Seward & Anchorage, AK

Travel log entry #5 (musings edition)
We said goodbye to the Radiance of the Seas here in Seward.
It was early in the morning and we hopped aboard a bus which will wisk us to Dinali with a quick stop-over for lunch in Anchorage. We saw nothing of Seward but managed to get a pic of the section of the ship where our cabin was.


To get to Anchorage from Seward by road, there is an obstacle
which needs to be by-passed adding about an hour to the drive. It's called the Turnagain Arm. It is an offshoot of the Cook Inlet.
From March to October, 1778, Captain James Cook under instructions from the British Admiralty, cruised from Vancouver Island to the Arctic Ocean looking for the illusive Northwest Passage. This inlet was aptly named since both the ships commanded by Cook, Resolution and Discovery, had to "turn again" when they were blocked by land. After his fruitless search, Captain Cook sailed back to Hawaii were he met his demise just five months later.

Our timing was right and we managed to catch a shot of a tidal wave(tidal bore). Note the thin white line stretching accross the inlet. When the tidal forces are at peak, one can

surf the wave all the way inside the inlet.

Here's Linda with bags of souvenirs (ulus) and a polar... er brown bear on 4'th Ave in downtown Anchorage. We had very little time there so we grabbed a couple of raindeer hot dogs. They didn't taste like chicken, they tasted like ballpark franks, actually.

Here's a pic of old city hall, now a visitor center. The flowers used in the public spaces are an amazing explosion of colors.

It's as if the growth cycle is at full speed... condensed in the seasonal duration but given reprive with endless daylight.

This is the biggest and busiest city that we have encountered in Alaska so far.