In 2005, I had a boatload of frequent flyer miles in my account and decided to give Tricia a free trip to a place of her choice for Christmas. The only catch was it had to be Hawaii or Alaska. I was looking forward to a super trip to Hawaii, but Tricia had different ideas. She had a friend, Dianne Simms, who passed away a couple of years ago, whose family had migrated to Seward Alaska in the early 1800s and Tricia wanted to see where she was from. Soooooo, we were Alaska bound in June of 2006.
We flew from Tampa to Phoenix where we missed our flight to Anchorage due to a storm delaying us from getting out of Tampa. Luckily, I had planned a slack day in the beginning of the trip for something like this. We drove around the Anchorage area for a couple of days visiting the Independence goldmine on Hatcher pass, Ship Creek and the Ulu (a knife used in Alaska to clean fish and wildlife) factory. We also found our favorite eating establishment and watering hole in all of Alaska.
Humpy’s, The great Alaskan Ale House with some 60-80 draft beers on tap. Tricia and I voted Humpy’s the best fish-and-chips in Alaska. Humpy is the nickname of the pink salmon.
On the third day, we left Anchorage on the Denali Express, an observation train , and headed to Denali National Park, the site of Mt McKinley, to the tallest mountain in the western hemisphere. Once at McKinley, we took a 14-hour tour into the park to the Kantishna Roadhouse, a stopping off point used by trappers in the 1800s. We saw more wildlife in this day than I believe I have seen in my total time in Alaska.(Bears, brown and black, Dall Sheep, Antelope, Fox, Moose, and more). We never did get a clear view of Mt McKinley due to the low cloud cover. I found out later that this is normal.
After Denali, we took the train back to Anchorage, rented a car and headed to the Kenai Peninsula, and Seward. On our way to Seward, Tricia saw a road sign indication the town of Hope was 16 miles down a side road. I wasn’t too excited to go to a town at the end of a dead-end road, a town I had never heard of, but Tricia’s persistence won out. Hope turned out to be a diamond in the rough…two buildings, one a bar, the other a restaurant. After Hope we continued on the Seward where we met Dianne’s brother who still ran the family business, a general store named Brown and Hawkins. It was, at the time the oldest family owned business in Alaska. We went fishing for Silver salmon, and finished with about 25 pounds of dressed fish which we had to keep frozen for about a week while we traveled around south-central Alaska. It took a lot of begging to get the hotel managers to let us use their freezers.
After Seward, we motored thru the Kenai to Cooper Landing, the place where Charles and I had stayed 10 years earlier, Soldotna, the place where I would visit on later trips, and Homer, “A great little drinking village with a fishing problem”. After the Kenai, we headed back to Anchorage, more fish and chips at Humpy’s, and on back to the “Lower 48” It turned out to be a great two weeks which we did on a shoestring budget using the Trip Saver Book.
No comments:
Post a Comment