Pandemonium by the Sea

ALASKA! Part 10: Ketchikan and travel to the Kenai Peninsula

We woke up in Ketchikan, the ship’s final destination, and disembarked, passing through a “receiving line” of the staff, although I guess it was a departure line. This was such a small ship that you met most of the staff during the week.  (They were for the most part a group of really earnest young people.  I could see my kids working on a ship like this.)  Our “Uncruise” was a thoroughly successful expedition. But we had a few more days to go in our Alaska adventure.

 

Ketchikan

Ketchikan, like Juneau, is inaccessible by road. It’s very accessible by water, however, and the big cruise ships make this one of their stops. And by “big” I mean “massive,” like the Disney ship below.  We’ve taken a big cruise ship in the Caribbean, and it was fun, but somehow these large boats seemed way out of place in Alaska.

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Dave and I had a good part of the day to kill before our multiple flights to Anchorage, so we walked all over Ketchikan. First we walked up in the higher residential areas. Like Juneau and many other Alaskan towns, Ketchikan is just a strip of a few streets between the mountains and the water.

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Virtually every one of the homes has flowers out front.

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We also walked along the harbor and watched seaplanes taking off for a while.

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Then we ventured into the tourist area for which Ketchikan is most famous. This area was once a red-light district.

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We pretty much walked the town from end to end.  The little red building below is the Ketchikan Yacht Club.

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The staircase below is an officially labeled “street” in Ketchikan:

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Because Ketchikan is so steep and forested, there are quite a few wooden paths.   Here’s Dave walking back down the hill from the hotel on the “Married Men’s Path” – supposedly the path on which married men snuck into the red-light district.

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We spent nearly an hour captivated by watching salmon trying to make their way up some rapids. A few were making it, but it was virtually impossible to get a photo. Trust me, I tried about 100 times. All my photos look something like this, with nary a salmon in sight:

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But we know that plenty of them did make it up the rapids to the mouth of the stream, because you could walk further uphill and there they were:

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Late in the day we headed to the airport for the most difficult traveling part of our 12-day Alaska trip. We needed to get from Ketchikan to Anchorage and, as they say in New Hampshire where I went to college, “You can’t get thay-uh from hee-ah.” In researching the flights I had even checked into taking a private plane ($10,000. Um, no.).   The search engines all had us flying from Ketchikan all the way back to Seattle and then to Anchorage, but the carbon footprint of that trip just seemed abominable. So we flew from Ketchikan to Sitka to Juneau to Anchorage. The good news was that each leg was short; all the flights were on time; and we never had to get out of our seats.  Alaskan Air is a pretty together airline.  Plus, the views were pretty.

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Here’s Mendenhall Glacier (at the base of the mountains with the stripe running through it), where we had hiked a week earlier.  See Day 3.

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More glaciers from up high.  I’m guessing these were in Glacier Bay National Park.

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Although we landed on time in Anchorage, next came the bad part:  We had to rent a car and drive to the Kenai Peninsula. We left Anchorage Airport at about 10:20 p.m.

I knew this drive was going to be tough:  It was late at night. I was tired. It was very, very dark. It was raining. It got foggy. And, because it was a Saturday night in the summer, there was quite a bit of oncoming traffic – pickup trucks hauling boats – as the day-trip fishermen headed back to Anchorage. So in the dark and rain and fog I had headlights in my eyes.  That one I hadn’t planned on.  All this probably would have been fine if my husband had been asleep. I had encouraged him to have several cocktails on the plane so that he would sleep on the drive, because he needed to be up at 6 the next morning to go fishing (I was planning to skip it). But instead of sleeping he was nagging, “Can’t you drive any faster?” No, I can’t! We’re on winding mountain roads and I’m not ready to die!

Melanie, from Rare Finds Travel, had anticipated that this would be a tough drive (and had in fact discouraged it) but since she couldn’t talk us out of it, she made sure it worked.   Earlier that day she emailed precise directions — as in the number of feet from the nearest landmark – to our fishing lodge. That guidance was most welcome, because we would not have wanted to be driving around looking for it in the middle of the night, and you never know whether you’ll have a signal to use Google Maps when you’re in a rural area. We pulled into the lodge at around 12:30 a.m., and the host showed us to our little apartment above the office (the cabins were all booked when we made reservations months before, but it hardly mattered since all we were doing was sleeping there and leaving). We waived off the tour of the property, figuring we could find the breakfast room ourselves the next morning, and fell into bed

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