Reflections of My Travel

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When we woke up this morning, we decided to take a drive through the longest (2.5 miles) tunnel in North America over to Whittier. The tunnel was fairly impressive, it’s a one-way tunnel that switches directions every half hour and it also has a train track running through it (not sure how often that runs). It’s a fairly expensive tunnel ride, though – $12 for a car, $300 for a commercial truck/trailer. Which was really upsetting when we drove out the other side of it into Whittier and saw that there was NOTHING in Whittier. It was less than worthwhile. We thought about at least doing the hike over to Portage Glacier while we were there but my stupid knees were acting up pretty badly. So we turned around and waited in line to go back through the tunnel. It was really just an anti-climatic experience. Fortunately, on our northward trek back toward Anchorage, we decided to stop at Girdwood. This was a very cute little town. They have a ski resort there and during the summer, you can ride the lift up to the top of the mountain and eat lunch and hike with seven glaciers surrounding you. It was a wonderful experience that we both thoroughly enjoyed. When we left Girdwood, we headed straight back to Anchorage and started calling around to make hotel reservations for our last two nights. We figured since we would be going straight to work from the airport tuesday morning, and since we were heading home to a flooded house, we should rest up pretty good. We made our reservations, walked around the mall a bit, and then set up camp and went to bed.

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This morning we got up and drove over to the earthquake park. Before Good Friday of 1964 there was an affluent residential area on the bluffs above Cook Inlet, but the 9.2 earthquake dropped the houses into 30 foot crevasses and destroyed the entire area. It is now a park with all kinds of monuments and interpretive signs telling about the quake and showing where the coast line used to be and such. It was pretty impressive to see the how the landscape changed in one day. Good Friday is not such a good day for Alaska. They had a 9.2 earthquake in 1964, then 25 years to the day later, they have the Exxon-Valdez oil spill on Good Friday of 1989. After spending some time walking around and reading all of the signs, we went to the Aspen Hotel to see if we could check in a little early but they did not have our room ready yet. So we went out to lunch and then grabbed a quick nap before heading back to the hotel for another try. This time they had the room ready and when we got into it, they had upgraded us to a room with a jacuzzi next to the bed and a little fruit/chocolate basket with a note to “Mr. and Mrs. Holloway” congratulating us on our marriage and wishing us a happy honeymoon. It was so nice. We unloaded all of our stuff out of the van and arranged for a shuttle to pick us up at the airport before we took the van back and turned it in. We figured we were just going to rest so we didn’t need the van anymore. It was a good call. We had a very relaxing night in our very nice room.

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We spent most of the day today in our hotel room relaxing. Late in the afternoon, we went out and walked down to the river to see the fish ladder. I was amazed by how HUGE the salmon are. We only saw one actually make it up the ladder while we were there. We also saw a family of beavers and some pigeon-courting. We then walked back up toward the mall to try to find some food but the mall was closed. And most restaurants were closed. You would think that Sunday or no Sunday, when the sun is bright as noon all night there should be food to be gotten after 18:00. We finally found a little pizza shop a couple blocks down that was open. On the way back to the hotel, we stumbled on a mmmMarble Slab-esque ice creamery from which we bought a pint to take back to the room with us. It was another nice relaxing evening, this our last night in Alaska.