), zero amenities (not even a bar of soap), no hooks in the bathroom and no place to sit or work except in the common areas.  This place is all superficial and last night’s was all substance—we preferred last night.

Bubbly Dawn has recommended Black Diamond restaurant near Healy for dinner tonight.  It is just south of town and it is not only a restaurant but also a 9-hole golf course, a lodge with horse and buggy rides, and ATV rentals.  There may be more but that is all we saw at first glance.  The greens on the golf course have some low spots where the mower bridges so the grass there is a couple inches long.  Now those are some tough putts.  Dinner is mediocre—John with a fish sandwich, fries and a salad and Mary with a smoked salmon appetizer and salad.  Service is equally mediocre with a couple local ladies and one eastern European.  (The Subway had a couple eastern European brothers working the sandwich line today.)

It is a little before 9:00 when we get back to the B&B and there is a moose just beyond the parking area munching on some feed that was left there for her.  She glances at us and then gets back to the chow.  This must be a regular occurrence for her.  The views here are indeed spectacular, and Mrs. Moose just adds to the scene.  Mary goes up to the breakfast room to get a couple coffee pods for morning and the Californians and South Koreans who are chatting there are discussing the Caribou at the trough.  Mary eventually convinces them that is it a female moose, and they now believe that in spite if her non-safari dress she is the wildlife expert on site.  Off to bed with moose now leading whales.

Todays observation: Today was the day we saw the Alaska you read about and see in the brochures.

June23, 2018

The Road to Cicely, Alaska

Or maybe from Cicely, Alaska.  Cicely is of course the quirky fictional little Alaskan town that was the setting for “Northern Exposure.” There has been speculation about what the real model was for Cicely and yesterday’s Seward and today’s Talkeetna are included in the mix.  Skagway is also mentioned as providing some inspiration.

We have a real sit-down breakfast this morning.  Our $20 breakfast credit almost covers our two salmon omelets with avocado and hollandaise in the hotel casual café.  We are enjoying our very nice room and don’t get on the road until 11:00.  Talkeetna is about three hours up the Glenn highway to Palmer and then the Parks highway heading north.

We would vote for Talkeetna as the true Cicely but not today.  It is a town of 450 independent-minded souls in an old mining town 14 miles on a no-outlet road off the main highway.  It is hard on the Susitna River and allegedly moose on main street are not uncommon.  It also is famous for electing a cat as mayor and our host here proclaimed the cat to be, on average, one of the better administrators the town ever had.  It is also a base for sightseeing flights to Denali, about 140 miles away.

But today, a nice June Saturday afternoon, it is home to a couple thousand tourists and the parade of the big white elephants (tour buses).  There is entertainment in the town park, bar patios packed with folks and the feel of a state fair.  It might be Cicely in February but not today.  There are some true characters around, but in this setting they feel like they are just actors in the play.  There are also a lot of “Pride” signs and rainbow flags which seem either out of place or in keeping with the live-and-let-live you might imagine in this part of Alaska.

We check into our cabin at Denali Fireside about a third of a mile from the center of town.  Our desk host is a jack-of-all trades from Montenegro.  We interrupt his cleaning of the rooms and later he will be out with Don, our host, building a new cabin on a back corner of the property.  It is an easy walk into the center and we explore for a couple hours spending some time in the park and more time on a bench on Main street watching the action.  We expected a more rustic experience, but so probably did everyone else who is here today.

We go next door to “Latitude 62” for dinner and grab a seat at the bar. John is still in beef mode and has the Saturday special prime rib with mashed potatoes.  Mary has the “Wendy’s Dinner,” a bowl of chili and a loaded baked potato.  Next to Mary is a transplant from Boston who was moved to Anchorage as a Walgreen’s manager.  She is very chatty about her life in Anchorage and her visits to Talkeetna to visit a friend.  The owner of the restaurant makes an appearance.  She is about 60 years old, 6’2” and about 240 lbs.  Her personality is as big as she is and she definitely makes an entrance as she works the room.  Maybe we have finally found Cicely, Alaska.

Back to our cabin.  We are 100 feet from the main rail line between Fairbanks, Denali and Anchorage and have been warned that there is a midnight train.  If it passes through, we are unaware of it.  Must be the mountain air.

Today’s Question:  Would the people of Talkeetna be happier if we all weren’t here visiting, or are they now too dependent on the tourist dollars?  Four months of noise and cash is probably a fair trade-off for 8 months of quiet.

June 22, 2018

Errand Day

We’re at the halfway point of our trip which in this case is laundry day.  After laundry we are going to transition between our “water week” into our “mountain week” which will require a one nighter in Anchorage tonight.

