I love to travel. I hate to be a tourist (an Ugly American). Reconciling these two facts is difficult and to me is at the heart of a good trip. Usually it means avoiding many of the typical destinations while not allowing myself to miss something spectacular just because everyone else has to see it and trying to meet and talk with locals and seeing the bizarre and out of the way places.
Travel to Alaska was somehow like traveling to another country- the differences between Alaska and the "lower 48" are so enormous and so compelling that I felt as though I was no longer in America but in a vast frontier of endless possibilities. Perhaps it had something to do with the sheer size of the state, perhaps the vastness of the mountains, perhaps the exorbitant price I paid for food which made me feel as though I were in Europe at a time of bad exchange rates. Perhaps it was the incredibly long hours of daylight energizing me- 19 in Anchorage and 21 in Fairbanks this time of year and it never got truly dark- or maybe just being on vacation so far away from Alabama. Whatever it was, I felt as though truly, Alaska was its own country and that I was another explorer who could, without an unreasonable amount of effort, penetrate to places on which no human had set foot.
There are only a few roads in Alaska, and they transverse only the lover third of the state- with the exception of the pipeline highway on which our rental company would not allow us to travel. We drove counterclockwise from Anchorage to Valdez, up to Tok, to Fairbanks, down through Denali, back through Anchorage, down the Kenai Pennsula and down to Homer. This was 2000 miles in just over a week, and yet, I never felt rushed. With the long daylight one could drive late into the evening without loss of scenery or feeling as though one was missing something.
There was very little radio, but it didn't matter-- hour after hour the visual scenery literally flooded me. I craned my neck, I realized that the vistas I was capturing on my camera would never come close to capturing the vastness and amazingness of the constantly changing mountains. The way your could feel nature, great and terrible - and her perspective was wider then any insight a tiny human could ever hope to have. I remember turning on the radio the third day we were there and hearing NPR long enough to learn of the bombings in London before loosing the signal. Every time I picked up a book to read, I could hardly make a paragraph before beginning to regret that I was not looking-- at everything. Even driving back on the few "retraces" of our steps we made I couldn't bear to read-- as the scenery was so completely different coming from the opposite direction.
My friend and I alternated driving- and I have to admit I let him drive more than I did because I had trouble keeping my eyes on the road while watching the mountains. I tended to volunteer in the plains, in the few brief places where forest closed in on the road closing off the horizon around us, or when were recrossing a section.
After the first morning in Valdez my friend had trouble sleeping. It was our one and only night in a campground- after the drunken idiots kept him up he agreed with my sleep in the cool pull offs that dotted the road policy. I dislike the 2 legged troublemakers more than I fear the possible 4 legged ones- so he asked if I minded sleeping (it was 4:30 am and broad daylight) while he drove. I said no problem, but after 20 minutes I couldn't stay in the back any longer. The fog closed in around us as we wound our way up from Valdez and even the impenetrable fog was fascinating- especially as it slowly lifted to reveal the immediate scenery and finally the glaciers and mountains around us.
So that was the first leg... I think this story is going to take a lot of entries.
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