A week in Alaska - Alaska part 1

If you want to plan Alaska trip this year, Its time to get your bookings rolling! "A week in ALASKA" - yes! Thats how much time we could get to vacation Alaska. My husband had always wanted to go there and no matter whereever we went on vacation, Alaska was always on his mind. Like a 5 year old kid who would become all excited at the topic of Disney. Well we have been to Disney as well for the kid within us :) but thats another blogpost. So we decided in January this year (2013) that we would go to Alaska. Something came up in March and by the time we decided to book our tickets it was mid-April. Mind you getting tickets and booking in mid-April for a holiday in May/June/July is not going to happen. There were too few hotels and bnbs to select from and many of the places and tours were showing full. That was a wake up call. In the coming week I researched on Alaska. I contacted a few friends, looked at their itineraries and then started a 5 day overwhelming google marathon to get all things together to update my husband over the weekend with a plan. 

That weekend we literally sat on the edge of our couch one whole day and did all the booking starting with airplane booking to hotels to a few tours. Tip: Do a quick check on availability of hotels or campsites, of places you want to visit before doing your plane bookings. Some 30% of bookings open 2 weeks before the actual trip date and so if you don't see any open spots you may call and want to ask about this option. We got a direct delta flight from Atlanta to Anchorage, woot! It was a 6.5 hours flight, but basically awesome because the return was a red-eye flight and no layovers! It was around $650 and we din't find a cheaper layover deal either. Our friends who were visiting end of August and September found better deals at around $400. I am guessing this is because the season starts to slowdown somewhere around August.

Trip options:
Below is the drive trip we did from Anchorage-Denali-Anchorage-Seward-Anchorage

One of the tourists we met on our way did Fairbanks-Denali-Anchorage-Seward-Anchorage (one way car rental)

Many itineraries included glacier bay national park, Juneau in their trip. They flew into Juneau. Took one day trip in glacier bay national park and then flew into anchorage to continue their drive trip.

Many others we met, mostly families with kids, did cruises starting in British Columbia(BC) or Anchorage. 

Aren't their too many great ways to visit this place!. We were quite excited. With recommendations from travel forums we realized that driving around the place was much easier and fun way to explore Alaskan interiors. So we rented a car for the whole drive and got ready for some adventure! Many larger families we met on trip had rented RV's instead too.

Checkout the google map for the drive below:

Alaska has it own regional time which is one hour behind pacific time, 4 hours behind Atlanta. We left Altanta at 4:30pm on Friday evening and landed at Anchorage at 7pm after a 6.5 hour flight. After renting the car and renting a GPS for the next 7 days we headed to our hotel. Our GPS brought from home loaded with Alaska maps did not work there, surprise surprise! GPS do not include Hawaii and Alaska maps! Though we tried to load Alaska Maps using some recommendations we found online, we were skeptical it will work. Its was 9pm by the time we checked in. The hotel restaurant was about to close. But courtesy hotel we found a great pizza place called the 'Mooses tooth' near our hotel which was open till 11pm. Well, the pizza place was not only open, but also bustling with people and having a wait time at 10pm in the night! oh well! did I say night? It was still broad daylight in Alaska, the sun had no indications of setting.  It was a great day in Anchorage with temperatures in upper 70's..aha! No jackets, no coats, I put on my fav dress and was ready to dine out. I was glad for the weather myself, but more glad for the people living there who were able to enjoy those few months of summer.

Btw, Here are some great breathtaking views of glacier from the plane. This is when I was fiddling away with the powers of Iphone camera and unhappy that our DSLR battery was in check-in luggage and we could not take a DSLR shot. Also, with us was a sweet grandma excited about traveling Alaska with her big family and craning her neck to get a glimpse of this wonder. We were ramdomly clicking photos and sharing them with her. Looks like one should never underestimate the powers of Iphone camera. Thanks to the great Steve Jobs :) Nothing in the trip could give us this wholesome ariel view of the terrain and glaciers of Alaska.