We mention our lack of housekeeping to the desk guy at checkout this morning which gets us a $50 credit. Seems about right. We (Mary) have separated our laundry into a couple big plastic bags which we drag into the “Suds and Swirl” a couple blocks from the hotel. The hotel had a guest laundry but we like a place with multiple machines so we can get it all going at once. We’re all folded and repacked by 11:00 and on the road.  There weren’t a lot of machines and people poured in after us so we were lucky to get it done so fast.

It is spitting rain this morning—what else is new. The Seward Highway is really a pretty drive with gray skies, and we can only imagine it with blue skies and sunshine.  We’ll have to buy the Chamber of Commerce book. At one point we were passing a low marshy looking area where an adult moose was munching her way to the other side. We nosed around the property of the Summit Lake Lodge where we will be completing our circle back to Anchorage and our trip home next week.

We’re all the way back to Girdwood before we get hungry enough to eat and we remember the local Subway.  Perfect. Costco is our next stop on out way back into Anchorage where we check out their inventory of dip nets, kayaks and gin.  We only buy one of those.

We had booked the Voyager Inn again for our hotel tonight but we got the “plumbing problem” call from front desk guy Michael.  They have upgraded us to a junior suite at the Captain Cook across the street.  It is a corner room on the 15^th floor with great views to the east and south and separate living and sleeping rooms.  Nothing junior about it.  We get the $12 Voyager parking instead of the $30 Captain Cook valet and a $20 credit for breakfast in the restaurant. It is the best of both worlds. We complained about the high cost of lodging in Alaska, but part of that is our own doing. Our room in Seward was referred to as the Presidential Suite and they weren’t kidding.  This place tonight is very special indeed.

Dinner tonight is at the Glacier Brewhouse once again.  We made reservations before we left last week.  There is again a line out the door and this very big place is packed.  Our server is from Serbia, has been here for three years and she is very professionally friendly. We need to take a break from salmon and halibut.  John gets a flat iron steak cooked over a blazing alder wood fire and Mary has a very rich Cajun pasta.  If we were to ever return to Anchorage we would eat here every night.

We finish the night watching the midnight sun from our 15^th floor living room window—gosh that’s almost like home.

Today’s news:  A 72-year-old kayaker from California drowned in the Kenai River.  He wasn’t wearing a life jacket. He died from stupidity.

June 21, 2018

Whales and Otters and Seals, Oh MY!

Happy Solstice!  That’s what we Alaskans say today.  Back home it would be “Happy Pride!” This is nominally the first day of summer and the longest day of the year in the land of the midnight sun.  As it turns out it is a second shorter than yesterday.  It’s hard to trust anything anymore.

After our cancelled glacier cruise in Shittier (I really accidentally typed that instead of Whittier—Hmmm) we booked a wildlife cruise here in Seward. We have an 11:00 am check-in and we want to pick up a sandwich before we board.  There is a Safeway just beyond the boat harbor where we explore a bit and grab a couple sandwiches and a bag of Fritos. There is a lame buffet on board but we have fallen for that one before.

Seating is assigned based on when you made your reservation.  Our table of six is about three-fourths of the way toward the front of the ship on the upper of two decks.  We are joined by a family of four Russkies.  Mom and Dad are speaking only Russian and the two kids (ages 9 and 12) speak Russian to the folks but an unaccented English to the rest of us. The parents don’t say a word to us throughout the trip but Dad comes out with an occasional “Oh Da” and “Nyet, nyet.” We arrive at the table first and grab the window seats which we immediately reconsider after we get pinned in like sardines. The tables are so close together that you can’t pull away from the table, nor move left or right. We non-verbally communicate to each other that we’re screwed for the next five hours.

Fortunately once we got moving there was constant motion among the passengers and our table mates were up and down as were we so we had some breathing room.  Temps were in the mid-fifties with low clouds and damp air.  It was the type of cold that didn’t alarm you, but it worked its way into your bones if you were out long. That limited the amount of time we wanted to be outside.  We normally waited until the skipper or on-board ranger announced a sighting of some sort.

Over the five hours all of the suspects made an appearance thanks to a lot of local knowledge by the captain. We saw Dall porpoises, harbor seals, puffins, eagles, sea lions, sea otters, and the stars of the show, humpback whales. We saw four separate whales including one pair feeding together. Bear glacier was very dramatic. Everyone considered it a successful cruise.

Our problem was kids.  We normally travel in the fall and we will try to never travel in the summer again after today. The small children on board probably made up 40% of the population and created at least 90% of the noise. There were so many kids that there were always at least a couple screaming their little lungs out.  About three hours into the trip the parents had given up, any semblance of order had gone overboard, and the kids had literally taken over the ship.  They should have been shot as pirates. It was Chuck E. Cheese with no escape. Crotchety?  You betcha!

