Thursday – August 22, 2019
I had trouble sleeping last night in anticipation of our 4:50am alarm. We had made reservations from home to take the early morning train from Anchorage to Seward. We checked out of the Embassy Suites at 5:45 – an excellent place to stay in Anchorage! – and took a taxi to the lovely Art Deco train station.
The sun was rising as we boarded and the station was crowded with foreign and American tourists. We had good seats with easy access to the Dome Car. The train is clean and comfortable with onboard commentary given by naturalists who pointed out wildlife as we zipped along.
This is a popular route and the train takes about 4.5 hours to travel 114 miles to Seward. The scenery along the way is magnificent and several glaciers are clearly visible depending on the weather. Unfortunately, forest fires southeast of Anchorage cast a smoky haze on most of our route today.
About half an hour outside Seward, in a place called Moose Pass, all the passengers had to get off the train and take buses into Seward. We were told there was flooding on the tracks. The bus left us at the train station and we had an easy walk to our hotel. We had decided to arrive one day early to explore Seward before boarding the cruise ship tomorrow.
Seward, Alaska is a lucrative commercial fishing port and terminus for the Alaskan railroad. The port is a mix of commercial vessels (some of which take tourists out on fishing expeditions), pleasure boats, and cruise ships. There were several seafood processing plants in the harbor.
In the afternoon, we took a free shuttle bus to the “Historic District” of Seward. The older woman who drove the shuttle gave local information and descriptions at every stop. She said the district was only a block and a half long and we could tell we were in it by the fancy lamp poles.
We browsed slowly along the main street to the end of town, which literally comes to a point at the edge of the bay. There are less than 3,000 permanent residents in Seward. With an average annual temperature of 40 degrees and 74 inches of rain per year, living there wouldn’t appeal to me.
We took the shuttle back to the hotel just in time to see the ‘catch of the day’ for one of the tourist fishing boats. We watched them weigh and clean the fish. Of course, we had to have king crab legs and fish for dinner!
