Alaksa: The Wunda Wunda

We have now moved on to a new and exciting part of Alaska. Yesterday (Rather, Tuesday, August 21, since I’m not sure when I’ll get connectivity to post this), we drove from Denali National Park. We departed before 6:00 and headed north to Fairbanks. However, Fairbanks was not our destination. We stopped briefly for breakfast in North Pole (with a lot of Christmas-y stuff…and the home of a friend of ours). Then we continued to drive for another 8 hours to Valdez, AK. Valdez isn’t really close to anything, and there was no direct way to get here, hence, the trip up and around.

Anyway, that’s not the important part. We were met by a relative who owns a boat here. Last night we slept on the boat and today we took off for a three day adventure in the waters around Valdez. We’ve only been on the water for about 4 hours. We’ve already caught about 15 silver salmon. This is the easiest fishing I’ve ever been a part of. I’m not too excited about fishing, so I’m mostly watching and cheering. But I remember fishing in Minnesota involving a lot of waiting around for a bite. These are coming very quickly!

The boat we are on doesn’t move very quickly (only about 7 knots – don’t you just love my nautical terminology? Is “knot” even spelled right for this purpose?). However, the pace works very well for us. We are slowly moving along glaciers and pockets of salmon. We caught ice that fell off a glacier to put in our coolers. We even put down some shrimp pots.

By the end of today, we hope to be at the Columbia Glacier. There is a lot of wildlife around there. We hope to see a lot of wildlife (more than we saw in Denali). We’ve already seen an otter swimming around the harbor, so we are at a good start for the day.

When I told people about this trip, many people asked me if I could handle a vacation with the family. The honest answer is, yes I can. Our family has always gotten along really well. We have enjoyed each other’s company during this whole trip. Also, because now we are all coupled up, we can split off into pairs a lot easier. The time away makes the time together a lot of fun. Of course, we were all 6 crammed into a minivan for our 10 hour trip from Denali to Valdez. But we made the whole thing pretty fun (even without any radio for most of the trip).

One interesting thing is that while we are on one vacation, we start thinking/planning on the next vacation. We’ve had some really interesting conversation about when and where we should go next. I’m sure that sometime soon we will have a family trip to Scandinavia. Our family is Swedish, and my sister’s husband is Norwegian, so we have a lot of family to see there. My parents would love to go and visit family. Heck, I’ll go wherever I can!