Fairbanks, AK

An early morning wake up for me (the alarm clock in our hotel room was set for 3 am!) but thankfully I went back to sleep. We both woke fairly early between the excitement level and adjusting from East Coast time.

We had breakfast at the hotel, which was super busy and headed off to do some quick shopping before heading to pick up our Talkeetna Packages. We stopped at Target for the important things… water, granola bars, chocolate 🙂 and then pointed Julie’s Mercury Mountaineer towards Talkeenta.

Our friends had been at the Sheldon Mountain House on Ruth Glacier (Google it, it’s amazing!) so they had a lot of relaxation and fun time, even with boiling their glacier ice/snow for their cooking and water use. We found them at their new home away from home, K2 Aviation. The folks there had been super nice and we’re letting them keep their things in their hanger until our arrival.

So we captured Sara and Melora and headed into downtown Talkeetna for a late lunch at the Denali Brew Pub. I kicked off the trip with some fish and chips and LJ had reindeer meatloaf!

Denali Brew Pub, Talkeetna

Stubbs – The Mayor of Talkeetna

After lunch, we wandered around the town for a bit and even met the Mayor, (another Google assignment for you) and then off we went, headed north up the Parks Highway.

We found a moose and two calves! Success! We were now three for three on our trips to Alaska to see a mom and two babies. They were eating just off the road and we were thrilled.

We stopped at one of the Denali overlooks to see if she was out but no such luck. Sara and Melora saw the mountain five days straight and this is our third time and still no mountain. We are starting to take it personally! Actually “they” say only about 10% of visitors actually see the mountain any given year. More… Moose! Yeah! Another mom and two babies having a snack roadside, there were some tourists that were way too close in our opinion but fortunately the moose seemed more interested in their dinner than in making them become dinner! Off we continued. We stopped to refuel at probably the most expensive place to stop ($4.03/gallon) but the man working there was super sweet and it was worth every penny!

Fuel Price: $4.03 a gallon

 Continuing on and… More moose! This time a mom and just one little one, making our total count of moose for the day at 8 and I couldn’t be happier!

Moose Group #2

There is a bit of road construction during the summer in Alaska, as you can imagine the window for actually accomplishing very much due to the weather conditions can be fairly small; couple that with the king days of sinner and that equals lots of construction to improve the impact of the severe weather. We got detained by a few different projects and rolled into the Best Western Plus around 11 or so (we went to bed without our supper!) and made plans to meet early for breakfast to head off to pick up our second rental car of the trip. More later!