Alaska Review! Day 2--Anchorage to Talkeetna (Part 2)

After our stop at the Eklutna Spirit Houses, we continued on to what I figured would be Imp's favorite part of this trip.  It's unfortunate that it fell on Day 2, but so be it.  He's still talking about it, so I was correct in that it would be a hit.

What is this magical place?

Why, the Iditarod Headquarters, of course.

Imp doesn't really care about the history of the Iditarod, but he is a HUGE dog lover, and this place didn't disappoint. 

Inside the building, there is a lot of memorabilia and information about the Iditarod.  There is also a movie which we arrived for just in time.  The movie ran about 30 minutes, which was a little long for the kids, although Chretien and I found it very interesting. 

No more time for memorabilia photos when there are real dogs to see...

 We got to play with three 15 day old puppies.  They were so small, and so cute.  

The visit to the museum is free.  If you want to have a very quick (e.g. 2 minute) ride in a sled, it's $10 per person.  We sent the kids on their way, and they had a lot of fun.

Probably not the same as being pulled on the snow, but the kids still loved it.  😉

After the ride, the boys were allowed to get a little bit closer to one of the dogs, while some of the others rested until the next passengers.

We spent about 2 hours at the Iditarod Headquarters, and that included a short time for eating our lunch in the minivan.

Alas, it was time to move along...

The fog was really starting to pick up as we made our way to the next stop.

Along the way, we stopped for a few photos by the Little Susitna River:

 

We couldn't really see the top, but the fog gave it a bit of a mystical aura.

 Nope, the binoculars don't help, Imp.

 But since there were rocks, they needed to be climbed upon.

By the time we reached Independence Mine, we could not see anything beyond the gate where you pay your entrance fee. 

This was our view.  Or not.  😞

We decided to skip the mine, since it didn't seem like we'd get to see very much of the lovely views I'd been admiring online. 

We drove back down the way we came and continued along to Talkeetna.  As we moved away from the Independence Mine area, the fog lifted a bit.

The Milepost told us that Denali would be seen on a clear day.   Earnest tried to find him, but no luck!  We'll take have to take its word for it.  😲  We still liked the view, though.

Onward to Talkeetna, which I'll continue in the next post.

Alaska Review! Day 2--Anchorage to Talkeetna

We slept relatively well.   I will say that I woke a few times, which isn't anything new for me.  I did take a peek outside around 2 AM and was amused that it really wasn't completely dark.  Yup, the midnight sun is real! 😀  I think we woke up for real around 6 or 6:30.  Not too bad, considering we were adjusting to a four hour time change.

As I noted in the last post, we ate our breakfast at the hotel.  We made the day's sandwiches, packed up the room and headed out.

I outlined the plan for this day here.

First stop was delayed a bit when we saw a sign for Thunderbird Falls.  We decided to check them out.

But before we got there, we managed to find an interesting construction site.

 See those people suspended in the basket?  Wow!

Onward to the falls.

 

This is an easy 'hike' along a path.  It took us about 30 minutes, although we didn't head down close to the water, which you can do.  It says it's a mile, but I don't think it was that long, based on the number of steps my Fitbit logged.  We didn't put our hiking boots on, but we probably should have, since it was wet.  It's $5 to park, and you use the envelopes provided in the parking lot to pay.

 

There they are!

Back in the minivan and off to the next stop, which was close by...Eklutna Spirit Houses.

I knew that the kids weren't going to love hearing much about the history of this spot.  It didn't help that the mosquitoes were out in full force, even with bug repellent, and it was raining.  But we managed to have the tour ($12.50 total--$5 each for Chretien and I, plus $2.50 for Trust--the boys were free).

The tour guide was very knowledgeable about the history of the church.  One thing I did not realize is that Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox are essentially the same religion with a few cultural changes inserted.  She also told us that "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" pretty much got things correct as far as the religious aspects included in the film.

 This is the new church, and below is the old church.  You get to visit both on the tour.

Once we saw the inside of the churches, we were free to tour the cemetery on our own.  We did keep in mind that these were the graves of people, but it was a unique experience to see the colorful homes.

 

We stayed at the Eklutna Spirit Houses for about 45 minutes.  It really isn't a long stop, and if you are interested in some of the culture/history of the area, it's worthwhile.

I'm going to break up this day since it's getting long, and we haven't even gotten to lunch time yet.

Alaska Review! Day 1--Flight to Anchorage

We've been back from Alaska for almost a month, and it's taken me some time to go through the thousands of photos I took, as well as finish up another photo project.  I would like to write this review before any more time goes by, as I enjoy including as many details as possible.  If you want to read about my planning, you can go back to the posts here in April and May.  If you don't want to read all of them, this one here gives a little bit of background as to how we got here.

If you don't feel like reading all of that, the quick information is that we are a family of five.  DH is Chretien, Trust is our DD and she is 13, DS1 is Earnest (age 11), and  DS2 is Imp (age 9).

