We did not leave Anchorage until a bit after noon, so we had a relaxing morning and an opportunity to explore the town a bit. Unfortunately I was not feeling too well, so I spent some time in the room using the internet, and managed to publish a few days of trip journal blog pages while my wife walked down to a weekend market. She found some delicious pastries and bought some Alaska socks.
We took a very short bus ride down to the train station again. This time we boarded an Alaska Train car which has the same sort of skylight windows as the McKinley Explorer on a single-level car with all the seats being little dining booths. You definitely got to know your neighbor if your legs were long – I played a bit of “footsie” with the elderly gentleman across from us.
We had thought this was just going to be a “ride the train to get to Seward” afternoon, but it was a sunny day and the rail route passes through amazing scenery. First it goes along the Cook Inlet, and we caught brief glimpses of some mountain goats on steep, rocky slopes above the tracks.
Then the tracks go over a pass to get to the other side of the Kenai peninsula. First they wind around a bit to gain some elevation near a glacier. We then passed through an incredibly narrow and steep canyon with a river rushing brown glacier melt through the crevasse below us.
Eventually we passed the summit and got to an open valley with the characteristic U shape of a glacier-carved valley. There was some very clear water in one of the creeks there and you could see hundreds of red salmon in the shallow water. Then we passed a number of lakes.
Finally we arrived in Seward where the train tracks go right up to the small cruise terminal on the dock there, and we boarded the Westerdam for our journey back to Vancouver.
