Gallivanting Grandma

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!

Wednesday August 21, 2019

It was a cool 53 degrees this morning and the air was much clearer than the last couple of days. We heard reports that the forest fires were diminishing. We drove to the Alaska Native Heritage Center located just outside Anchorage. The educational and cultural center’s goal is to educate visitors and share the heritage of Alaska’s 11 major indigenous groups.

We arrived in “The Gathering Place” of the main building to hear a young man talk about his life growing up with his grandparents in northern St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Afterwards, there was a musical performance of singing and dancing.

The Heritage Center is located in a beautiful setting on Lake Tiulana. Five distinct houses were constructed around the lake to replicate Alaskan villages. They demonstrate how different indigenous groups of people lived and survived in the harsh northern climate.

In the southeastern part of Alaska, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Eyak people lived in wooden houses built out of local spruce and pine trees:

The Unangax and Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people of the Aleutian peninsula and islands built their homes largely underground or covered with earth:

The northern Inupiaq and St Lawrence Island Yupik groups also built their houses under earth and had small entrances to keep out bears and cold weather:

The Athabaskan people of the interior of Alaska built log houses out of available trees:

There were interpreters inside each house who explained how residents lived and used their hand-made tools. It was an incredible experience to hear about the peoples’ resourcefulness and survival skills. The people survived in extreme northern conditions for thousands of years.

Later, we had tea outdoors with a view of the lake. There were signs everywhere warning us about bears. When I asked the man at the cafe about the signs, he showed me his “bear spray’ which he kept close at hand, right under the counter. We didn’t see any bears….

It was still early when we left the Heritage Center, so we drove to the Anchorage Museum located downtown in the center of the city.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the ultra-modern exterior of the museum, but it was another excellent place to visit to learn about the land, peoples, art, and history of Alaska.

There was an exhibition of Salmon: catching, breeding, fishing, cooking, and eating. Also included was an explanation of the different kinds of salmon and ‘when and where’ to catch them.

Also contemporary Alaskan art:

Both the Alaska Native Heritage Center and the Anchorage Museum had excellent exhibits and were great introductions to Alaska for us first time visitors!  In the evening, we had dinner at the Moose Tooth Pub & Pizzeria. I had Margarita pizza with reindeer sausage – not bad. Later, back at the hotel we turned on Alaskan television. The most exciting program was a nature show on PBS: The Squirrel’s Guide to Success.  I’m not making this up! We didn’t watch much of it. We’ll catch it when it comes to New York!! :-)

Tuesday August 20, 2019

The odor of pungent wood-smoke hung in the air. Thousands of acres of forest were burning north of Anchorage near the town of Talkeetna which had closed the road to Denali National Park and stranded hundreds of tourists in the park. It was a chilly 41 degrees this morning and it would have been a sunny day except for the thick smoky haze.

We rented a car for our few days in Anchorage so we drove out to the town of Wasilla to visit the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters. It’s a charming place of several log cabins where we met Raymie Reddington, the son of one of the founders of the Iditarod Race. He had a team of dogs tied to a cart on wheels which he used to train the dogs during the summer.

When I was teaching, I taught a unit about the Iditarod Race. My classes and I followed the teams on the Internet as they raced approximately 1000 miles from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. The Iditarod always starts during the first weekend in March and runs about eight to 15 days. The children learned about the mushers and their dogs. They studied the history of the race in the context of learning about our 50th state and people’s early dependence on their hearty Alaskan dogs. The Iditarod unit was exciting and a lot of fun for everyone!!

The museum in the headquarter’s building displayed many photographs and had memorabilia collected from past races. We saw an excellent video and heard an excellent first-hand account of background information. Here’s a picture of me and Raymie Reddington with his dogs resting in the background:

Jeff and I were able to pet two and a half week-old sled dog puppies, Mr. Bean and Lima Bean.  They were soooo sweet:

Later, we left Wasilla and drove east on the Glenn Highway National Scenic Byway toward Matanuska Glacier. It’s the largest glacier in Alaska accessible by an automobile and an easy two-hour drive out of Anchorage. We arrived at the scenic outlook across from the glacier but could barely see it. Unfortunately the smoky haze masked the magnificent mountains which surrounded us.

On our return to Anchorage, we had dinner at The Bridge on Ship’s Creek. Of course we had delicious fresh fish! I had silver salmon and Jeff had halibut, which were the two kinds of fish which were being caught at this time.

Ship’s Creek was a popular local fishing area. The tide was coming in so we saw several salmon fishermen.

I wish my photos were better, but the smoky haze lingered and filled the air everywhere we went.

Sunday August 18 & Monday August 19, 2019

Sunday began with an easy ride to JFK Airport and a comfortable wait near the gate. We couldn’t book a direct flight to Anchorage so we had to change planes in Salt Lake City, Utah. Everything was going well until the plane taxied out onto the tarmac and sat there for an hour. Finally, the captain told us we had to return to a gate to get more fuel! He said we were being rerouted on a longer flight over Canada (due to storms over the U.S.) and more fuel was needed to make the trip. We were supposed to leave at 3:12 but didn’t take off until 7:40pm.

Long story short, we missed our connection in SLC.  Delta Airlines rebooked us on an early flight the next morning to Seattle (not Anchorage!)  So, at midnight we scurried to find accommodations to get a few hours sleep. What should have been a routine cross-country trip turned into a two-day nightmare. Airline companies take all the fun out of traveling…..

We finally arrived in Anchorage at 12:30 in the afternoon, Alaska time on Monday. The bad news was there were several major forest fires west and north of Anchorage so the air was hazy and smokey with unhealthy air-quality alerts in effect. I asked Jeff to take this picture of me in the Anchorage airport because I knew our chance of seeing a real moose in the wild was very slim.

BUT there was good news: 1) our luggage was waiting for us at the Anchorage airport! Yay!! and 2) the Embassy Suites Hotel (which we booked sight-unseen from home) was very clean, roomy, had friendly staff, and a complimentary ‘Happy Hour’ from 5 to 8pm, and free breakfast in the morning. We made ourselves at home and collapsed.