Walking Around Anchorage and The Ride to Denali

Woke up that morning and had the complimentary breakfast. When everyone was ready, we went out for a walk around Anchorage. After walking for a while Ah Ma got tired as her knee was still painful. So she headed back (or actually made a detour to buy some things) while we tried to look for the Ship Creek viewing platform which was marked on the map where we were supposed to be able to watch the salmon run.

So we walked. And we walked.. and we walked some more and we walked. In the end, daddy and Ah Kong had to take turns carrying you as you complained of being tired. We got a little lost trying to find our way to the bridge. We walked along a road which was rather quiet, wondered if we should cross the train tracks and didn't. So we walked along the tracks and saw this:

Coca-Cola Bottling Co of Alaska

And we finally found the proper place to cross the train tracks. We sure walked a lot that morning.

And we continued to walk more and at long last found the little path that led to the viewing platform:

So guess how many salmons did we see? Er.. none. Haha.. walked all the way there for nothing! So it was time to start our journey back to the hotel to get Ah Ma and go for lunch before our bus comes to pick us up. Before that we decided to stop and look at the Ulu Factory.

After taking this shot as daddy was keeping his tripod, we saw the "Free Shuttle". Ah Kong asked and the driver said that he was leaving to the tourist center in the city center soon. Yay! No need to walk back (we saw a shorter and more direct way back as we passed the train tracks but it was still a long walk back to the hotel).

Here you sitting on the bench of the bus (or is it a tram.. it's a bus which looks like a tram!)

We got back to the hotel in a short time, packed up and checked out before heading to a Japanese restaurant which we saw the day before. Too bad it was not opened that day. Ah Ma said that she was not hungry so she went back and we walked around to look for a place for lunch. In the end as we were out of time, we bought take away and went back to the hotel where the bus driver was already waiting for us. The 5 of us packed into the bus and off we went to pick up more passengers.

As we were waiting for the passengers, the nice bus driver even let you sit on his seat and pretend to drive his bus:

You were certainly excited pretending to drive the bus

We were then dropped off at the Anchorage Museum where we quickly gobbled down our lunch. Then we headed to the museum to have a quick look as we were given a free entrance ticket each.

Finally it was 3pm and time to board our bus headed to Denali National Park. It was a bus ride similar to what we had in New Zealand. There was no tour guide. Instead all the information and any questions we had were answered by the bus driver. Our driver for that day was Mike. As we drove to Talkeetna he told us all sorts of stories and shared many information about the Alaska.

You napped for almost 2 hours on the bus and by that time we reached Talkeetna where we got off to stretch our legs and to drop some passengers who were staying in the hotel there.

After that we headed to the Denali National Park. It was an amazing ride. We could not take our eyes of the beautiful view.

The first picture on the left is a gorge (I cannot recall the name). If you look carefully you can see just how far the drop is. The bus driver managed to stop for us to take pictures as there was no other traffic on the bridge. We even got to see rainbow. We could almost see both ends of the rainbow.

And at long last we arrived at the town area where we dropped other passengers off at their hotels and we finally arrived at our hotel, The Denali Bluffs. We met Paul, the agent who was there to help us arrange any additional tours in Denali. We were all given our room keys and after dropping our luggage we headed to the hotel's restaurant for dinner. We had thought that it was late (nearly 9pm) and so we decided to just have dinner there than to walk to the nearby town (which was just down the hill) for dinner.

After dinner you KO-ed even before I was done with my shower!