I am going to include what we spent, because I have found that the reviews which did that for me helped me to budget and have a realistic idea of what we were going to spend.

We flew to Anchorage on July 2.  I went into my airline ticket musing here.  We wound up spending $478 apiece for four tickets plus 30,000 miles for the fifth ticket--I considered that a pretty good deal to fly roundtrip from the East Coast to Anchorage at what were good times and dates for my family.   We left fairly early in the morning, so Earnest tried to get a little bit of shuteye at the gate.

We flew from the East Coast and were in Alaska by 12:45 PM, so you can get an idea of how early our flights were.  Fortunately, our layover in Chicago wasn't too long, but we were still feeling it.

These were shot from the plane, somewhere over Canada.  Just seeing the mountains made it all seem more real.

We rented a minivan from Avis at the airport.  I rented this in September, so 10 months out.  Two weeks with a Toyota Sienna cost us just shy of $1000 ($988).  Believe it or not, the airport was less expensive (and more convenient), than the downtown location, so I counted that as a win.  It's too bad we needed the minivan as I did have a Toursaver coupon for a free rental day, but it was not valid for a minivan-sized rental.  For kicks, I checked the Avis website last week for July 1-14 next year, just to see what it might have cost me if I had booked the van in August and not September--it's about $300 less now for next July than it was for me in September, so if anyone is reading this for 2018, I will only echo what I read...book early!

En route to pick up the car, I couldn't resist this photo:

I sent it out to my parents, so they knew we had arrived...and we hoped we'd see more of him, but maybe not so close up.

We set out for our hotel.  For this first night, we stayed at the Quality Suites Historic Downtown.  It's not luxurious, but we tend to stay in the Choice Hotel brand because (1) we can often find rooms which accommodate all five of us in one room, (2) they always provide a free hot breakfast, which, when you are five people, cannot be underestimated and (3) their loyalty program is pretty good.  In this case, we had enough points to get our room free, so we weren't going to pass this up.  We had two queen beds and a pull out couch in another area of the room (it was a suite, after all), so we were good.

By now, it was close to 3 PM.  We knew we didn't want to nap, evne though we were tired.  We decided to have a snack (leftover pizza that we had brought from Chicago) and head out to explore.

We decided not to visit any sort of museum as we didn't have a lot of time before some of them closed.  Chretien loves planes and was fascinated by the floatplanes, so we headed back to the airport to check out the area where floatplanes are kept.

It was a bit overcast and drizzly, and we were tired, so we didn't feel like doing a lot of outdoorsy things this first day.

We did head over to Earthquake Park and looked out at Anchorage, but the views weren't so great.

I had also had Kincaid Park on my list, so we headed over there.  We were rewarded by stumbling across a wedding:

 and a bridge, which the kids willingly crossed and posed for this photo:

 By then, it was just about 5, and we figured we had waited long enough to eat.  We did a quick search and decided to try Gwennie's.

This amused me:

although we didn't care to partake.   At this point, all we really wanted was something quick and substantial.

I will say that the kids were entertained while we waited, and had their second encounter with wildlife.

The food here was pretty good.  I think we had a few burgers, some pancakes (Imp LOVES them) and I had chili with bread which lasted me for THREE meals.  (It was a crazy-sized meal!)  We sat and marveled that we were actually in Anchorage, Alaska.  I think this is where it started to really sink in.

Our meal at Gwennie's was around $83.  That included the tip, but we didn't all have beverages and none of us had dessert.  I will say that pretty much only Imp gets kids' meals anymore.

The kids loved the ambiance at Gwennie's.  There was a lot to look at, and it was a nice introduction to Alaska.

Before we headed back to the hotel for the night, we stopped at Fred Meyer to stock up on groceries.  Yes, even though we didn't have an RV, when we travel on a road trip type of vacation, we always try to either bring or buy snacks and lunch fixings.  We also bought cereal, fruit, milk and other items for breakfast, since many of our lodgings didn't include breakfast.  Our reasoning is if we can just have one meal out a day, it'll keep the costs in check a bit and allow us to do more.  We spent around $107 in Fred Meyer on food, and another $12 on water bottles for Chretien and I, since we didn't bring ours with us.  We brought those home, though, so it's not really an Alaska expense.

I will say that while I kept reading how expensive the food is Alaska, to be honest, we didn't really notice a huge difference, overall.  When we go out for dinner at home, it normally runs somewhere between $90 and $100.  I didn't think most of the groceries were that much more expensive than home.  And some sales were even better!  The first week we were in Alaska, the strawberries were 3 pounds for $5.  I normally spend somewhere between $4 and $5 for 2 pounds at home.  

We returned to the hotel and the kids managed to find some energy to utilize the pool.  It didn't last long, but they were happy.

Around 8:30 or so, we called it a day, approximately 22 hours or so after July 2 started for us.

The real fun begins tomorrow!