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Alaska! Our itinerary and amazing photos!

Travel

This has nothing to do with my art and everything to do with my life and inspiration, so I decided it needed a blog post!  Maybe I am becoming a travel blogger?  Probably not. But you will also find random cooking/recipe blogs on here in the future as well, so consider me a “Renaissance Woman”, I suppose.

We (my partner and I) took a bucket list trip to Alaska recently and I MUST write about it and share our itinerary and how wonderful of a time we had.  It was life-changing and we will be talking about it for the rest of our lives, of that I am sure.  What an amazing part of the world!

So, here is our itinerary, day by day, if you want to follow it or use it as a basis for your own trip!  This trip was not cheap, and the land portion was sometimes tough physically, but all the memories and photos were worth it!  YOLO, I say, right?

  • Day 1 – Fly into Anchorage airport, rent SUV (that you have previously booked many many months in advance to ensure it is available), and stay at your hotel of choice in Anchorage
    • We stayed at Clarion Suites Anchorage Downtown – it was fine, nothing to write home about. Their breakfast was nice in the morning, eggs and sausage and waffles, etc, but their beds were so hard, it was a rough way to start our trip for my back and hips.  Proceed with caution.

  • Day 2 – Pick up our rented camera lens (again, rented way ahead of time to ensure it is available) at Stewarts Photo.
      • It was cheaper, safer, and easier to rent our camera lens in Anchorage and then return it before our cruise than it would have been to do it from home and try to keep it safe through the whole trip.
    • Drive to Denali National Park, approx 4 hours, stop and take pictures at roadside stop for first glimpses of the mountain herself, if weather permits
    • Check-in and drop off luggage at Denali’s Crow’s Nest Cabins – nice little place!  The cabins are basic but cute, and the location is great.  They are up on a hill, but just at the bottom of the hill is a great row of shops and restaurants and every excursion we signed up for would pick us up on that strip, so we didn’t have to drive anywhere else.  It was handy!  We stayed there 3 nights and total cost was $1418

    • 1830 we had the Denali Highway Jeep Excursion – 4 hours long, cost $317 for two of us.  My advice:  skip this. The drive was pretty, but it is not off-road, your SUV can drive this highway fine in the summer, and it would be free.  The commentary was not worth it and while one of our guides was lovely, the other was condescending and not worth the money or time. So, maybe drive the highway on your own and listen to some tour guide app or something instead?  At the end, while driving back to the home base to return the Jeeps, we finally saw our first moose!  And it was a mama moose nursing her calf!

  • Day 3 – Took the East Transit Bus into the park itself – on any normal day, this might have been more fun for us, but there was a wildfire north of Denali and I think the wildlife is smarter than us, they had already skipped town. So we saw bupkis the whole day on the bus besides some random Dall Sheep about a billion miles away on the side of a hill that were the size of gnats to us.  At the end, while waiting for our shuttle, THAT is when we saw our second moose!!

    • 2100 we took the Midnight Sun ATV Adventure tour with Denali ATV Adventures…do it!!!  We were visiting Denali on the solstice and this ATV tour was just the very next night, so it was so light out all night, it was wild!  We drove ATV’s for a few hours out along the park edge and we had an absolute blast!  Cannot recommend this enough!  For the add-ons, skip the helmet cam, but either buy or bring your own neck gater to protect your breathing from dust.  Total cost $278.

  • Day 4 – Final day in Denali – We took a twin engine plane flight up to the peak of Denali from Denali Air – we took the “Peak Experience Tour” and it was awesome!  $449/adult, but worth it if the weather cooperates.   The weather around Denali is a gamble every day because it is so big, it creates its own weather.  It is said that only 30% of visitors see any part of the mountain, and only 5% see it all, so if you can make the weather Gods look down favorably upon you as they did us, consider yourselves very lucky, as we do!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    • That night, we went to Denali Dinner Theatre at the Holland America Lodge – Price for 2 of us was $139, and I am torn on whether this was worth it. The food was good, the people at our table were very nice, but the acting was….campy?  I don’t know it was just somewhat childish, I suppose. The voices were great, singing was very well done, but the acting and the show itself was just a bit campy.  So, not a bad experience, but probably could have found a better dinner elsewhere for cheaper. So, 50/50 on that recommendation, honestly.
  • Day 5 – Leave Denali and drive to Talkeetna, stopping along the way at a couple of different places –
    • We stopped at Squid Acres Kennel and had a private tour with Paige, the owner and Itidarod sledder who placed 3rd last year!  We got to learn all about the race, the dogs, got to meet the dogs and go on an ATV-pull with them, and then we got to meet the puppies!!!  Definite cuteness!  I actually can’t believe we didn’t take any pics of the puppies…its shameful, really. Price for us 2 – $381

