A Hot Day in Anchorage

Saturday 13th July
After our night time adventures we all woke up tired, but our packing was already done (your suitcases get taken away the night before you disembark) so all we had to do was get showered and have our last breakfast on board. It has been a great week. We were efficiently escorted off the ship and bussed from Whittier to Anchorage. Whittier is very small and is connected to the rest of Alaska by a seven mile tunnel. When we got on our bus it was cloudy but as soon as we emerged from the other end of the tunnel we were in broad sunshine, how strange. The friendly bus driver chatted to us about the scenery but I have to admit that I dozed most of the way. When we got to our lovely hotel in Anchorage our room was ready so we were able to take our suitcases upstairs and get changed into shorts (the boys) and a sundress (me). It was very hot in Anchorage and we no longer have a shipboard breeze to cool us! We had a coffee in the hotel before setting off to explore the town. I like it! It reminds me a bit of Darwin in Australia, it's modern but mostly low rise, with broad streets and pavements and lots of nice cafés and shops. We went for a walk along the coast road, there isn't a beach because it's mostly mudflats. There is a statue of Captain Cook who was here shortly before his final, fateful visit to Hawaii. He was only 50 when he died. We went on a trolley bus tour which was very informative; they had a massive earthquake in the region on Good Friday of 1964 (9.2 on the Richter scale) and a lot of downtown Anchorage was destroyed, although luckily there were few deaths because it was a holiday so not many people were in the worst affected areas. We saw the effects of this earthquake in Glacier Bay and College Fjord where there are lots of dead trees at the shoreline because of salt water damage (?) during the earthquake. There is also a harbour on a lake where instead of yachts there are loads of seaplanes, it looked really cute. The young bus driver kept singing and sang the Alaskan state anthem for us which was very sweet. We had dinner at a great seafood restaurant called "The Bridge" which was delicious, James thought his rockfish was excellent, I enjoyed my Alaskan salmon and Davie had "mac and cheese" made with seafood which he said was "awesome"!