The Chickadee Feeder

ALASKA:  KISSIN’ THE MOOSE IN TALKEETNA

 

 

I tried kissing a moose a couple of times.

 

I tried BECOMING a moose once.

 

And I even tried to dance with a bear.

But cousin Adele REALLY kissed a moose antler, and it wasn’t pretty.

When we left Anchorage to start our land tour, we boarded the Wilderness Express train to go north. 

Our cruise company (Celebrity, owned by Royal Carribbean) had private cars with a restaurant on the lower deck and huge windows on the upper.  It allowed us to walk during the trip, to look for moose and bear, and to learn a lot of info about Alaska from our tour guide.

 

Tom & his wife Rita

 

Our first stop was in the small town of Talkeetna.  It’s often advertised as being like the town of Cicely in television’s Northern Exposure.  Broad streets, quaint buildings, VERY low-profile and quiet. 

 

Although 50 miles from Denali, it is the starting place for climbers, who fly in to Base Camp.  Talkeetna has a small museum that talks about the history of climbing…and also a cemetery that honors some of those who have lost their lives.  At least six men have died on the mountain this year.

The shuttle bus dropped us off at the town, and we were off!  The very very first tourist shop had a cute decorative garden of gravel, flowers, and several moose antlers laying there, and when Adele walked past this lovely decor, she slipped and fell!  FLAT ON HER FACE, wham!  Down!

Of all the impossible things to happen, her face hit a moose antler, and the point of the antler went INSIDE her mouth and punctured the inside of her cheek!

Did you ever hear of such a thing?!

It was large enough to be concerned about, and so a doctor was consulted, but they decided to leave it untouched.  The whole side of her face was bruised for the rest of the trip.

But you have to admit, there’s a lot of humor to be found in it too.  Of course we were concerned about her, but it was hard not to laugh as well.  I imagine the doctor did–and went off to add it to the book he’s going to write some day, called My Crazy Adventure with Tourists in Alaska.  Meanwhile, Adele got a lot of “ribbing” about moose every day.

 

ALASKA:  A GUNMAN HELD US UP

When you go to Alaska, they say you should do the land tour first and the actual cruise afterward.  I think this is a good idea.  My cousin Tom had chosen to do the Cruisetour #12* offered by Celebrity Cruises so that all transportation and hotels were taken care of (with our time free to do what we wanted).  It was a great way to get commentary and teaching about everything we were seeing, along with making friends whom we would later see on the ship.

We began in Anchorage, took a train up to Denali, and took a motor coach back south all the way to the ship.  Our last night before the cruise was spent at the Alyeska Resort near Girdwood, with the biggest ski mountain in Alaska.  The accommodations were very luxurious.  We rode the tram to the top (wedding photos were being taken),

 

 some of our group rode bicycles,

 

some of us just hiked around,

along the highway

and through the woods. 

 

Claudia petted a local dog who was milking all the tourists for anything he could get.

 

But the next day we had troubles.  We were to meet our bus at 1 PM for the final leg of our trip to………THE SHIP!!  Until the gunman arrived.

It seems a gunman took another man and his car as hostage–in Anchorage.  They began driving south toward Seward on the only highway there is–the Seward Highway.  The Point A is where we were in Girdwood.

Along the way, the gunman decides he needs a restroom break, so they stop at the rest area in the scenic Turnagain Pass, he locks the kidnapped victim in his car, takes the keys, and is off to find the loo.

BUT the kidnapped man has an extra set of keys–HA-HAH!  So he happily drives off and contacts the police.

Now EVERYONE has problems, because this is the only highway going south.  It is a Friday afternoon, and many tourists want to get to Seward to get aboard their cruise ship.  Many tourists are getting off their cruise ship and want to come north.  AND “the red are starting to run” (the red/sockeye salmon are starting to enter the creeks and to upstream spawn), so all the locals are getting off work and going south to the Kenai Peninsula to fish for the weekend!

All traffic was halted for 3 hours while the police searched for the gunman.  This included the bus that was supposed to take us to our cruise ship.  I can’t remember the reports, but it was between 20-30 miles of backed up traffic??

