Pre-Trip Planning: Day 2--Anchorage --> Talkeetna

I am amused to wonder about what time we will all wake up the first day.  Both Imp and I are naturally early risers, although I'm hoping that we are tired and sleep in to a normal waking time for Alaska.  Chretien, on the other hand, will probably be psyched.

The plan for this day is as follows:

• Hit the road fairly early.  Again, I don't know how long we are going to sleep, but my guess is that we can probably be on the road by 7 or 8.  At some point either yesterday or today, we'll need to get some groceries.  When we travel, we often make sandwiches, fruit, chips for lunch to cut down on meal costs.  Given that feeding five folks in Alaska is going to get pricey anyway, this is the plan for Alaska.  

• First stop--Eklutna Spirit Houses.  I only recently put this on our possible list.  I do like the kids (and grown ups!) to get a little bit of culture wherever we go, and this sounds like it would be unique and nothing like we've ever seen.  I'm not sure if the timing will work, since they don't open until 10

•  Next up--Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Museum in Wasilla.  This also falls under the "Alaska culture" category.  And who can resist cute puppies?  Imp, in particular, loves dogs, so this should be a hit.  Perhaps we'll get a dog 'sled' ride as well.  The kids would probably get a huge kick out of that.

•  Onward, to Independence Mine!  When I was first planning this trip, I debated getting a car to drive on gravel (not just for Hatcher Pass, but also Denali Highway and also the McCarthy Road).  The more I thought about it, though, I decided that things were started to get logistically complicated, and we would still have a great time without the extra worry/possible expense of limiting ourselves to only vendors who allow driving on gravel roads.  So, we'll just go as far as Independence Mine and poke around there, and retrace our steps after we are done.  Retracing our steps to head toward Talkeetna isn't going to really add any time to our journey, since driving the gravel road would be much slower.   I figure, a picnic here will be fun and beautiful.

•  Our final stop today is Talkeetna.  We have nothing planned in Talkeetna this evening, so we can enjoy the places we have planned and not have to worry about arriving at a certain time.  I have learned our travel style and know that this will make for a more relaxing vacation.   We are staying in a cabin which has a queen bed below an a loft for the kids to sleep.  I'm sure that my boys at least will get a kick out of that.  This cabin also has a kitchen, so we should try to take advantage of that...if not for dinner, but breakfast for sure.  A continental breakfast is served as well. 

Alaska Pre-Trip: Anchorage

We are flying into Anchorage, as many do.  We'll get the rental minivan at the airport (see last post--actually was cheaper at airport).  I have one of the Choice Hotel brand hotels booked--we use them a lot when we travel.  They aren't luxury by any means, but many of them in the chain aren't a bad place to spend a night or two.  They often have rooms which accommodate all five of us easily, with an extra sofa or something of that sort.  The best perk is that they offer free hot breakfast and for this trip, we'll take a free breakfast wherever we can.  I will say that food is the one thing that is concerning me the most for my family of five.

This first day is one of the few days where I don't have a clear idea of what will happen after we get the minivan and go to the hotel.  I have no idea how tired we will be, since it will probably be around 2 PM before we drop everything off (and that translates to our already traveling for more than 12 hours).  I suppose lunch of some sort will be in order.

I think if we are feeling up to it, what is on top of my list of what to do this first day is the Tony Knowles Trail.  I have this vision of renting bikes, but in reality, we'd probably just walk it for a little bit.  Another option might be the Alaska Native Heritage Center.  We will also have time at the end of our trip to check out Anchorage, so this isn't the only day we can do anything here.  There is also the zoo, the William Jack Hernandez Sport Fish Hatchery, or Flat Top Mountain.  I have learned with my family that we never get to all the options, but we usually have a good time and enjoy what we do see...and there is always the hotel's pool, if we just want to chill out this first day.

Alaska--A bunch of other plans made

Once I purchased the plane tickets, it was time to air out the itinerary and start making some reservations.  One thing I had read on Trip Advisor is that in many cases, it is good to make some reservations early, because that often translates to better prices--especially if they are either refundable or don't require a deposit.  I found that to be the case in several instances, in that when I'd call or email, the owner would often say that they'd give me an "early bird" price or honor 2016 prices because they hadn't figured out those for 2017 yet.   I would say that making the reservations early is probably the best money saving tip I would give...at least for now.

So what did I book?

Car--Cretien and I talked briefly about renting an RV, because it gives more flexibility and you always have a place to spread out, a bathroom to use, etc.  I know the kids would have enjoyed it.  The cons against renting an RV is that our flexibility would be somewhat limited anyway, since we were going to book and pay for certain activities ahead of time, so we'd need to be where we had planned to be on time.  Also, although I kept reading how easy it would be to drive an RV, I wasn't sold on doing it.  And I know that Cretien doesn't want to have to be the only driver for 2 weeks in Alaska.

With that said, I knew we'd need a decent sized vehicle with the itinerary we had planned, so we booked a minivan.  Although I kept reading how the prices are cheaper off-site, the airport counter gave us a better price for the few weeks I monitored the prices.   My only regret is that I didn't book it in August, because I have to wonder if the prices were better 11 months out than 10, but I console myself with the fact that I reserved the minivan as soon as I could.

More to come...

Alaska--first plans made!

