Alaskan Adventure

Featuring Phil, Crystal, Greg and Jennifer Gantt

Special appearances by Mark Glassmaker, several moose, eagles, various plants, some fish, and even a couple of insects.

Special thanks to Mark Glassmaker Fishing for all of his help in making this a memorable vacation.

Here I have briefly chronicled our adventures in the beautiful State of Alaska.  For those in a hurry, below are shortcut links to the various pages.  In all, we took over 450 pictures with the digital camera, 8 rolls of snapshots with Crystal's camera, and nearly 3 hours of video.  I may add some scanned photos at a later date.  Here is a teaser photo of the Anchor River.
 



Days 1 and 2

On June 26, 2000, my son Greg and daughters Crystal and Jennifer left San Jose Airport at 10:10 a.m.  We had a 1 hour layover in Seattle which turned out to be more like an hour and one half because the airline changed gates on us and we did not hear any announcement.  Consequently, we missed our original flight, but were fortunate enough to get on another plane bound for Anchorage, Alaska.  We were fortunate that our luggage was in the terminal ready for pickup by the time that we arrived in Anchorage at 4 p.m.

We were scheduled to stay the night in the Holiday Inn Express.  So, when we saw a van with the words Holiday Inn on the side, we duly loaded our luggage and got on board.  Unfortunately, this van did not go to the hotel we were booked at.  As fate would have it, the driver was kind enough to reroute us to the correct hotel on his way back to the airport.  The Holiday Inn Express was a nice hotel with an indoor pool that Jennifer took advantage of at every opportunity.  Here is a view from our hotel room:

Note:  All of the still photos were taken with a Sony Mavica FD95 digital camera with a 20x telephoto lens.  All of the images have been reduced by 50% or more to facilitate rapid downloading.  Very few have been color optimized using Adobe Photoshop.  With Netscape, Right click on an image to view the full image in a different window or save it to disk.  All photos copyright by Philip R. Gantt, 2000.
 
 









On June 27, we started out with Greg complaining of illness.  Consequently, we took him to a nearby clinic to see a doctor.  He was prescribed antibiotics and by checkout time, we were ready to start our adventure.  We loaded our gear into the shuttle van and went to Alexander's RV Rentals.  After a 4 hour wait, we got our RV and were on our way.  Then we discovered that the laptop computer was missing.  We drove back to the hotel and were fortunate that someone turned it in for us to pick up.  After getting gasoline and groceries, we were on our way south toward the Kenai peninsula.  We drove the Seward Highway along Turnagain Arm and the views were outstanding.  Here is a picture of our view from the highway:

Our first tourist stop was at the Portage Glacier located about 40 miles from Anchorage.  As you can see, the view of the glacier was simply beautiful.

To test out the telephoto lens on my new camera, I took a closeup of the distant iceberg located right of center in the above photo.  Here are the results:

Needless to say, I was impressed with the capabilities of this new camera.  Here are some more icebergs from this glacier.  The body of water is actually a lake that feeds Portage Creek which flows into the Turnagain Arm.  What some may not realize is that the ice actually is blue.  It is striking in color and beauty.

Here is where the ice is from at Portage Glacier

And below is the lake outlet into Portage Creek


 
 

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