After my brief bout with some type of food poisoning…

After my brief bout with some type of food poisoning and missing out on Vancouver tourism, we have arrived in Anchorage! I’m still not exactly sure what happened during the last evening on the cruise ship to cause my less than stellar health at the beginning of the week, but I’m just going to say that I need to start following my own advice and stay away from the seafood the last few days aboard anything that hasn’t had a fresh shipment of groceries in 7 days. On to, or back to Alaska! We arrived to meet my parents in Anchorage who had already arranged a rental car and picked us up at the airport the morning we arrived. Over the next couple days we toured around the Anchorage area checking out the local touristy things in the town. To the South we were able to make it down Turnagain Arm and saw several paddle boarders surfing the bore tide wave (the wave that precedes strong tidal currents), saw the views at the Alyeska Ski Area, and even made it over to view the animals at the Wildlife Preserve. The Wildlife Preserve was a great place if a bit of a let down, it is similar to an Alaskan Arbuckle Wilderness and although it has it’s place, it’s a little less exciting to view a brown bear unless there’s no fence between you and the wildlife (we did get that opportunity in spades, but I’ll let Misty elaborate a bit more on that later). I think the most unexpected thing in Alaska so far is the participation in aviation in this region. When we were going from town to town on the cruise we saw many aircraft giving tours to people on the cruise ships and there were quite a few, but not so many that it seemed out of the ordinary given the terrain and lack of roads to get to most of it. Once we arrived in Anchorage and drove around town to see several airports the picture was more clear. Alaska loves it’s airplanes. There were sections of the general aviation areas in at least one of the airports that was larger than the entirety of the general aviation in OKC. There is a whole lake at the Ted Stevens Airport in Anchorage dedicated to float plane docks and unlike Oklahoma where everyone puts huge tires on their trucks, these guys put huge tires on their planes. I had thought that tail draggers would be relatively common here in Alaska, but not so much so that they’d almost make the tricycle gear planes look few and far between. I also now understand the inflated prices on Cessna 185’s, these people are keeping the market boosted with their love of anything that you can stick big tires on and bounce off sandbars somewhere on a river in the wilderness. I’ve also never seen so many planes on floats. I’d always perceived planes with non-amphibious floats (those lacking wheels as well for pavement landings) to be a bit of a one trick pony, something akin to most people’s motorcycles, things that don’t get flown but on few occasions when you actually make a special trip to do nothing other than get the thing out of the garage or hangar, but with the prevalence of lakes up here they have enough seaplane bases as well as backcountry areas to land these aircraft I can’t imagine it ever really hinders the ability to get to one’s desired destination. We’ll be headed to Denali in our next blog post and I’ll let Misty cover most of that and our return to Anchorage to head back to Seattle / Portland / ???? wherever we end up!