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canyonwalkerAlaska Travelog #16
At the hotel - Mon, 17 Jun 2024, 10am
The way it's light so late at night here in Alaska is kind of disorienting. Don't get me wrong; it was nice having twilight until 1am when we landed in Anchorage and drove to our hotel. And it's nice not worrying about about finishing our daytime activities outdoors before dark. We'll almost certainly run out of energy before the day runs out of daylight. But the sun not even starting to set until after 10pm throws off my sense of time. It's interesting to learn how many things are aligned to a kind of circadian rhythm. Like, I forget to eat dinner.
I forget to eat dinner. That's certainly not a sentence I ever thought I'd write! While some people I know easily forget to eat, when I haven't eaten in a while my body reminds me approximately every 3 minutes that food is delicious and would fill a void in my stomach. But here with sun not even dropping behind the mountains until 10pm, I've been like, "Woah, it's after 8pm already, I should get dinner!"
Unfortunately the choices for dinner in this small town of Seward are few. There are a handful of restaurants at the low end of the spectrum, dive-y type places serving small-town America staples like burgers, pizza, and chicken fingers with your choice of barbecue sauce or ranch. Then there are high end, or at least high end-looking places with steak and seafood and prices that promise a tab of $50-70 per person after adding a drink, tax, and tip. We're not the spendy-dinner type of people, especially when traveling in small towns where all the food looks kind of suspect, so we've eaten at the dive-y joints. And that— not being disoriented by the sun— is why I've had pizza 4x in 36 hours.
No, I didn't buy pizza 4 times in 36 hours. I bought it two nights in a row for dinner. But each time there were leftovers. And since I have a thrifty streak from childhood I can't quite outgrow (and also the pizza wasn't disgusting) I ate the leftovers for breakfast both yesterday and today.
But hey, back to the midnight sun thing. You'd think that the flip side of midnight sun would be early morning sun. Like, blazing sun preventing sleep at 4am. Well, here in Seward, there's been morning fog. So yay being able to sleep in 'til a morning hour. But boo not being able to get out and enjoy the daylight right away.
Today we're planning to hike up to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Just like yesterday's cruise in the fjords started out with hours of heavy fog that left me uncertain we'd get to see anything, so too does today's fog make me reluctant to head into the park until I see evidence the clouds are starting to burn off. And here it is 10am already... which means the sun's been up— not that we can see it— for almost 6 hours! Well, it's a good thing there's another 13 hours of daylight left for us to go hiking later today. 🤣
At the hotel - Mon, 17 Jun 2024, 10am
The way it's light so late at night here in Alaska is kind of disorienting. Don't get me wrong; it was nice having twilight until 1am when we landed in Anchorage and drove to our hotel. And it's nice not worrying about about finishing our daytime activities outdoors before dark. We'll almost certainly run out of energy before the day runs out of daylight. But the sun not even starting to set until after 10pm throws off my sense of time. It's interesting to learn how many things are aligned to a kind of circadian rhythm. Like, I forget to eat dinner.
I forget to eat dinner. That's certainly not a sentence I ever thought I'd write! While some people I know easily forget to eat, when I haven't eaten in a while my body reminds me approximately every 3 minutes that food is delicious and would fill a void in my stomach. But here with sun not even dropping behind the mountains until 10pm, I've been like, "Woah, it's after 8pm already, I should get dinner!"
Unfortunately the choices for dinner in this small town of Seward are few. There are a handful of restaurants at the low end of the spectrum, dive-y type places serving small-town America staples like burgers, pizza, and chicken fingers with your choice of barbecue sauce or ranch. Then there are high end, or at least high end-looking places with steak and seafood and prices that promise a tab of $50-70 per person after adding a drink, tax, and tip. We're not the spendy-dinner type of people, especially when traveling in small towns where all the food looks kind of suspect, so we've eaten at the dive-y joints. And that— not being disoriented by the sun— is why I've had pizza 4x in 36 hours.
No, I didn't buy pizza 4 times in 36 hours. I bought it two nights in a row for dinner. But each time there were leftovers. And since I have a thrifty streak from childhood I can't quite outgrow (and also the pizza wasn't disgusting) I ate the leftovers for breakfast both yesterday and today.
But hey, back to the midnight sun thing. You'd think that the flip side of midnight sun would be early morning sun. Like, blazing sun preventing sleep at 4am. Well, here in Seward, there's been morning fog. So yay being able to sleep in 'til a morning hour. But boo not being able to get out and enjoy the daylight right away.
Today we're planning to hike up to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Just like yesterday's cruise in the fjords started out with hours of heavy fog that left me uncertain we'd get to see anything, so too does today's fog make me reluctant to head into the park until I see evidence the clouds are starting to burn off. And here it is 10am already... which means the sun's been up— not that we can see it— for almost 6 hours! Well, it's a good thing there's another 13 hours of daylight left for us to go hiking later today. 🤣
