My Alaska Trip - Part 1: Flight and Anchorage

Actually I am back in England. The sun is shining, Amber is back from the kennel and watching me typing this and I decided to spend this afternoon writing at least the first part of my travel report. So here it is:

The whole trip started on Monday, June 1st. I decided to drive my car to Harwich, take the ferry from there to Hook-of-Holland and spend one night in Essen. And it was a very short night. At 4:30am on Tuesday morning the airport taxi was already waiting for me. For "just" 70 Euros it gave me a ride to Duesseldorf airport from where I had a connecting flight to Frankfurt/Main. After arriving there it felt like it was my first trip. Seriously, it took me at least 1.5 hours to figure out where to go. No Condor transfer counter, too early for the flight being posted on the departure board and no working information terminal. But finally I held my boarding pass in my hand and was on my way to gate B60. But wait a minute! B60 is not where I usually flew from. No second security check, but even more important: no McDonald's for breakfast or any shopping possibilities. So the only thing to do was watching my co-travellers.
Many years ago when I first took the Condor to Alaska, 80% of the passengers were men in their maybe late 40s, early 50s. They were hunter, wanted to go fishing or on a canoe trip or maybe spend some a couple of weeks in a remote cabin. Adventure-Men. This changed a lot. There are always some Americans on board. Maybe coming home from a trip to Europe, maybe living in Germany and going on vacation to Alaska. Of course there are the above mentioned men. You can easily identify them by two things: First of all they are already dressed for their adventure and second they don't wait at the same areas as all the other passengers do, they want to be different, going to the wilderness, they know all this very well and pretend that they are not excited anymore. They are not like the young couples with their kids in Spiderman dresses, or the excited older couples on the way to their RV adventure driving the "8" (the most popular roadtrip through the Yukon and Alaska). Well, as mentioned above, it was a very mixture.
I was very lucky finding the guy sitting next to me neither being one of the above mentioned adventurer nor a young dad with a screaming and crying baby. No, it was a biologist on his way to Barrow to do some research on birds, especially sandpiper.


When flying on Tuesdays there is always a stop over in Whitehorse, YT, Canada. The majority of the RV tourists usually leave the plane here. For them it doesn't really matter where to start the "8" and usually, if you book the RV from Germany it is cheaper to start the trip in Canada. For maybe one hour we all had to get off the plane and wait in a designated area. After a 9 hours flight it felt very good standing or sitting there in the sun. It was warm, in the 70s already and nice outside. It was really good to spend that time there before going on another 1.5 hours flight to the final destination, Anchorage.
The immigration process was much shorter than expected. I was a little bit nervous waiting in line with my big, sealed envelope in my hands. At the usual passport control point everything was done withing a few minutes, nothing special here. After that I had to follow another officer to a separate room. Here she opened the envelope, showed me my photo and waited for me to tell her that it is really me. After that all I had to do is give two finger prints and signatures. That's it. Now my green card will be on the way to Dave's parents in Kansas and in the meantime a stamp on my visa in my passport will do the job.

Jane waited for me in her house in Anchorage. And shortly after my arrival Al came home from work. The sun was shining, we were sitting outside on the deck, had wine and steak and I felt at home. At 7pm, 25 hours after I got up that morning in Essen, I was too tired for any further conversation and went to be.


The next morning was warm and sunny again. I drove down to Potter's Marsh, a bird nesting area south of Anchorage, to meet with Marcus and Eva. They arrived in Alaska a few days ago and were on a big RV trip. We wanted to spend that day together. First we watched a joung moose at Potter's Marsh, after that I showed them a spot from where we had a good view into a bald eagle's next. Too bad I didn't bring my 400mm lenses. But that would have been way to much for me to carry.

From the eagle's nest we started our 2 hours trip north to the Matanuska glacier. With three guides from Mica tours we started our 3 hours glacier hike. And that was really fascinating. We saw lakes with ice beaches, little streams and holes where a grown man could disappear. Our main guide was very knowledgeable and gave us a lot of new and detailed informatino about glaciers in general.

At 5:30pm I said good bye to Marcus and Eva. I drove back to Anchorage to start my trip to Talkeetna and Healy the next morning while they wanted to go to Valdez and then further on to the Yukon Territory.