{"id":11177,"date":"2018-08-25T19:47:39","date_gmt":"2018-08-26T00:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/?p=11177"},"modified":"2018-08-25T19:47:39","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T00:47:39","slug":"alaska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/25\/alaska\/","title":{"rendered":"alaska"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

For my summer vacation this summer, I opted to go to Alaska. I traveled with G Adventures\/Nat Geo, the same venture that I went with to Iceland in 2016<\/a> and Peru in 2017<\/a>. I chose Alaska for a variety of reasons – first, the trip was one that fit into my existing vacation schedule. Second, I have been trying, at least periodically, to go more places within the United States that I wouldn\u2019t ordinarily travel to (see Wyoming in 2015<\/a>). Lastly, I wanted a trip that was a bit shorter than my normal two weeks, because my brother was coming home for a spell, and I wanted to split my time off so that I would actually get to spend at least a few days with him. So\u2026Alaska.<\/p>\n

The trip looped from Anchorage to Homer to Seward to Denali and back to Anchorage. It started a bit rocky, with my flight nearly getting grounded at JFK and ultimately sitting on the tarmac for six hours, thanks to a veritable monsoon in NYC. A few rebookings and many<\/i> hours later, I landed in Anchorage, missing all of the first day\/night activities, but at least not missing the tour, unlike all of the folks who were supposed to be on cruises who missed their boats. <\/p>\n

First stop took us to Homer, a cute coastal town, where we were supposed to go on lots of hikes, but due to the typhoon-like weather than apparently followed me from NYC, we instead visited every coffee shop in town, along with the very small, but very cute Pratt Museum, and squeezed in a hike when the weather finally cleared up a bit.<\/p>\n

From Homer we circled around to Seward, another coastal town, where we got a private behind-the-scenes tour of the Alaska Sea Life Center (interrupted by an always fun fire alarm!), saw our first puffins, went on a boat tour of the alaskan coast and saw more puffins in the actual wild, together with a pod of orcas, and hiked up to view Exit Glacier, which is much smaller than it was even a few years ago.<\/p>\n

From Seward, we had a loooong drive up to Denali, stopping a few times to stretch our legs and take pictures along the way. Our first full day in Denali was a 4 hour one-way bus ride deep into the park to view wildlife and the Alaska range – of course it was cloudy and rainy on the day we were scheduled to do this, so we couldn\u2019t actually see Denali (only 30% of visitors actually ever see the mountain). The next day, when we did some more local hikes, it was (obviously) clear and beautiful. <\/p>\n

Last, we headed back to Anchorage where at least some of us had a day to wander around before leaving for the airport, but not before I (or really, our fantastic tour leader) arranged for a local photography guide to take me on the Denali and Parks highways early in the morning so that I could do some landscape photography. As a bonus, we ran into some beavers building a beaver palace, even though they normally only come out in the evening!<\/p>\n

<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my summer vacation this summer, I opted to go to Alaska. I traveled with G Adventures\/Nat Geo, the same venture that I went with to Iceland in 2016 and Peru in 2017. I chose Alaska for a variety of reasons – first, the trip was one that fit into my existing vacation schedule. Second, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,6],"class_list":["post-11177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-photos","tag-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6ZBi-alaska","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11177"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11182,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11177\/revisions\/11182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}