Alaska - Doggone it, that's some good pizza!

After getting a taste of the wildlife we might see in the full Denali National Park, we decided to satisfy our taste buds in search of a late lunch. We ended up back at the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge to eat at their on site pizza restaurant, known as Lynx Creek.

You enter on the main level and order from the counter. There were several tables in use on this main level so after ordering, we headed down a couple steps into an adjacent dining room where no one was sitting.

Hey Dad pause right there so I can get a pic of the pizza:

Hey Dad, how about actually smiling and opening your eyes while you're paused for the pic:

Well, 1 out of 2 isn't bad. :) That's a medium pepperoni pizza by the way. Now if only Pizza Hut could follow the same measurement system.

With our bellies full, we returned to the room to relax until my optional evening excursion. Dad didn't want to sign up for this excursion so he hung out in the room the rest of the evening. I felt perfectly safe going on an excursion without him because I wouldn't be truly alone and this was a Princess sponsored excursion. This was our next extra cost item that was not included in the cruise tour fare but if you've read my other trip reports, you know I couldn't pass up the chance to...drum roll please...play with puppies! Princess calls this excursion the Husky Homestead Tour and currently retails for $59.95 per person. 

Tour groups met back at the main building of the lodge and we boarded a bus with the tour name logo. 

Once at the homestead, we joined several other similar looking buses that were color coded so they could stagger the groups at the various areas. Our first stop and the one everyone looks forward to the most, the pen of puppies! They give everyone a chance to hold these new future sled dogs to help acclimate them to people and learn to socialize. There's always a few employees of the homestead on hand to watch over this portion so no chance to sneak off with one under my coat. The plus though is there was someone to photograph the moment for me with my own camera. Look Dad, I actually appear in vacation photos once in a while! The staff was also there to take a professional picture of you with the puppy and will happily sell it to you. For buying the picture, you get it in a semi sturdy cardstock frame. There was some promotional offer where if you bought Jeff's book, they threw in your picture or it was a discounted price together. Both items were autographed so I bought both. There was other little memorabilia you could purchase as well. Don't worry, there's even a gift shop here!

The tradition with the sled dogs is to name each pack around a theme but they wait until the dogs are older and show more of their personality before naming them. 

Next we moved over to the open air area where the adult dogs are kept with their own small doghouses and water/food bowls. The staff had a couple of the adult dogs on leashes and were wandering through the crowd to let us pet them and interact as well.

Iditarod champion and owner of the Husky Homestead, Jeff King, gave a presentation on how the dogs are treated, trained, and how they got their names. 

The dogs have a long chain attached to their doghouses.

It was funny to hear how the various pack names changed based on what his family was interested in at the time. Jeff told us how one of his packs was born in the 90s and when he gave his daughter the honor of naming them, his new dogs became Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe. 

No experience meeting sled dogs would be complete without seeing them pull a guy on a four wheeler right?

One of the employees had developed a special rapport with one of the adult dogs and discovered that the dog loves hanging upside down to get belly rubs and massages.

Next up was a demonstration of the dogs running in the giant wheel:

Our group next moved inside for a presentation by Jeff about his gear and sled.

 My what big horns you have:

One of his staff came running in to pose dressed in the full protective gear the sled dog racers wear:

Despite suffering a tragic loss of his dog Nash (from the Crosby Stills and Nash pack of course) about 7 months later when a reckless snowmobile driver ran into Jeff and another racer's team as they were running the Iditarod, King continues to raise sled dogs and race with them in Alaska's most famous dog sledding race. While you can find tons of sled dog related excursions offered during your time in Alaska, some way more expensive than others, as an animal lover this one will stay in my heart and memory forever. 

