This is going to be hard to describe. If there was ever a trip that one should take, this would be it. Alaska always surprises me. I mean, we already come from a beautiful province with similar terrain, but then we get up here and its like home on steroids. We have come up here in early May, too much ice and you can’t get very close to the glaciers, in September, much more likely to be raining or foggy, and now in July, and it has been perfect.
The mountains are massive, the wildflowers prolific and lots of wildlife..the real kind....big bears, giant moose, ratty beavers, graceful undulating porcupines. And for me it really really reminds me of Smithers where I grew up.
Very early yesterday morning we got onto a fantastic train with a glass roof and a lovely dining area at the bottom of the car. We had a three hour trip to Tillamook (sp?), about an hour from the Princess Lodge. We sat at a table with a father/son from Georgia and had great convo as we went along. Alaska is so beautiful, even along the tracks. We passed endless flowers, grassy swamps with moose, and expansive grassy fields, off to the mountains.And then, with no warning, there it was...Mt. McKinley. And it was Clear!!! I truly didn’t expect to be able to see it. Mt. McKinley is very much like Everest (which is only about 6,000 ft higher than this mountain) a mysteriously huge mountain that is shrouded in cloud most of the time. But not today! It almost looks like a joke. There are lots of really tall craggy mountains and then bam...this giant tall white monster plunked down in the middle making the others look like insignificant hills! Pretty thrilling I must say.
The lodge is really lovely, very lodgey and all that. The rooms are pretty utilitarian with quaint lodgey touches. The grounds are rustic, wild grass with flowers (the wild ones). There are paved pathways to all the little buildings, each one with about six rooms. I took some pictures as we walked around looking for building 15, ours.
We found our room, plunked our backpacks, and went back to the lodge, found some awesome chairs and stared at the mountain....for two hours! Bill had a snooze and I listened to awful people.
I know I have said this before, repeatedly, sorry, but honestly the people, in general, are so stupid. I just cannot believe some of the questions they ask. eg....when we were going through the tunnel out of Whittier, the longest multipurpose tunnel in North America (its actually a train tunnel that cars share, one way, 15 minutes every half hour), its very very narrow and when you are in a big vehicle like a bus, you feel like you can reach out and touch the roughly hewn rock walls. It was built during the war to move munitions into should there be an attack. When we reached the other side, a very authoritarian male voice pipes up from the back,” is this a two way tunnel? I didn’t see much oncoming traffic!” What?? Is he blind? Well when you hear forty questions like this per day, a lot of them asking a question that has just been explained to us by a tour person, one can get a little jaded about the brains of the average human.
But that truly is the only negative. As usual its the people. And they are very ignorable! (as well as ignorant haha)
Last night we had reservations in their finer restaurant here. We each ordered the king crab and beardi crab. Over a pound of meat and utterly divine. But more than that...it was so much fun to eat. It took forever but its fun to dig around and bite and crack and get every little morsel out. There was an Asian couple sitting near us, a couple we had run into several times over this trip. They are very demanding and unhappy and complaining. He came over to ask about the crab, saying they had ordered it in Anchorage the night before and were very unhappy with the skinniness of the legs and no meat blah blah blah. Well, I said, this is amazing and well worth the try. It was so awesome to see him get his crab and start to smile and nod his head and proceed to dig in and crack and bite get out the meat. Every time our eyes met he would vigorously nod his head, bits of crab flying, give me a thumbs up and laugh. So cool and such a wonderful shared moment or two.
Now it is 7 in the morning. I am sitting in bed getting this written. Its time to pack our one little suitcase each we are allowed and get them out the door for pick up. We head off by bus today to the Denali Princess Lodge for another splendiferous nite. You know for 1,800 bucks each, we got a week cruise plus a five day train/bus land cruise....you just can’t beat it. Plus that was in a mini suite on the ship, a bigger stateroom than the regular stateroom. Amazing.
I am going to try to post some pics here...but if they won’t then I will try to get them on face book. TTYL WELL AS USUAL, IT WON'T LET ME POST PICS....BLOGSPOT SUCKS
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