Alaskan Adventures; All the beginning is difficult!
En route!
We said goodbye to our family on the 29th of July on Schiphol airport. The day before we had packed all our stuff in the new Ortlieb waterproof bags and to our surprise everything we wanted to take fitted in there. The Whikes came with us in the taxi van and we were all set to go on our one year adventure. We did not plan much more than the first night in a hostel and an idea of the route to take and figured that to relax for a bit in the first days and figure out what to do next. Because we had a beautiful marriage three weeks before and that takes a lot of preparation, that seemed the right thing to do. Unfortunately not all things turn out as planned.
Where’s my Whike?
At the airport we thought if would be fun to see our Whikes being loaded to the plane, but it was all but fun. We saw the handler rip the cardboard that we had tediously applied the day before off and the poles of the sail were flying around and thrown into the belly of the plane. That is not a relaxing start of your flight. After assuring that they at least put the luggage tags back in the Whikes we hoped for the best. On our stopover in Reykjavik we made sure to closely follow the movement of the Whikes. We saw both offloaded but only one loaded on the plane to Anchorage. And indeed only one arrived when we set foot in Alaska. The other Whike was lost in translation.
Hanging around
It took four days and a lot of nightly phone calls to Iceland Air in Reykjavik to find it back (we will not rant here because they did compensate us for hostel stay in Anchorage). After they almost sent it to San Francisco assuring us it was not ours and they had tricycles all the time, it finally arrived a week later. Relieved with the news we could start to plan some more day trips. We had met up with Ryan, a friend-of-a-friend from Jakoba, who showed us around town and gave us our first bear encounter lessons. How to distinguish a black bear and a grizzly and that you should be worried when it starts licking you. Good to know! We visited the museum and were impressed by the exhibit on native culture, made a hike to the top of Flattop mountain and watched salmon fishers in a creek. We also made a day trip to the amazing Denali national park and saw grizzlies, moose and wolves. The bus tour on the road through Denali unexpectedly took 8 hours and we drove back to Anchorage in the middle of the night with rain pouring down.
Starting out
Anchorage was nice enough to hang around but we were anxious to start our trip. The scenic beauty of Alaska starts around Anchorage but is also has its big city problems with a lot of homelessness and addicts. Some of our prejudices about Americans were affirmed when we saw a very overweight couple pushing a cart through Walmart with their very overweight son in there playing video games. We decided that our symbolic starting point of the trip would be Homer, the most westerly point of the American highway system. Already giving in on our green ambitions we rented an All-American gasoline guzzling Ford F150 to drive over there and make a stop in Seward to see the glacier. Surprised to see the key was just left into the vehicle on the parking lot, we loaded our Whikes on the pick-up and left town. Our abundant use of fossil fuels already turned against us as after camping in Seward the truck would not move and had to be towed. Matthijs went along with the tow truck and was surprised to get his ear licked by Miley, the tower’s dog that had been hiding behind the passenger seat. Luckily we could continue with a U-haul (a moving rental truck), make the hike upon Exit Glacier and went on to Homer.
Kodiak mini-honeymoon
In Homer we treated ourselves to a ferry trip to Kodiak Island without the Whikes to gain the courage to start riding. We met with the Kodiak Electric Association (as written about in our article) and drove across this beautiful island. Green hills, rocky cliff beaches and blooming purple fireweed all as far as the eye can see. We camped out in Fort Abercrombie Park where a grizz with cubs was just signaled and the Japanese taxi lady assured us it was ‘very sneaky’. Nice quiet first night of camping! We did see our first Kodiak bear on the road side driving around the next day. Also, we might have made ourselves look suspicious when we were making drone shots and driving a U-haul near a spacy looking missile launch base on the far end of the island.
Back in Homer we could not escape getting on the Whikes which we had left under a trailer at the Alaska Adventure car rental and from here we would make the first miles of our epic cycling trip!
