Last week I took a trip to Anchorage, Alaska. The first 4 days were spent doing business-related things, so not much point in going into those. The last three days were 'vacation days' and were more fun. Below is a brief log of the events that occurred. To view pictures from the trip, click here.

Sunday, October 20, 2002

We travelled down to a town called Seward to catch a small boat trip out into Resurrection Bay, which is part of Cook Inlet, and onward toward the Pacific Ocean. Our captain was a guy who had lost both his forearms. He steared the boat with two hooks. I think his name was Mike, but can't remember for sure. He didn't go by Capt'n Hook, but he could have. It was interesting to watch the man smoke a cigarette. You would think he might let it simply dangle from his mouth, but he actually held on to it with one of his hooks and brought it to his mouth for each drag. He quiped with us throughout the cruise, providing commentary on all the scenery, as well as humorous asides on sea-sickness.

I'd always heard about glaciers, but never really knew what they were until this cruise. Turns out they're nothing more that huge chunks of ice on mountains. The ice is so densely packed that it tends to refract certain light, making the ice appear blueish-green to the naked eye. It's really quite an incredible site. Of course, my camera battery burned out about 5 minutes after we left the dock, so I got no pictures of the glaciers. I did get one or two of a seal waving at us from the water. I hope to get some pictures from others on the cruise with me.

We were actually quite lucky with the wildlife we got to see up close. As we were leaving the dock, we caught sight of two bald eagles perched on some wooden poles. Then we had a Stellar seal visit us and wave. Then we cruised by some sea-lions reclining on a giant rock. At this point, the waves started getting rough because we were approaching the ocean.

As we got into the rough seas of the Pacific, some porpoises came up to our boat and started 'racing' us. Our Captain said they like to race out in front of the boat. They're a playful species.

Meanwhile, I was desperately holding on to the side of the boat for fear of going overboard. The waves were causing us to rise and fall at a very unsettling velocity. It got to the point that I had to kneel on the deck to feel okay. At one point, I started to worry about sea-sickness but, fortunatley, it didn't take hold of me, though several others onboard started to turn green and a few lost it. I just tried to focus my attention on something close whenever I felt a little queazy. If you concentrate on the rise and fall, you're going to lose it for sure. The porpoises helped me focus.

My socks and shoes didn't provide quite the protection I was hoping for. My toes got incredibly cold and I had to remove both my socks and shoes and rub my feet with my hands to get the feeling back in them. Might have helped if I had worn something aside from sneakers - like boots! Duh.

When we got back to Anchorage, we ate at the 'Glacier Brewhouse' - actually one of the better meals I had in Anchorage. I ordered a Greek Pizza. We had fried halibut for an appetizer, which was delicious.

This was a pretty tiring day, and one that, in retrospect, I don't think we ever quite recovered from the rest of the trip.

Monday, October 21, 2002

We took a drive out to Talkeetna to see what we thought were going to be mountains. On a clear day, you can see Mt. McKinley from Talkeetna. It turned out to not be such a clear day. However, it was quite a beautiful drive to the town, nonetheless. Historically, Talkeetna, was a small fishing and coal mining town. Basically, the town was a lot like the town in the TV show 'Northern Exposure.' The mesquitos were plentiful. Talkeetna was actually the kind of town my mom might like - had a couple of little stores in it that sold 'nick-nacks.' Very quaint.

We drove back into town and caught a nice sunset on the highway heading towards Seward - which I had already been on twice before - once during a train ride earlier in the week during the business conference we had attended, and once heading down there for our boat trip. Now that I had a camera battery, I took several photos here, including a series of this long white dessicated tree trunk that was washed on shore.

The wind was fierce and we often found ourselves leaning at an angle to keep from falling over. We ended the night at a bar called Humpy's.

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

James and I decided we'd take a morning hike and try to get a glimpse of some wild moose up-close. We had been in Anchorage almost a week and still had not seen one. This had to change.

Watching the sun rise is one of my favorite things. Unfortunately, I don't get to do it that often because I don't typically wake up early enough. I'm a late-night kind of person. One of the cool things about Alaska during the Fall and Winter is that it's easy for people like me to wake up in time to catch the sunrise since it doesn't happen until after 9:00 am. James and I stumbled out of bed around 8:00 am with ample time to catch Anchorage in its pre-dawn sleepiness.

The goal was to see moose and that we did. Lots of 'em. No sooner did we park the car and begin walking to the 'Tony Knowles Coastal Trail' on the outskirts of Anchorage, did we see a moose quietly grazing in a field. It was a female and it was kneeling on its forelegs as it grazed - we weren't sure if this was out of laziness or fraility because we didn't see any other moose graze in this manner. We soon found the male moose and got up close for a picture (this was probably not so smart, but we did it anyway). James had a small zoom on his camera so I'm sure he got some good shots, mine were not quite that up-close as I was using a 50 mm with no zoom. After those first two moose we eventually saw about 10 more - all of them just peacefully eating in the forest right off a pebbled road. Interestingly, all the moose we saw were close to places where humans would come by. We went deeper into the trees, but never saw any moose. I guess they like being closer to humans as that's where they can find the better food! Anyway, it was a good thrill and we were glad we had gotten up early to see them.

In the afternoon we went to the Anchorage Museum and learned about the history of Alaska and of Anchorage. Some interesting facts:

Fact 1: There are several different types of Eskimos and none of them ever lived in igloos. That's just a myth perpetuated by children's books. They did however live in shelled-out spaces underneath the ground, but that's not quite the ice-houses we usually imagine. Anyway, it was kind of like finding out that the Easter bunny is not real.

Fact 2: Early primitive cultures made water-proof parkas out of bison intestines.

Fact 3: Early primitive cultures created black dye by putting certain metals in urine.

Fact 4: An earthquake, which occurred on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 and lasted 5 minutes and registered a 9.2 on the now-defunct richter scale (about an 8.6 on the current magnitude system), virtually destroyed most of 4th street - a now popular section of Anchorage. Amazingly, only 9 people were killed - they attribute this primarily to the time that it occurred - around 5:30 pm - just after most people had gotten off work and were on their way home. Most of what we see in Anchorage was built after 1964.

Fact 5: We left at 12:30 am on the morning of Wednesday, October 23rd, 2 hours before a 6.2 magnitude earthquake occurred.

We did some shopping at the downtown Anchorage mall. Amy got a massage. James and I ate and went to a bookstore. Mostly non-eventful stuff.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

The rest of Tuesday and into Wednesday morning was a test of endurance. We decided to go on an earlier flight out of Alaska in order to avoid paying for a room for a third night. We were scheduled for an 8:20 am filght out of Anchorage, but all we were going to wind up doing is sleeping until about 6:00 am Wednesday morning and heading over to the airport, so why not go ahead and head back on the 12:30 am red-eye? Of course, we should have thought of this several weeks ago so that we wouldn't have to fly standby.

We knew we would catch the 12:30 am flight out of Anchorage because there were 32 seats available when we checked in. However, our second leg out of Salt Lake City to Dallas looked bad - only 2 seats available. And there were three of us. We were hoping by some stroke of luck several people would not make the flight and we could board in Salt Lake; otherwise, we were in for a long day at the airport without much sleep. - The next flight out didn't leave Salt Lake until 3:30 in the afternoon. That would put us back in Dallas almost around the original time we were scheduled to make it back - 7:00 pm. Ughh. Luckily we all made it, but just barely. There wound up being about 10 available seats. And just about all were taken by stand-bys.

I spent the rest of the day Wednesday recouping from no sleep and got ready to go back to work Thursday morning.

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