Anchorage, where the sun shines day & (most of) the night

It was good to finally arrive at my charming hotel late last night. The Lakefront Anchorage is on the out-skirts of the city, overlooking Lake Hood, the world’s busiest aerodrome (that’s what they call it) for float planes. They have been taking off and landing most of the day, possibly reaching the average of 190 flights/day.

After a very gentle flight from Melbourne, we had clear blue skies all the way from LA to Seattle, where I was treated to a wonderful view of Mt Rainier from the airport lounge.

But about 45 minutes out from Anchorage the clouds started to build below us, creating a white, textured, wall-to-wall “carpet” with huge mountains to the east, pushing their snow-capped peaks through this and up towards the sky.

One of the benefits of flying during the solstice is that the sun was shining brightly above the clouds until at least 10pm. And it was still very light outside when I finally climbed into bed just before midnight.

Today has been catch-up time – a leisurely breakfast, followed by some photos of float-planes and a couple of hours wandering through downtown Anchorage.

It is a bright and cheerful city, with the obligatory tourist shops, filled with t-shirts, caps, mugs and so on. Lots of bright flowers are used outside the shops – and an occasional (stuffed) bear is placed on a corner, ready to scare tourists, & perhaps locals as well.

But it’s unusual things that standout when you visit a place for the first time (last year was a brief 24 hour stop-over, so doesn’t really count). I’d read about a nice little place that sounded great for lunch, Urban Greens. Went in, started to order an Asian salad and they asked me what I would like to drink with this – my answer, “a hot tea.” “Oh, we don’t serve that, just cold drinks.” Really? She then went on to say that “no one has ever asked me for that before.” Amazing – this is a place where it can be -10C in winter!

Earlier in the day I was in the lift in the hotel and overhead one guy saying to the other that the “cost of a large animal is higher than a smaller one.” Yep, this was about hunting and shooting – I am indeed in Alaska!

This evening I’ll complete the reorganising of my clothes so that I can leave my larger bag here until Tuesday evening. I’m off to Denali early tomorrow – the bus leaves at 6:30am. This is going to be quite an adventure for me – certainly something very different to what I normally do! And so I’m slightly nervous, but in a good way. We can only hope that the weather continues to clear and that we will see Mt Denali – even a glimpse will be amazing.

More on that in the next post – hopefully Tuesday evening, Anchorage time.