Vagabonding begins!

After an exhausting 16 hour travel day, I arrived back in Kentucky with my father…both of us still in one piece. Mostly.

Kentucky welcomed me with 100F weather and a humidity heat index of 104F. (40C for my metric friends). Quite a difference over the cool Alaskan 50F’s I left. When I stepped off the plane, every sweat gland in my body that has been dormant for the past week woke up and put production into overdrive.

Our 8 days in Alaska was unforgettable….I am going to upload some pictures and do some writing to catch up. I did not have much internet access while there, go figure!

A strange sensation came over me….one that I had not felt almost this entire trip. I was no longer cold, and there was something strange burning my face….something familiar….could it be, THE SUN !!

After a week of gray and rainy weather, we were granted one day of spectacular sunshine to close out our Alaskan adventure. The sky was a magical blue color, and everything around us was vibrant and took on new meaning as we walked through the Chugach National Forest just 30 minutes away from Anchorage. I took full advantage and wore out my finger taking pictures of everything in site. We had 6 hours to kill before our dreaded flight home, so what better way to do it than to take a tough hike in the hot sun, get very sweaty with no hotel to wash up, then sit next to some poor guy for an 8 hour flight?

As a bonus, Mt McKinley was visible from where we were. After driving for 2 days to get to the bottom of the tallest mountain in North America and never seeing it, we were now looking at it from hundreds of miles away. Awesome!

[read on]

After calling an end to our fishing, we continued to drive south into the small town of Eagle River, which has an awesome nature center and trail system that I explored during my desperate hunt ... [Continue reading this entry]

08:00 came around early after my accidental Bluegrass music ambush that I walked into last night. We packed up at the hostel and left Talketna with fond memories and anxious to take advantage of a ... [Continue reading this entry]

We rolled into Talketna, Alaska in the evening, just as shadows were starting to become a little longer and the sun was getting a little lazier. Being a proper road trip, we did not have a ... [Continue reading this entry]

I have been around UXOs (unexploded objects) in the Army and strangely never quite felt comfortable around them. Imagine an object, built only for one reason only, to kill or maim another person, that had ... [Continue reading this entry]

Wow...who would have guessed that driving across a gravel road for 130 miles in the rain could be a pain? Normally, as you cross the famous Denali highway, which is mostly gravel and about ... [Continue reading this entry]

After my 4 hours of sleep (my fault) we got up early, checked out of our small hotel, and hit the road driving north on HWY 1. Our destination - Denali, the national ... [Continue reading this entry]

OK, just kidding. :) Alaska is much, much more than just mountains. The population grows steadily, even despite the constant exodus of people born here that leave for school or better jobs. What keeps this ... [Continue reading this entry]

After our bear encounter, the ride across the lake was much less eventful than yesterday's wild ride. For an hour, I sat on the front of the boat and scanned the banks for wildlife. We ... [Continue reading this entry]