Feeling shamefaced and slightly unpatriotic, I think Alaska is overrated as a vacation spot.
Now we have all read the story about the blind man describing the elephant. Feeling the front of an elephant is a lot different from standing at the rear of the pachyderm, right?
I guess I got the rear of Alaska as I chose an eight-day land tour beginning in Anchorage with a reputable cruise company, followed by a four-night cruise starting in Skagway and ending in Vancouver, British Columbia.
First of all, the cruise company handled the air transportation or mishandled it. Flying from San Diego to Salt Lake with a two-hour layover and then a flight landing at midnight in Anchorage did not hold any joy for this infrequent phobic flyer.
When we called our travel agent, she informed us that if we were to change air carriers we would be financially penalized, since air was part of the package.
“No, we won’t!” was our assertive response and her supervisor agreed.
Then we booked the airline with the name Alaska on it and got a straight shot to Anchorage with a short stop in Vancouver. We arrived at a reasonable 5 p.m. instead of midnight.
Anchorage boasts 300,000 of the 700,000 Alaskan residents. Size makes a difference. From a 5 a.m. walk around the hotel with the only ones awake being Starbucks and me, Anchorage was a pretty city, the last pretty city on the tour in my limited view.
At 7 a.m. we joined tour 10, a great group of camera-wielding folks from across the USA and Scotland, headed on an eight-hour train ride to Denali National Park, home to Mt. McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America at over 20,000 feet. While it was a long ride in the double-decker domed train and not one moose stared out from the tundra, it was doable with a breakfast and lunch break of decent food.
At night we entered our cabin/motel room owned by the cruise company, a seedy AAA two-diamond rating. Our cute tour director told us we’d be on an eight-hour bus tour of Denali, looking for one or two of the 167 species of birds or 39 kinds of mammals. I anticipated herds of caribou, grizzly bears and babies, wolves and moose.
Denali was breathtaking in its beauty and Mt. McKinley’s top was bathed in clouds. After eight hours of the bus tour with stops for photo fanatics along the way, we counted a few animals that we had seen. Looking like tiny cotton balls on the mountains were the Dall sheep. A Disney-like grizzly strolled past the bus on cue, and a lone wolf watched.
No more bus sitting for a day, we hoped.
The next morning we hit the zenith of our trip seeing Jeff and Donna King’s husky homestead. Not a weight-watching workshop, the husky homestead was a place to raise puppies for the famous Iditarod Jeff had won himself six times.
Iditarod began in 1973 to commemorate the 1925 event in which 20 mushers relayed serum to Nome to save children who contracted diphtheria. Beginning in Anchorage and ending in Nome, the race trail covers 1,000 miles of tough terrain and mushers are on the road for nine to 17 days. Temperatures can reach minus-60 Fahrenheit in March when the race is run.
Our train to Fairbanks was two hours late and Alaska cooled off in a misty rain. Finally, masses of humanity boarded the train and our tour group celebrated as we were invited to the lower car for our no-host dinner during our four-hour ride.
Perhaps I had romanticized Fairbanks too much, because the town of only 30,000 in the center of Alaska was once the site gold prospectors visited in 1902. Fairbanks housed the military in 1942 when the Alaskan Highway was built in eight months. Then in 1968 the oil boom in Prudhoe Bay 390 miles north of Fairbanks helped a redevelopment.
The simple hotel owned by the cruise line was situated in a depressed part of Fairbanks, where walking around opened visitors to social services offices, closed gas stations, broken sidewalks and a ghost town feeling.
Suddenly I was seeing a pattern in our accommodations; the common denominator was being owned by the cruise line and not being the best choice, just the most expensive. Two nights in Fairbanks might be second prize in a contest, with one night being first prize.
The next morning unfolded with a tour director and witty bus driver filling us in the history of the area: a gold mining tour, a sternwheeler tour, a bush pilot demonstration, a visit to the Alaskan pipeline with hundreds of tour groups and buses lined up like elephants at a circus. However, we knew we would be on the road in the early morning. The red flag was the time we would be on the road: nine hours. It was day five now and we lined up at the motor coach.
The company liked to call the bus a motor coach the way a dentist likes to refer to discomfort rather than pain.
It was rainy on and off for the nine-hour trip to nowhere, nowhere being Beaver Creek, a dot on the map of Alaska, with only a hotel owned by the cruise company. A dump with a tacky show and barbecue awaited the weary passengers. This was the nadir of the trip, but at least it would only be one night.
In my mind I made a mental note to never sign up for a tour again.
I didn’t have the flexibility or stomach for driving eight-hour days, where even the beauty of Alaska was outweighed by the endurance test of sitting on my rump over rolling and bumping permafrost Alaskan highway, where one of our passengers vomited without benefit of a barf bag and other good-natured folks joked their way out of the tacky stops and terrible choice of restaurants, owned by the company we toured with.
Our next day was another eight-hour ride to the Yukon Territory, the capital, Whitehorse, with breaks at beautiful Kodak moments, and a slowing down of our motor coach because we couldn’t pass the bus ahead since we all had a time issue for arriving at the last hotel owned by the cruise company.
Weary and frustrated, we walked through the lobby, reminiscent of a Greyhound bus station, and headed for our room that overlooked stacked chairs and weeds winding their way up.
At least there would be no bus ride the next day unless we chose a tour back to Kluane National Forest for fishing or hiking.
Our final day of this luxury tour (ha-ha) was a reasonable four-hour ride to Fraser, where we boarded the narrow gauge train, White Pass and Yukon Route, for a pleasant ride to Skagway; the ship waited and we waited almost two hours to board. Too many buses were lined up ahead of us.
A cruise through the Inside Passage, Glacier Bay and to Vancouver should have erased all the memories of the tacky tour, but it didn’t. Our cruise company wasn’t at fault because my husband got pneumonia and spent each day in our cabin with two trips to the infirmary.
The last frontier of Alaska is ruggedly beautiful, but so is Rose Canyon, where I love listening to train whistles, love running and walking around and feel that spiritual connection.
On the second visit this week to my husband’s internist to combat this pneumonia, I picked up a July Sunset magazine and read an article by Peter Fish: “The Road to Wonderland: Montana, Wyoming, trip of a lifetime.” He describes what a good vacation should do. “It explodes your usual idea of yourself, takes your regular life and tosses a bolt of lightning at it, making it new.”
A bad vacation explodes your wallet, makes your regular life seem better. The view from Route 52 always is welcoming.
” Sandra Lippe, a former high school teacher with a master’s degree in creative writing, was born and raised in Connecticut. She is a 33-year resident of University City with husband Ernie. They have two children and two wonderful grandchildren.