Sunday, and we are assimilating

Having completed thirty six hours in this thoroughly weird time zone, it is safe to say that we have become adjusted to the constant daylight, the windless heat, and the smokey air.  Today is our last day on our own before joining the land tour tomorrow and the Wilderness Express train, to Denali, on Tuesday.

I didn't expect Alaska to be so verdant, but apparently drainage from the melting of the late snow (they had snowfall in May) and the constant sunshine from twenty+ hours of daylight makes for ideal growing conditions.  It appears that Alaskans love plants and flowers, probably because they may grow them only three or four months a year.  That which they grow grows well and grows huge.  Below is a cabbage, one that is predicted to weight as much as I do when it is finished growing under the all day and all night sun.

Alaska is the largest state, in terms of size, of the fifty United States.  It is twice the size of the second largest state, Texas, and 688 times the size of the smallest state, Rhode Island.  At 656,425 square miles of land, it is one-fifth the size of the entire lower contiguous 48 states.  Yet with all this land, the population of the entire state is only 731,000.  That is about the same population of just Lee County in Florida.  For comparison, Miami, Florida  currently has 2,591,000 people.  

Fairbanks, where it has been very hot

We slept; we slept off the fifteen hours of travel, and we somehow adjusted to the four-hour time difference.  We awoke feeling a lot closer to being humans than we had the night-less evening before this, when we crashed at 10:30 p.m., Alaska time, or 2:30 a.m. Florida time.  In the summer, the sun shines brightly in Alaska for approximately 20 hours a day.  Midnight sun is not an expression; it is a reality, and it is weird.  On the balcony of the suite we will occupy for four days, the sun blasted down in the middle if the night as if it were late afternoon.

It has been ridiculously hot in Fairbanks this summer, so much so that the dryness has resulted in massive brush fires, yielding smokey air that is both a respiratory and an olfactory nuisance.  In short, the fresh, crisp air of Alaska has been replaced, albeit temporarily, with the kind of air to which we are accustomed in Florida when the Everglades burns.  It was unexpected, but it is one of those unpredictable aspects of nature that we accept.  As for the heat, it seems to be abating.  Though the highs had been in the 90s (Fahrenheit) the week prior to our trip, it was in the 70s today.

The tour books warned of Alaskan Mosquitos.  There is not much wind here in the summer months, and conditions for the nuisance bugs are said to be ideal.  Apparently those ideal conditions apply to size, as these things are honestly the size of small hummingbirds.  Huge.  And ubiquitous.  We have resigned ourselves to smelling like bug repellant for the duration of the land portion of the trip.

Today, we rode the resort's shuttle into downtown Fairbanks to get a feel for the city.  Fairbanks is a small city with a quiet and Alaskan-folksy downtown.  We walked along the main streets and stopped for lunch at Soupy Smiths, a favorite of locals.  There, Albert had a Fairbanks-brewed beer, and Steve had an Alaskan crab burger.  After lunch, we walked throughout the old, somewhat decaying little city, and eventually came upon the Cultural Center.  What a beautiful place!  There were very well done exhibits chronicling Alaska's history, wildlife, and people.  The day ended with dinner at the Bear Lodge, on the grounds of the Wedgewood Resort, our home in Fairbanks.

Fifteen hours of travel, and we're here

We are here, in Anchorage, Alaska, the first of many cool destinations on this long-awaited adventure through the 48th state and northwest Canada. We refers to Steve and Caroline Seefchak and Albert Kunze, our adult son.  Before leaving, we survived the arduous tasks of having packed for nearly three weeks and of preparing two separate houses, one dog, five cats, and a plethora of plants for our lengthy absence.

The trip, over six thousand miles of it, was very smooth and efficient. It began with a chauffeur-driven limousine ride to Fort Lauderdale International Airport, where we boarded the first of three first-class flights:  Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta; Atlanta to Minneapolis; and Minneapolis to Fairbanks, pretty much in the middle of the huge state of Alaska.  Delta's flights were all on time, and things were relatively smooth until baggage claim, where we found that one of my two bags did not arrive.  Tracking it, an agent told us that it was in Minneapolis, and it would travel to Alaska a day later than its clothing-filled travel mates.  Oh well.  If that is the worst mishap, it's safe to say that the travel to Alaska was absolutely awesome.