    • Left Squid Acres and drove 90-ish minutes to Denali Gold Tours, where just the 2 of us and a tour guide went panning for gold in a pretty chilly river – we found some small bits of real gold and got to keep them, along with some that he gave us to round out our own haul.  When we got back to home base, the owner was there grilling us some reindeer sausages which were super good as well!  That was a fun end to what was a surprisingly fun tour! – Price for us $300
    • Finished the drive to Talkeetna and Stayed at Susitna River Lodging – really cute little place, we stayed in the Marathon King room, total $247 for the one night.
  • Day 6 – Walk around Downtown Talkeetna either last night or today before leaving to drive to Seward, approx 4.25 hours total.  Can also stop in Girdwood on the way there, but we found much more to do in Talkeetna to walk around than we found in Girdwood, personally speaking. Cute shops downtown, got some ice cream, bought some souvenirs, etc.
    • We stayed at Bell in the Woods B&B in Seward, which was the super cool B&B run by a Lithuanian chef who spoiled her clients with the most amazing food!  Highly recommend this spot – we stayed for a couple nights and really enjoyed it. The service was outstanding!
      • We had to get up super early the first morning and were going to miss breakfast, so we told her that in a text message as an apology for missing the meal, and she said they would make us some breakfast to take with us!  So the next morning, they were up super early and gave us 2 giant breakfast burritos and 2 brownies to take with us.  I mean…right?  Love that!  The next morning when we had time for breakfast, we had this lovely Italian quiche thing, fresh fruit parfait, and then tiramasu for dessert…what kind of breakfast has dessert, you ask?  Apparently, Lithuanian chef breakfasts.  Service and food, phenomenal! Stayed 2 nights, total price was $756
  • Day 7 – Fishing day!  We had a full day fishing expedition booked with Pro Fish N Sea Charters  – fishing for Salmon and Rockfish.  Halibut is the quintessential Alaskan fish, but neither of us really like Halibut all that much….(I know, heresy!), so we went fishing on a Wednesday which is a “No Halibut” day in Alaska by law, and we fished for salmon and rockfish instead. John, our captain, was great, and we came home with 6 salmon (1 King, 1 Pink, 4 Silver) and 4 Rockfish all to take home!  Beware, motion sickness WILL be a problem on this trip if you do not prevent it or if you are lucky enough not to suffer from it. It is a small boat in a big ocean, and it is a wild ride, so plan accordingly.  See the end of this post for my newest find for my motion sickness that worked wonders along with some of my old standby’s of the past that also work.
    •  John filleted them all for us and then Captain Jack’s Fish Processing right on the dock packaged and froze all of our fish and held it all until the appointed day after we got home, when they sent it to us in AZ overnight UPS so it arrived on a day we were home and could get it into the freezer immediately. We had some extra room in the box, so we added on some other seafood from Captain Jack’s menu as well, so we got a 25lb box of frozen seafood on our doorstep after our trip was over!  Yummy!
      • The only enduring mystery is what salmon is which in our box – none of the fish is labeled, and while the rockfish and such is more obvious, the 3 types of salmon look suspiciously similar to the untrained eye. So…we have 12lbs of mystery salmon in our freezer!  Oh well, it will all taste good!
    • Fishing was $500 per person for the day, and the processing/freezing/shipping of our fish along with the add-on was about $500
  • Day 8 – Took a Kenai Fjords National Park Cruise for 6 hours, included lunch – this cruise was fun, but not earth-shattering. However, we got to see a glacier calving which was a super cool experience!  Also got some good shots of sea life like otters, sea lion, harbor seal, and the fins of a couple whales!  But, motion sickness people be warned, there were a lot of sick people on our boat, it was not a smooth trip at all.  So, again, proceed with caution.

