It has been a month since coming back from Alaska. My pixel phone was damaged during the salmon catching at the Kasilof river, and stayed in the Alaska time zone for another few weeks until it finally recovered itself.
Writing about Alaska travel is a luxury when the covid-19 pandemic is still rampaging a good part of the world. In Alaska, social distancing means that the Alaskans get out of their homes. Such is the vastness and the wilderness of land in Alaska; and at the time of our travelling, most people hardly wear masks in restaurants.
This trip has been made special not only because this made our first flight since the onset of the pandemic, but also the unusual effort put in to make it happen. We can forgive Alaska being so much more expensive than the lower states, given its tourism is squeezed in mere three summer months. Little did we know that many other Americans were thinking of travelling to Alaska at the same time as us; little did we understand the airline and rental challenges to resume the operations; little did we know about so many other things.
Day 1 Arriving Anchorage
It was a direct flight between San Francisco and Anchorage, with less than 5 hours flight time. Since we booked the air ticket, there were various types of changes by the airline. We ended up with a 5:30am flight via Denver, and by the time we arrived in Anchorage, it was 10 hours later. Denver was a busy and lively airport, everyone was wearing masks and business seemed to have resumed, there were long lines to get coffee, to get food, most restaurant tables were taken.
The car rental business has been so hard hit by the pandemic, they have been forced to sell most of the fleet, and the resumption has been hindered by major shortages of chips that affect cars, computers, phones. It was so bad that I even got a rental quote as $5000 dollars per day. That was as crazy as it could get. After thousands of clicks on the computer, and after seeing the message “sold out in all locations” hundreds of times, we finally found a car rental from Dollar, which seemed to have merged with Hertz. The rental was at a hefty price of over $300 per day. With the reservation, we still worried about our rental – would the car show up? There were lots of scary stories that renters had to wait for hours. Fortunately, we were not among the scary stories. The rental pick up was smooth, we took the smart move to join the express club to cut short our queuing time. We got a Nissan Versa 2018 model, quite some miles on it already; the wear and tear was easy to see. The car came with a CD player, it did not read our USB device, nor did it come with any smart auto setup. In other times, it would be considered as a total rip-off; this time, we were happy to get going.
The Internet has become as essential as electricity. Our mobile plan works for 48 lower states, but not in Alaska, so we had to swing by a GCI store for a SIM card. At dinner time, we learned good restaurants in Anchorage mean either a reservation or an hour of waiting. We fell back to minimizing our spend and filled our belly with KFC chickens. That Nashville style KFC chicken was still pretty bad.
Anchorage is a modest city beautifully surrounded by mountain ranges. The mountains were no longer snow-capped, the unmelted snow painted interesting patterns over the mountains, which added variations to the ranges. In our drive from Anchorage to Talkeetna, we were treated with the grandeur of the mountain ranges through and through.
Talkeetna is a nice little town and has been a popular stop for climbers to the Denali range. The main street is lined with restaurants, gift shops and galleries. In Alaska standard, the main street can be considered as a busy place. We stayed in the Talkeetna Inn. The inn has an unbeatable location, and a nice view of a flowing river. The room was new, but quite costly in terms of what it offered.
Flightseeing awaited us the next day. We went to bed at usual bedtime, when the sky was still very bright.
Coming up the otherworldly flightseeing.
oliviatamccue 
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