Today we headed to Anchorage where we will spend the night and then take one more land trip down to Whittier to board the cruise ship.
We boarded the McKinley explorer done train in Denali – it’s a train we’ve been on before. It is scenic but slow and it ends up taking the entire day to get to Anchorage with a lot of sitting and a lot of food but not much else to do. We were the lowest priority train so we had to pull over often and sit for long periods of time waiting until other trains passed us on the single track. The weather was crystal clear and we got some really nice pictures of Denali especially about a mile after we stopped in Talkeetna.
Denali peeking out above the trees
Denali through the train window
Train station in Talkeetna where we stopped to let off passengers
Denali to the right and North in the Middle and Foraker to the left
Denali to the right and North in the Middle and Foraker to the left
Once we got to Anchorage we bussed over to the Westmark – the restaurant wasn’t open so we wandered around town a bit and stumbled upon a little restaurant that had great food and great wine.
Overall we didn’t feel that HAL did very well with the land portion of the tour. They don’t have enough staff in May to really appropriately run the tours. Hopefully things improve as we board the ship tomorrow.