And yet, we survived. Until we got back to the hotel at 5:30 and our room had not been cleaned. We called the front desk and they said the Do Not Disturb sign was hanging on the door.  Actually it was the Please Make Up the Room sign. They were very sorry but the cleaning staff had gone home for the day. There was a fellow doing laundry and they would see if he would clean the room. At 7:00 we had heard nothing else so stopped at the desk on our way to dinner. A new person was there who knew nothing of the problem.  Good grief. We told them to bring towels and coffee and that eventually happened.

We had made reservations for the hotel dining room, a little 4-table place with one server/bartender, one cook and a two-item menu. When we made the reservation we got to pick one of the two items and selected grilled salmon.  It was served with unseasoned white rice, asparagus spears with the woody ends intact and a dill butter sauce that was pretty good. Once again we uncovered about three hours of incredibly weak performance by our hospitality brethren. Disappointing.

We brought our bottle of wine back to our room so we had that going for us, which was nice.

Today’s good idea:  Adult Wildlife Cruises!

June 20, 2018

Back on schedule

After a couple lousy days of weather delays we are back on our active schedule.  Our hotel is an old classic in Seward, aptly named the Hotel Seward.  It has been around for ages, but we are in the new wing that is a nice architectural match.  It still has a bit of an old smell and there are historical pictures covering every hallway wall and stuffed critters all over the lobby.  The only thing it doesn’t have is a complimentary breakfast which means breakfast bars this morning with a couple pots of in-room coffee.

The sun is shining with temps in the high fifties, so this is really our best day since leaving Anchorage. Not trusting our luck we go for the big outdoor activity while the sun is shining this morning.  Our destination is Exit Glacier National Park, about 15 miles north of Seward. It is part of Kenai Fjords National Park but with its own information center and staff.

The star of the show is of course Exit Glacier.  As we near the info center we see road signs with numbers like 1899, 1921, 1942 etc.  We later learn that those are the years when the glacier last reached that point in the park.  It has been receding since the last ice age ended in the late 19^th century.

There are several hiking loops that range from easy to strenuous and we opt for the moderate.  We have the option of backing out at the “easy” since it is on the way.  The trail starts as ten-foot wide blacktop, gradually converts to 6-foot wide gravel (end of the “easy”), and winds up as a boulder strewn 2-foot wide path with carved stone steps.  We have jackets on when we start but they get peeled off about halfway into the hike. The problem with jackets off is that in the wooded parts of the path the mosquitoes are lying in wait and attack with a vengeance.  It is one of those things where you have no good options.

We finally break free of the woods and peak at the edge of the glacier which is the end of the moderate path.  Mary finds a bench while John covers the last couple steps up to the glacier overlook.  There is breeze whipping off the glacier with a 20-degree drop in temperature.  That is not unwelcome after the final climb. We both take a bench break before heading down.  All in all, it was a nice little workout, not too strenuous for old people with new parts.  It clocked it at 2.25 miles, half up and half down, a very reasonable distance.

The ship harbor is on our way and we do a bit of exploration.  There is a Regent Seven seas Mariner in port.  We look it up and it is a 750 passenger all-suite, all-balcony ship.  Very upscale. We hit Ray’s at the harbor for lunch where Mary gets a grilled salmon sandwich and John gets the crab and shrimp salad sandwich.  We each eat half and swap, and both are delicious.

At this point we should address prices in Alaska. To begin with it isn’t cheap, and the fact that we are traveling in-season doesn’t help.  We already mentioned the price of rental cars (almost $100 per day). Lodging is double our normal budget and it is unusual if we find a place under $200 a night.  Food is a bit of a surprise as lunches for two of us have been running at least $50 with tip and dinners are always right around a hundred. We had hoped that seafood would be less expensive here but it certainly isn’t. The $40 halibut dinner in Minneapolis is also a $40 dinner here. Our other budget item was going to be gas, but gas is higher here than at home. Logically we know that this is a 3-4 month season and these folks have a lot of bills to pay in a short amount of time.  But still…….

We take a bit of a break after lunch because we can.  Later in the afternoon we walk the town from the bayside park and then up 4^th street, the local version of Main Street.  It is mostly bars, gift shops and restaurants, obviously geared for the tourists.  There are three or four big cruise ships that dock here each week, each with a couple thousand folks who flood the city.  It is like net fishing for the retailers who just toss it out and let the fish swim in.

The hotel people have recommended the “Highliner Restaurant,” our dinner destination tonight. We grab a seat in the bar and have plans for a light meal.  However, the halibut special sounds really special and we both go for it.  Easily our best meal since leaving Anchorage.  We washed it down with a couple local beers and all is right with the world.

Food, exercise, beer—we will sleep well tonight.

Today’s observation:  In a crowd a backpack is as dangerous as a selfie stick.