Saturday, June 29th, Kansas City Departure

Lois arrived in Kansas City from Killeen on time. I was at a nearby Walmart getting a couple of last minute items. Luckily her bags were checked through to Copenhagen, which made picking her up easy.  We had a several hours to burn so we went to the Zona Rosa for a late lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings. After lunch we shopped for a bit, just to walk around before getting on the plane.

Our plane departed 50 minutes late. It was late getting in, but everyone hurried the loading, hoping not to miss too many connecting flights, but air traffic control had other plans. The good news is that the United agent gave us boarding passes for the non-stop SAS flight to Copenhagen. Only two problems...our seats were not together and they were missing first names, both which came back to haunt us at the first security check point. We got from terminal two to terminal five in record time, we only had twenty minutes.

After security said we needed names on our tickets, it was a run back to the SAS ticket counter, then back to security. By the time we got to the gate people were boarding. By the time they figured out our seats we were almost the last people on board. The down side of sitting together is that we gave up better seats for bulkhead in steerage. It is pretty tight back here and that is where Tylenol PM is coming in!

Dinner was served a little after 11:00 pm. We had a nice salad with mixed greens and fave beans, dressed with lemon, cheese and crackers, meatballs with rice and steamed broccoli and carrots, with a tasty cheese cake with a chocolate frosting for dessert.

We were served breakfast about an hour and a half before landing. It was pretty simple: juice, coffee, yogurt with granola and a ciabatta roll with ham and cheese.

We landed at 1:10 local time, now Sunday afternoon. Lois' suitcase didn't make it out of Chicgo, or so they think. Since tomorrow is a day at sea, it will catch up to us in Estonia. There were forms to fill out. We just are taking off in the bus, it is almost 3:45. The airport is not as Rick Steves describes, and certainly not a model of organization. The check- in lines were long because of a baggage sorting issue. I hope they have that resolved before next week.

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July 5th, Homeward Bound

Our bus left the hotel at 3:45. That is early even in the daylight. The first leg of our journey was from Fairbanks to Seattle on Alaskan Airways. They checked our bags all the way to our final destination, which alleviated the need to pick our bags up in Dallas, which would have been a nightmare. It was a 3 hour flight. We had a great view of Mount St. Helen's in Seattle. It was interesting flying over all the areas we had cruised. You could recognize glaciers from the air. The flight from Seattle to Dallas was 4 hours. We both slept most of the way. Lois flew out to Killeen first and was home before my flight left for Kansas City. I had a 2 hour flight, hers was 30 minutes. The good news is that my bags were there when I arrived, so getting out of the airport was quick. Great trip.

July 4th, Fairbanks

We ate breakfast in the hotel, the had a nice buffet with reindeer sausage, my new favorite breafast meat. Included in the tour was a riverboat cruise. I guess I had pretty low expectation, but it really was nice. We left the hotel at 12:30 and arrived at the river just a few minutes later. Again, a gift shop. Shortly after we ate family style, beef stew and potatoe soup. After lunch we boarded the riverboat. We had a seaplane demonstration and a dogsledding demonstration before arriving at the native fishing village. At the fishing village we learned about native dress, housing, and fishing. It was all well orchestrated and very interesting. We returned to our hotel at about 5:30. Our one big excursion for the whole trip was a flight to the artic circle. When we arrived back to the hotel we went to the tour desk only to find out that it had been cancelled due to bad weather conditions at Fort Yukon. Bummer. To console ourselves we went out to dinner. We splurged on King Crab Legs. They were awesome. Food always makes things better. Our bags had to be in the hallway by 11:00 pm. Packing took a while since we had sent two bags to Fairbanks and had everything mixed up. We finally got everything sorted out. Sunset was at 12:34 am with sunrise at 3:40. There were people out playing basketball at 3:00 am...in the daylight. There was a full moon, but it like the fireworks didn't work as well in the day light as it would have at night, but it was clear and you could see Denali from our hotel room. It was beautiful.

July 3, Denali to Fairbanks

We had a couple of muffins in our room before we headed to the park visitor center. We sat through a presentation on Eagles and a short but good movie on the park. It was an odd day, our luggage had to be on the deck by 9:00 am and check-out was 10:00. Transportation for the train station was at 3:00 pm. Not too much time to do anything. We ate at a little pizza place and had the "it ain't the lower 48" pizza. It had reindeer sausage and elk burger. It was very good. It is only 120 miles between Denali and Fairbanks. And there are trees, trees and more trees. After the first hour or so, the land really flatted out and was pretty much the same the rest of the way. The guide explained that it was real tundra, with the permafrost keeping much from happening. We didn't hurry, that is for sure. We didn't arrive in Fairbanks until 8:00. Downtown fairbanks is less than happening. Sunset was at 12:30 a.m. It just never got dark.

