As I write this, I am already fighting sleep and it is only 8:20pm here in Alaska. Of course, back home I would be fighting sleep, as it is 12:20am there. Trying to use iTunes to stay awake is a rather futile effort, mostly because I get 30 seconds into a song, and my internet connection has a fit.
The good news is that it was another travel day, so not a whole lot of exotic activities to report. Our flight left Seattle at 7:05am and got into Anchorage around 9:45am Alaskan Standard Time. We both got a little more sleep on the flight (I most assuredly do not recommend sleeping on airport gate chairs). It is not a big airport (to no one’s great surprise, I am sure) but they had some pretty good restaurant options. We wound up choosing the Silver Gulch, which is actually associated with a brewery just outside of Fairbanks. A little bit of lunch, and some beers, were good enough to keep us going for the final leg of the day. A four-hour layover and then we flew to our final destination, Fairbanks. I think there were six gates total there. We picked up our one checked bag and were directed to the Princess Cruise Line desk to pick up our cruise packet and board the bus to our final destination for the night.
Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport Concourse B art from Rachelle Dowdy. The flying Canada geese are made from recycled spruce cabin logs.
A stuffed moose in the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, at the intersection of Concourse B and Concourse C.
So Princess has their own hotel in Fairbanks and I assume the other cruise lines do as well? Princess’ hotel is on the Chena River, which was pretty fast moving, I presume from the snow melt. I saw some pretty good-sized logs booking it downstream. The birding wasn’t too great along the hotel’s River and Nature Walks- the only birds we saw that we don’t normally see in Florida were a Mew gull and violet-green swallows. I did see a magpie at the airport in Anchorage, but I guess we can’t count that because Melissa had wandered off to look for birds elsewhere three minutes earlier. She wasn’t really happy about that, when all she saw were white-throated sparrows…
The Chena River, from behind our hotel in Fairbanks.
The pioneer log cabins on Princess property. Those pioneers sure were eco-conscious with the solar panel and all…
The hotel has two restaurants onsite – a fancy one (The Edgewater Dining Room) with the requisite prices; and a bar and grill (Trackers Bar & Grill), which wasn’t much better pricewise, but the atmosphere was more our speed. An order of fish and chips each, plus a couple of mixed drinks and beers, and we both came back ready to crash. Melissa gave in, but I decided to try to do a hard reset of my sleep cycle, so here I am. It is now 9:20pm (okay, yeah, I nodded off a couple of times) and it still looks like 5pm outside. Someday I will have to stay up late enough to take a picture of dusk/dawn (which I understand is about 1am right now), but that isn’t going to happen tonight.
Congrats on arriving in Alaska! Enjoy!
I remember magpies from Colorado. You’ll find more exciting things! 🙂
What? No mention of finding moose scat just outside the resort?!
Edit: White-crowned, not white-throated, sparrows. As we’ll be back to Seattle “for real” later on I didn’t even bother to record them.
Yes the incident with the magpie was annoying but again, I will see one later I expect. 😊
Current Alaska bird count: a very sad 5. No life birds.