So there I sat, the second week in September, with a draft of an itinerary just itching to see the light of day.  I was doing a search for flights and lo and behold, I stumbled across a set of flights which met my criteria of:

1.  Being below $500 per ticket
2.  Be available as a reward flight so I could use some miles
3.  Flights over the weekend to maximize our time


Other things that I hoped for, and saw with these tickets, included:

4.  Decent time of day/arrival--> I had thought we'd arrive late afternoon or early evening, but we arrive in Anchorage around 12:45 PM.   That will give us the option to do a little sight-seeing the first day, if we aren't too tired from our early morning flight.  Our connecting flight is pretty short.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there is nothing to mess up that connection.

5.  Red eye for the return-->  This is what I expected and this is what we got.  I think it'll be nice to have a full last day before we head home.

I consulted with Cretien and he told me to go ahead and book the tickets!

Unfortunately for us, I only had enough miles to get one ticket paid for.  I debated waiting another few weeks until the next credit card cycle posted enough miles to get two tickets, but I was concerned that these very good tickets would no longer be available.  I figure, we'll have more miles for another trip down the road.

It almost seemed surreal...We were going to Alaska!!

Granted, the trip was about 10 months away, but who cares?

Alaska in 2017!!

Alaska--More Pre-trip musings

After I had my rough itinerary of towns, I put it aside for a bit.  We still had our vacation for 2016, and while most of the planning had been set since January, I wanted to spend some time refining and getting psyched for that trip, which was in August.  All the while, though, I knew that if we were going to visit Alaska during the summer of 2017, I'd need to start making real plans once we returned.

During the spring, I had stalked air fare, which is a bit of a Catch-22, in that our possible flights wouldn't be published for a few months and who knows if 2017 would match up with what was being offered in 2016.  Still, though, I studied the fares and learned about Google Flights and ITA Matrix, which proved to be a lot of fun in their own right.  ;-)  We would be able to use some credit card miles, but I had almost depleted our miles for our flights for our 2016 trip, so I knew we'd be purchasing some of the five tickets we needed.  With this research, I concluded that we'd probably be arriving in Alaska early evening and leaving on a red-eye.  I also decided that when the time came, if I ever saw round trip flights for less than $500 from our home airport, to snatch them up.

So, we went on our vacation in August.  It was very different from what I envision Alaska to be.

  

Sure, we saw beautiful scenery and wildlife on that trip, but of a completely different sort.

When we returned, the kids went back to school (the very next day!  One day we were having breakfast in San Juan, and the next, they were on the bus to school.  Literally.)

Once I unpacked and got settled in, I started thinking about Alaska again and knew it was just about time to actually pull the trigger.

Alaska

The main reason for the rebirth of this journal is because I'd like to share my thoughts and planning for our vacation this year.  I do have other places I journal, but I figure that eventually, I would like to do a real trip report with photos and the like, and when I've read others' trip reports, it's on their own blog.  Ergo...

Essentially, I have wanted to go to Alaska for decades.  One of my best friends from college did a year in Juneau right after college, and I toyed with visiting her then.  At the time, the logistics to get to Juneau seemed overwhelming.   Looking back, I'm not sure what it was about the logisitcs.  Long flights?  It couldn't be the "no direct flight" thing, because I wound up flying to San Francisco that summer to visit another friend instead, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't a direct flight since I was a poor grad student and didn't have a ton of money to pony up for direct flights.  Anyway, in this case I sort of proved the idea that "youth is wasted on the young".  Almost 30 years later, and I still sort of kick myself for not going to Alaska then.

Why go now?  Well, this year is a milestone birthday year for me, and Chretien asked me how I wanted to celebrate this birthday.  The answer was easy.  Alaska, finally.

However, even with this trip, we aren't going to Juneau.  I started doing some serious research on Alaska in January or February of 2016, and for five of us, it didn't take me long to rule out a cruise with an extra week in south central Alaska.  The price of flights, plus cruise, plus another week in Alaska was way over the budget I set in my mind...and what complicated matters was that there was just too much to see in south central that one week to devote to it, after a cruise, would never be enough.  So, I scrapped the idea of the cruise/land combo and decided to concentrate our two weeks on a land-based vacation.  I figure, Chretien and I can go back when the kids are all off in college in 10 years or so and do the cruise without them.  They should be more than happy with the land-based Alaska trip, right?

Once that decision was made, I started doing all sorts of research...the Alaska boards on Trip Advisor and Cruise Critic became nightly reading, and I started keeping notes and shaping itineraries based on all the fabulous reviews I'd read.  Can you tell I enjoy this sort of thing anyway?  

I had all sorts of options--RV or rental car?  McCarthy or no?  Homer?  Seward?  It was a big puzzle and I was having a lot of fun trying to shape a trip that would allow us to see the highlights of Alaska while taking into account the ages of my kids and not breaking the bank or running us too ragged.  

By late spring, I had an itinerary of towns that I think would work.  With two weeks, we could not fit everything in, but we could cover a decent amount of territory.   I had to keep reminding myself that just because Alaska is one state, I wouldn't expect to go on a two week vacation in the Lower 48 and drive through numerous states all in that time.  Everything I read kept reminding me of the distances between places, so I tried to honor that.

Dusting this thing off

Wow, almost three years since I've posted.  I had pretty much forgotten about this blog, but not quite.

So odd to go back to my first post here, all the way back in May 2010.  Trust was 6, Earnest was just about 4 and Imp had just turned 2.

Now we're at Trust getting ready to start high school in the fall, Earnest ready to jump up to middle school, and Imp almost 9.  Yes, we've come a long way.