Next stop, Anchorage!
The family and I made it into Anchorage Saturday afternoon after an 18 hour day of preparing and travel. Getting here took a long time (only slightly less than flying to London, Kelly says) but was surprisingly smooth, all things considered. Our Expedia booking put us on different airlines for each leg and the outgoing one was on United through Houston. I’ve complained before of how airlines are going out of their way to make flying as miserable as possible, squeezing every last cent out of its customers, but our flight didn’t suck as bad as I thought it might. The leg from Houston to Anchorage got us there in under 7 hours, though we weren’t treated to the spectacular views of the area that I’d been told about due to the cloud cover.
Waiting an inordinate amount of time for our baggage at the carousel gave me some time to people watch. I saw a number of bearded young men there, all in the Alaska uniform of the day: ball caps (preferably camo) with cheap sunglasses propped on top. In Raleigh, bearded young men are considered hipsters. In Anchorage, they’re rednecks. It made me wonder what it must be like to be so rigidly conformist, if these guys ever felt trapped in the routine.
We wandered over to the car rental place only to have the clerk quiz Kelly about the discount code she had used to reserve our cars. We were about to lose our sweet rate when I pulled up the Hotwire site on my phone and threatened to go two booths down to the other rental agency. We got what we needed, though, and were soon driving out in the daylight at a time when it would already be dark at home.
It was weird having the heat on in our rental car in mid-August.
We were all hungry so we stopped into an IHOP near our rented townhouse. We were all comatose after a long day, it was 9:30 PM Anchorage time (1:30 AM East Coast time), and the cheerful clerk sent us off with the question: “so, how are you going to spend your day?” Ahahahaha! It was straight to bed for us!
Our rental is on the south end of town near all the Anchorage box stores. A Super Wal-Mart is down and across the street, followed by Best Buy and your typical chain stores. You can get everything you need here. Kelly laughed at how our friends back home might have thought we were “roughing it” here. Hardly, though I’m guessing the winter is another story!
Our place is the lower unit of a townhome. When we got in a family with a young boy and an infant were above us. We heard the sound of creaking floorboards and a crying baby at night, which didn’t help our sleep. Also, the beds here all have loud, squeaky box springs, making a racket whenever one turns over at night. On the other hand, the windows in our place are very good at blocking outside noise and, once the young family left yesterday, we had a very peaceful night last night.
Sunday was spent making a grocery run and then driving out to visit Whittier, AK. Whittier started life as a deep-water port for the Army. A railway tunnel was blasted through the mountain to complete the base but then the whole place was mothballed by the Army in the 1960s. Now the tiny town is home to fewer than 200 residents, the vast majority of whom live in just one 14-story building, the Begich Towers. There is a great write-up in Gizmodo about what life is like in Whittier which I recommend reading.
The Whittier side of the Whittier Tunnel.
The tunnel to Whittier was amazing! At 2.5 miles, the single-lane tunnel is the second-longest tunnel in North America and well worth the $13 toll. Our sightseeing trip was a bit disappointing, outside of the tunnel. Whittier’s downtown is nonexistent. There are few inns and not much for tourists to do, it seems. I wondered what the passengers of the cruise ships do when they get here – I guess they get the hell out of town by way of the Alaska Railway. We did spend some time checking out the other significant building in town, the shuttered Buckner Building.
The Buckner Building
The Buckner Building was built by the Army in 1953 to house its troops under one roof and was mothballed only 7 years later. In its time it was the largest building in Alaska. In spite of its Wikipedia entry (which I’ve since corrected), the Buckner Building easily survived the devastating Good Friday Earthquake of 1964.
On the way back, we stopped at the Begich, Boggs Visitors Center at Portage Lake. It has a glacial iceberg in the lake, parked outside of the center and its blue ice caught our attention. It was blustery and spitting rain but we posed for pictures in front of the iceberg. The kids were impressed!
Hallie and the iceberg
Travis and the iceberg
We topped off our first full day in Anchorage with a visit to downtown’s Glacial Brewhouse. The wait was insane at over an hour but it was crowded for a reason. We browsed nearby souvenir shops until our table was ready but once seated, our meals (and importantly, beers) were ready surprisingly quickly. We enjoyed our meals and soon headed back to the place to crash for the night. After all, another busy day was ahead!