The ship docked in Whittier bright and early Sunday morning. We walked right off the ship and onto an Alaska Railroad train to Anchorage, about a 2 1/2 hour ride.
This was our one and only opportunity for a bike ride in Alaska! We were delighted to have another beautiful day for that adventure. The timing was a little tight in Anchorage as our bus from the railroad depot was sent on a number of long loops around the city awaiting a parking spot in front of the welcome center. We saw our lunch reservation time pass by and realized we might have a bit of a timing challenge to pull off a clothing change and a bite to eat before our bike tour. Coffee would be very welcome as well! Fortunately the driver tried to keep an increasingly restless bus of people happy by sharing ALL of his favorite eating spots in Anchorage. In passing, he mentioned a small coffee and donut stand in the back of a gift shop right across from our eventual parking spot.
When he finally got a spot, we did a quick change into some shorts in the civic center where we could have our bags held until our hotel was ready. We headed for the coffee stand and much to our delight found some really good coffee, egg salad sandwiches and a nice little table. We were a tad frazzled by then.
The bike tour was great! We were shuttled to Kincaid park and took an 11 mile ride with a small group and an excellent leader. The bikes were cruisers and the leader set a very, very slow pace and made quite a number of stops to explain local features along the trail.
Sounds lovely, right? It was. But a couple of factors made it a bit challenging. We had our first encounter with the “Alaska state bird” – the mosquito. Swarms surrounded us every time we stopped. I could see that they were having a big meal on the back of Tom’s legs while he was biking. The other was air traffic as we were biking very close to a runway for part of the ride. We had big airplanes taking off right over our heads! Anchorage is the second-busiest freight airport in the country and the 4th busiest in the world, so there were a lot of planes.
It was still a great time and now we can put an Alaska bike sticker on our US bike ride map!
We got back to the civic center just a few minutes before they were going to close and we grabbed our backpacks and walked to the hotel where our luggage was waiting for us. After a long day of traveling and biking we ate dinner in the hotel dining room. We all decided that the skillet oatmeal chocolate chip cookie a la mode sounded like a great way to end the day.
