Notes From The Travel Journal--To Anchorage We Go

Our time at the Denali visitor center included a Ranger-led hike, which I ambitiously thought I could handle despite the 1,000 foot elevation climb in under a mile. We turned back halfway in and I promptly decided to join a gym upon our return to Boston.

So the next day, we departed the park, wishing we had one more day to try some other hikes and stare at the mountain. This time our McKinely Explorer ride was 8 hours down to Anchorage. More and more and more incredible views, at least for the first four hours as we emerged from the mountains.

Our overnight in Anchorage was relatively uneventful, although we figured out we could each board the cruise ship with two bottles of wine, so made a late-night run to the liquor store and traipsed through downtown Anchorage with a case of wine and a corkscrew. Stay classy! We devoured a delicious breakfast at the award-winning Snow City Cafe the next morning before hopping aboard the train to head to Seward, the port from which we would set sail.

Mountains slowly started merging with the sea and boy was it gorgeous.

A few of us made a slight detour to explore Portage Lake and the Portage Glacier, which was our first, but certainly not only glacier. Portage Lake was really neat...greenish blue water and steep cliffs loaded with waterfalls spilling into the lake. As seemed to be the theme thus far with Alaska, everything was just vast and enormous. It's nearly impossible to understand the scale of things when you are in them, much less when you're looking at photos after the fact. I remember feeling very, very small.