We were fortunate to be stuck at the hotel and not in a bus sitting on the highway.  But still…we had to hang around in case the bus came. 

 

Some of us passed the time making phone calls. 

                                    Cousins Tom & Greg                                          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of us created roadrunner jokes, started by (yours truly):  for example, what did the roadrunner do when his best friend died?  Weep-weep. Why does the roadrunner shop at the Dollar Store?  Cheap-cheap.

Aunt Carol & Cathy

                  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My husband and I tried to make interesting photos.  Here’s a fountain growing out of his ear:

 Kissing a moose

Leaping up in the air

Being roasted alive

 

Because we were on a Celebrity cruisetour, the Celebrity ship would have to wait for us if we were late.  But we got there just in time (literally) at 8 PM.  The ship was churning the water by the time my big toe touched the deck.  We missed the sit-down dinner meal and wandered around a bit confused for a while, but our on-board adventures had begun!

* Cruisetour #12 cities:  1 night Anchorage, by open-ceiling train to Talkeetna (1 night) & Denali (2 nights).  Tundra Wilderness Tour in Denali National Park.  By bus to Alyeska (1 night) & Seward (where the cruise ship is boarded).

P.S.  Who is the Roadrunner’s favorite female movie star?

 

ALASKA:  TALKEETNA FLIGHT

When you pay for a cruise, the cost covers the ship, but not the extra trips you might want to do on land.  For Caribbean cruises, that might be OK–you can shop, see the sights, and lay on the beach.  But in order to have a great Alaska experience, you must go on excursions to get yourself deeper into the wild.

Save your money.  Go there.  Do it.

At Talkeetna (the base town where mountain climbers gather), my husband and I booked a flight and glacier landing with Talkeetna Air Taxi.  A fellow flew us around the mountains (hoping for a glimpse of Denali) and landed us on the snow part of a glacier.

 

 

To get there, we flew over dead rivers full of glacial silt.  Fish and plants don’t live in them, and animals don’t drink from them.  The silt is almost like cement mix.

 

 

Sometimes I thought the airplane’s wing was going to clip a mountain.*    *scary words in this post are underlined

 

 

Landing on the glacier really spooked me because we came over a 5-mile valley of dangerous crevasses before we landed.  We went lower and lower so I thought we weren’t going to make it.

Another plane landed at our spot while we were there. He asked for help in getting his plane turned around for take-off, because he wanted to be ready to go right away if he needed to.   The plane was so light it only took 2 guys to do it.

Here it is coming in, just landing after flying over the valley of crevasses.

 

 

Leaving our cliff really spooked me because the pilot drove right to the edge of the cliff before we began to fly.  He said he wanted to make a good driving path for the other plane, since it was smaller and the weather was getting bad.

We had to wear special snow boots so our feet wouldn’t get wet.  The snow was slippery, as evidenced by how hard it was to walk around, and by how the plane slipped back and forth as it tried to take off when we left.

 

 

The beautiful blue lakes can be very very deep….

 

We followed Ruth Glacier out on the way back.  The brown stripes are all the silt the glacier is carrying with it.  The satellite version of Google Maps gives a great view of Ruth Glacier and many others, like curling fingers all over Alaska.

 

 

We were fortunate; some of the cousins took a flight 30 minutes after ours, but the weather turned bad and they weren’t able to land on a glacier at all.

A fun side story:  We met Donna and Bob from South Carolina!  As a reader-and-planner-before-I-take-a-trip, I spent a lot of time on the forums at CruiseCritic.  While there, I had some correspondence with a lady named donna&bobfromSC, who said they were going on the same cruise and the same land tour as ourselves.  When the pilot began to call out our names to board the airplane, he asked for a Bob and Donna.

Could it be?

When they replied “South Carolina” to his queries of where we all were from, I asked my husband “How many Bob and Donnas do you think there are from South Carolina”?  So I asked them, and indeed they were the same people.  We saw them many times on our trip and had good conversations.