Destination Daydreams: Alaska

Well, would you look at that. I'm capable of maintaining a blog. For a few weeks at least...

On with the show. Destination Daydreams is back and this time I'm looking at Alaska. Ahh, Alaska. Baked Alaska. Mmmm...

Anyhoo... what to do in Alaska? What indeed to do in Alaska? Let's start with how I'm getting there. I could fly up from Vancouver. That'd be the quickest way to do it and quite reasonably priced.

Bit boring though, innit? Just flying over all that beautiful coast. All those little fjords and islands and whatnot. So I figure I could get on a boat instead. There's ferries all the way up that western coast from Prince Rupert in Canada all the way round to the far west and the Aleutian Islands. Takes longer - 4-5 days instead of the 3.5 hours or so it'd take for a flight.

But imagine how much you could see from the ferry. And it'd be a nice change of pace for a few days. Just sit back, relax and take in the view.

So sure, maybe I'd have to put up with rough seas, but I've not yet had a problem with seasickness, so I figure I'd be OK. Coped with Lake Taupo when poor Claire was doing this:

Getting there aside, what could I actually do in Alaska? Well, for a start the ferry I'm currently looking at stops at Whittier. I could disembark there and then explore the Kenai Peninsula for a day or two - glacier boat trip, anyone? Oh yeah.

After that I could make a move north on the Alaska Railroad to Anchorage. Anchorage might not be the state capital but it's very much the biggest city in Alaska and a quick search suggests there's plenty to explore there - museums and the like. So perhaps 4 days or so in Anchorage? They're claiming a great music scene as well, so perhaps I could even catch a gig. Hurray, live music.

From Anchorage, I could go for several places. The first of these is Denali National Park. I'd possibly consider taking a small group tour up here, but I could do it solo. The Alaska Railroad runs north from Anchorage to Denali or there's a whole host of small bus services that could get me there for less cost. I think the nicest option would be to get the bus in one direction and the train in the other - you know, to get the best of both.

The second place to go from Anchorage is down into the south west, heading down towards the Aleutian Islands. From there, I could visit the Kodiak Archipelago or keep on heading west into the Aleutians proper. It all looks beautiful down there, but I have concerns about the transport and in the end it would probably mean having to take a cruise of some sort which might be just a bit out of my price range. Still, this is all a long way off and there's plenty of options to explore.

I had initially considered heading further north into Alaska, past Denali into Fairbanks. And then I discovered that a) there's not a lot to do in and around Fairbanks that I couldn't do elsewhere and b) Fairbanks has one of the highest crime rates in the States (more on that in a future post). At which point I figured maybe I'd only go as far as Denali. Yeah...

And from there... the lower 50 states?