July 2, Anchorage to Denali

Each cruise line seems to own its own cars on the railroad. On this particular train, Holland America and Princess lines had the most cars. There are several for Alaska Rail Roads, Our car has its own tour guide, bartender and cooks and waiters. We are grouped by tour. Our car has two different tours, but we are beginning to settle in with the same people. The scenery is beautiful. Mountains and trees, more mountains and more trees. We follow the river and the highway most of the way. The tour guide points out things of interest the who way and gives us facts about the terrain. There were several long bridges. The neatest part of the trip was when the clouds parted and Mount McKinley loomed before us. The guide explained the use of McKinley and Denali, Denali being the native name for the mountain. We went through a number of interesting little towns before we arrived at Denali National Park. We were met with the usual fleet of tour busses to take us to the hotel. We stayed at the chalets, our room was near the river at the bottom of the hill. The room was comfortable. The train trip was nearly eight hours. We arrived at about 4:00 in the afternoon. The problem was that very few excursions were available due to our short time in the part...only about 24 hours. There were the usual array of shops, so we shopped. We ended up eating at the Salmon Bake, which was very good. The salmon was done on a cedar plank and topped with a maple syrup accompanied with mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables. We stopped at the grocery store to renew our supply of tonic and diet coke. Bread was over $5.00 a loaf.

Steward to Anchorage, July 1

The sun was already up when our alam went off at 5:00 am. We had already docked in Steward. We just had to pack our hand luggage. We were in the first disembarkation group. They called us at 6:15 when we boarded our waiting train to Anchorage.

The train ride was beautiful, passing lakes, streams, mountains and lots of glaciers. There was a guide in each car pointing out different sites. We saw a mother bear with three cubs, a moose on the run, Dall Sheep and bunches of eagles. It was really beautiful, the wildflowers were all along the tracks.

We pulled into Anchorage about 11:45 and were transferred to the Anchorage Convention Center where we could check our hand baggage until three. We could see our hotel form the Center, but figured they were waiting to three and check-in time.

We wandered the weekend market, at lunch at the Rum Runner bar and grill and did a little shopping. We did go to the Anchorage Mall, which is right downtown. Pretty classy, but typical mall. We then headed back to pick up our luggage and walk to the hotel.

We were met in the lobby with all our instructions for tomorrow...another early day. Our send ahead big bag was waiting for us in our room. I like not having to worry about luggage.

 

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Gulf of Alaska, June 30.

We were at sea all day today so we tried to do things we hadn't done yet since it was our last day on-board.

As Deluxe Suite Guests, there is a special dining room for breakfast. So we tried that. It was table service and very, very nice. There were only about six tables in the King's Room and we had our special wait-staff. It had a much more extensive menu than room service.

We then headed to our disembarkation briefing and also the crew good-bye. There had all of the crew at least represented, from the vacuum cleaner guys, room stewards, cooks, entertainers up to the captain. So that was fun.

The we went to the demonstration kitchen and watched how to cook Steak Diane and chilled raspberry soup. It was entertaining...and smelled good. We then hit the casino and actually won some money.

We had a quick bite to eat on the Lido deck. We hadn't eaten in an hour or so, so we had to keep up our strength. It was a pretty grey day, about 50 degrees, but there was a lot of rocking, since we were in open water.

We then went to a towel folding demonstration, which was cute. Between the four room stewards they could do something like 40 different kinds of animals. There was a standing room only.



We then attended Mass. That was a unique experience, but there were a lot of people there. The priest gave a decent homily, at least it was prepared. We even sang.

We then went back to our suite to figure out packing. We had several options, to carry bags on the train, send some bags on the Anchorage and send others to Fairbanks. We decided to send most of our stuff onto Fairbanks, so we wouldn't have to mess with them.

We had dinner at the Pinnacle Grill, which was the up-scale restaurant on-board. It was Lois' retirement celebration. Wow, it was awesome. First, the chef sent out an amuse bouche of smoked duck breast wrapped around a little slaw. We also had a variety of freshly backed rolls, three kinds of butter: garlic, lemon and tomato, and three kinds of salt, a black smoked Hawaiian sea salt, a spicey red sea salt and finally a pink sea salt. This was followed by our appetizer which was smoked salmon, cooked salmon and scallops served with wasabe cream. We both had the steak Diane, whcih was flamed table side. It was a great presentation and a really, really tasty dish. Lois had a baked potatoe and mushrooms with her steak and I had scalloped potatoes and creamed spinach. There were lots of tough choices for dessert. I settled on a chocolate volcano cake, Lois had the cream brulee which was presented in three different flavors, chocolate, vanilla and expresso. Again, wow. We went to the casino to give them back their money and finished the evening at the stage show.

 

 

It was still light out at eleven. We closed our suitcases and put them out in the hallway to get picked up. I don't know when or if it ever got dark. At midnight you could have still read a book.

 



 

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