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.