After cruising along the Inside Passage, I was really looking forward to exploring more of the incredible state of Alaska. We were fortunate to make the drive from Seward to Anchorage in clear weather and had amazing scenery the entire way. You’d think I would have gotten jaded by snowcapped mountains at this point; but you’d be wrong! My Instagram account was just mountains, mountains, and more mountains. Hey, maybe because I’m a flatlander or something but I just could not get over how freaking gorgeous the landscape is.
At the Anchorage Airport, Mom and I got into our rental car and foolishly, I put my mom in charge of navigation to our B&B. This is the same woman who can barely check her texts. Somehow I just assumed that reading skills translated to being able to read the directions provided by Apple Maps. Well, let me say now, I’m an idiot for making that assumption because as I started looking at the exits flashing by on the freeway, I realized that we were heading away from downtown. I asked Mom, can you look at the map because I don’t think we’re heading in the right direction… I glanced over to see her with a bewildered expression on her face. “There’s no map”. Mom, yes there is, close the instructions by clicking the x in the upper right corner and the map is right behind it. And then a full three minutes later after she found the x, “I got to the map finally but I can’t read it, it’s too small.” Mom, you can zoom in on the map to read stuff. Oh for God’s sake… I ended up pulling off at the next exit because I couldn’t watch my mom take six years to figure out how to zoom in on the map and keep an eye on the road at the same time.
But funny enough, at the exit was a burger joint that I had seen from the bus on the way to the airport that had a funny name that my dad would have absolutely gotten a kick out of. Impulsively, I turned into their parking lot. I quickly verified that Mom is no Vasco de Gama (we were about 10 miles off track) and decided not to have her play navigator any more on this trip. I turned to Mom and announced we were stopping for lunch because at that point, I was starving. Ironically, we had to wait over 20 minutes to get our food. Apparently it was not fast food as I’m pretty sure we waited for them to butcher the cow, grind the meat, and then cook the burgers while we sat there, but it was delicious – although at that point sawdust and shoe leather might have tasted good because I was so hungry.
Fed and no longer hangry, I memorized the correct directions to get us in the right direction and we took off – back the way we came. Finally, about 20 minutes later, we pulled into the driveway of our B&B. The extremely friendly woman who owns the place immediately came out the door to welcome us. She whisked us inside to show us around while she got her male friend to haul our suitcases up the stairs to our accommodations. We stayed at the Birch B&B, located super close to downtown Anchorage but in a very residential setting. The term B&B is kind of a misnomer because it’s really a 2-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. After being in a ship’s cabin with my mom all week, it was really nice to spread out and have my own space. And as a bonus, the place has a clothes washer and dryer. My mom must have felt badly about the navigational debacle because she ended up washing all of my clothes over the two nights we stayed there. I have to say, it was pretty awesome to have an entire suitcase worth of clean clothes without having to spend hours hand washing stuff in the sink like I usually do on trips.
Mom and I set out to walk the 5 or so blocks into downtown. Anchorage has a compact, super walkable downtown core. We ambled along, amazed that so many souvenir shops could be jammed into such a small area. Seriously, at least half of downtown caters to tourists buying random Alaska-themed merchandise. My mom ignored my admonishment not to shop any more because she was already over the 50 pound limit on her suitcase and bought knickknacks and t-shirts for about 20 relatives and friends.
We wandered back to the B&B after a couple of hours. The early morning wake up call in Seward definitely hit us and we opted to turn in around 8:30pm. The only thing was – the sun was still so high in the sky that it felt like we were trying to go to bed at 3pm. Fortunately the B&B has dark shades in the bedroom windows so it wasn’t like trying to go to sleep with a flashlight shining in your face. I went to Iceland a long time ago and had experienced daylight when it’s midnight before but my mom was completely weirded out by it.
The next day, I had to get up early to jump on work-related conference calls. Despite me still being on vacation, I sat at the small desk in my bedroom trying to clean through a week’s worth of emails and get somewhat caught up from being completely off the grid for a week. While I’m not important at all in a work sense, we have a bunch of deadlines looming and I felt guilty enough being gone that I opted to work half-time for the second week of the trip. I know it’s a sickness and I really should do something about this over-developed sense of duty I have. But if it means that I can keep a job that allows me to travel whenever the hell I feel like and work remotely from random locations, I’m going to suck it up every once in awhile.
Around noon Anchorage time, I was caught up enough that I felt comfortable heading out for the day. Mom and I drove to a parking lot close to an entrance to the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, a paved 11-mile walking and biking trail along the coast. We had temperatures in the low 70s F (about 23 C) and beautifully clear skies which provided stunning views across the water of the mountains north of Anchorage, including a glimpse of Denali itself! Allegedly, you might get lucky and see moose along the trail; but Bullwinkle must have been napping because while we did see a bunch of birds, no moose made an appearance during our walk.
I was proud of Mom. We walked over five miles, according to my pedometer. I really wanted to go into Earthquake Park, a section of trail located just off the paved trail, but it was super muddy and the mosquitoes were coming out in force. I thought I was a magnet for those bloodsuckers until I was walking next to my mom. Then it was like walking next to a tornado of buzzing needles. We backtracked back to the relative safety of the paved path where the bugs weren’t quite as overwhelming. The sad thing is, we had slathered ourselves with bug repellant but that did us as much good as if we had just smeared honey on our limbs.
That evening, we went to a local restaurant called Moose’s Tooth for dinner. I guess everyone in the metropolitan Anchorage area had the same idea because the place was packed. We waited over 45 minutes for a table. But we had a view of the mountains… The food was actually really good, although pro tip – if you go there with only two people, you need to have an appetite if you order cheese breadsticks and a pizza; otherwise, you will have a ridiculous amount of cheesy leftovers.
Mom and I drove back to our B&B to get a good night’s sleep because on tap for the next day – a pretty epic road trip further north into the heart of Alaska.