 

 

 

    • Now leave Seward and drive to Homer – approx 3.25 hours. Stay at Lands End Resort – $624 for one night! Now, that is an expensive night, and given what we now know, we wouldn’t have spent that much. But we needed a spot to do laundry at this point in the trip, and this place had laundry inside, so we went with it and booked.  It is a large townhome with more room than we possibly knew what to do with, it was complete overkill. It also had 2 flights of stairs which sucked to get our luggage up and down, so it was not ideal for our needs.
  • Day 9 – This is the creme de la creme for the trip, in our opinion: We did a Lake Clark National Park Bear Viewing trip!  This was the most amazing, and the most expensive, part of our trip, but we both agree it was worth every penny!
    • We met our captain about a half hour back up the peninsula from Homer where he launched his boat.  He gave us water proof overalls and shoes to wear and drove us out to Lake Clark which was, maybe 1.5 hour boat ride? Also a rough ocean ride, so be warned.  Once we got to the deepest spot right by the low tide area, we jumped out of the boat with water up to our belly and walked, slow and steady, to the low-tide sandbar where grizzly bears were just hanging out, digging for clams.  We hung out on the sandbar with the clam-digging bears for about 3 hours, just chillin’, taking a billion pictures, and just watching these amazing creatures up close!  We ended up 10ft or less from the bears at times!  We even saw some bears doing…well, what animals do ;0  This trip was $700 per person, but if you can budget it in, it is worth it!  https://bearviewinginalaska.com/ with Captain Mel Erickson.

 

 

 

    • Once we returned from the bears, we drove back to Anchorage for our last night on land, with another stay at Clarion Suites.
  • Day 10 – In the morning, returned the camera lens and returned the car to the airport.  From the airport, we went to baggage claim and chatted with the Princess Cruise person there and got on the shuttle to the ship.  Anchorage is not a port city, so cruise ships dock at Whittier, which is about an hour away, and getting there is a bit of a challenge.  There is a one-way tunnel that you must go through, and you could end up waiting quite a while if you time it poorly to get through the tunnel. There is also no place to stay or return a rental car in Whittier, so taking a shuttle with the cruise line is just about the only viable way to get from point A to point B.
    • We successfully got on our ship, the Caribbean Princess, and proceeded on a 7-day cruise south, stopping in Skagway, Juneau, Skagway, and then ending in Vancouver.  To be honest, between the land and the cruise portion, the land schedule we created on our own beat the cruise, hands down!  The cruise was fun, and much easier than the land both on body and mind, but not nearly as exciting or earth-shattering as seeing Denali and Grizzly Bears up close!

Now, for those of you who are lucky enough to suffer from motion sickness, I have some potential good news for you!  I have suffered since childhood – I have slept through my fair share of vacations in the 80s and 90s because there was nothing to do about it except dramamine, which knocked me out like a hammer to the noggin.  In adulthood, I was introduced to scopalamine patches by a pharmacist friend, which were a God-send!  Prescription patches that kept me from being sick for years and years, but it has some blah side effects that got worse with age, namely vision issues due to blowing out my pupil in whichever eye was on the same side as the patch.  Wild, right?

On this trip, we tried something new – Emeterm bracelets!  It boasts an 85% effectiveness rate and is scientifically-backed!  It kept me completely and totally feeling amazing throughout this whole trip. And as you can see, we did not shy away from moving vehicles!  Now, to be completely transparent, it DID NOT help my partner at all – he was so damn sick on that fishing day, I felt horrible. So we put him on meds for the rest of the trip (backup baby – fail to plan = plan to fail).  So, he must be in that 15% 🙁 But I was in the 85% and I am in love with this thing.  I highly recommend you try it out!  I am not affiliated in any way, nor do I get any money if you buy from them.  I just found it amazing and needed to share!

Full transparency – I am not affiliated with, nor do I get any money from, any of the companies that I linked to in this post.  We planned this whole trip on our own up until the cruise itself, doing our own research and booking everything on our own.  If you want to use our itinerary as a backbone to plan your own trip, please do!