Alaska - Denali National Park Tundra Wilderness Tour

It's our first full day in Denali and time for our next included land excursion. There's a couple varieties of Princess tours visiting Denali National Park and lots of cruisers who will insist one is better than the other. Either one you choose, it makes for a very long tour with a lot of sitting on the bus. And in most of them, you trade in that relatively comfortable motor coach for an old refurbished school bus. If you thought your 20 minute ride to school as a kid was uncomfortable, start warming up that gluteus maximus now for the nine hour tour we took known as the Tundra Wilderness Tour. The tour currently retails for $185 per person. There's a six hour version known as the Denali Natural History Tour where for three less hours of time and a cost of $115, the only other difference I can find in the two tours' descriptions is that the Tundra Wilderness Tour included the video screens so we could get a much better view of that goat on the hill or the moose crossing the road that no one except those in the front few seats would have been able to spot out the front bus windows. If you're really a glutton for punishment, umm I mean feeling adventurous, there's a twelve hour version that includes a visit to the remote mining town of Kantishna known as The Kantishna Experience costing $285.

I've heard there's a bunch of rules, regulations, and possible need of permits when it comes to entering Denali National Park for your own exploring so it's more practical to take one of these tours. If you're subject to motion sickness or heights, I'd suggest preparing in advance because the bus travels along winding roads cut into mountainous terrain. You will encounter several areas where the bus looks close to the edge or goes around a lot of curves. While most school buses of my youth featured a longer three person bench seat on one side and a two person bench seat on the other side, this bus only had two person bench seats on every side. They fill these buses to capacity with two people to every seat regardless of whether you're a solo traveler or someone who's fluffy. Dad and I had the very last seat on the left side of the bus and I spent the bulk of the ride with one cheek and one leg out in the aisle. I don't recommend it as a core strengthening exercise.

Above - outside of refurbished school bus. Below - inside of school bus sans people.

Below - what it was like when everyone was inside the bus (also note the hanging video screens)

There is a restaurant café in the bottom level of the main building at Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge that sells boxed lunches. You can buy them whether you're exploring on your own or going on an organized tour like this. You pre-order them by the evening before and they are ready for pick up that next morning. I think it was around $12 each for a decent lunch of about 4-5 items and I seem to recall a couple options of sandwich choices. I don't recall whether anything else was offered during the tour if you chose not to spend extra on the boxed lunch.

While wildlife sightings are never guaranteed, you are more likely to see the animals way off in the distance up on a hillside than wandering up close next to the bus. This is definitely a tour where you want to bring along binoculars and a camera with a long zoom lens. At times we even used our 200m zoom lens as a second set of binoculars. The below pictures are what our camera caught with that zoom lens.

The road ahead of us as we travel through the park:

Such wonderful color variations in the land:

One of the few opportunities we were allowed to get off the bus was for a bathroom break in a valley of the park. There were several of these shacks constructed each with 2 single use unisex bathrooms. Can lead to quite the wait when you arrive at the rest stop with a few other bus tours. Lots of trying doors to see if they were locked and having your door checked repeatedly. The inside was literally a toilet seat on top of a cylindrical stand that covered up the reality that there was nothing but a whole in the ground underneath it all. I grew up using latrines at scout camp that had a toilet seat sitting on top of a wooden bench (and looked like the one in Wiseman on the outside) so it wasn't as bad to me but it can be a little off putting to someone whose never experienced that level of "roughing it" before.

Our final stop where we could get off the bus was at a base camp within the park. There was displays to check out inside the tent and a set of giant antlers to examine. This also served as the office for the park rangers so those camping at the park would stop here to deal with permits etc.

Hey, get a picture of me with the antlers!

While this tour can make for an uncomfortably long day, it's also a great overview of the natural beauty Alaska has to offer.

Alaska - Can we see Russia from Sarah Palin's house?

Time to head to our last stop on the land tour, the city of Kenai. This is one of the cities most of the shorter land itinerary portions never see. But wait, this post title talks about Sarah Palin's house, that's not in Kenai! As we boarded the motor coach to head to Kenai this morning, our guide Lori announced that she had a surprise stop for us on the way. She asked us if we knew what was in the town of Wasilla and pretty much the entire bus asked if we were going to visit Sarah Palin's house. No, turns out it was something much more pleasurable - the home of the Iditarod Headquarters!

We read the true story of Balto the sled dog who worked hard to bring medicine through the snow into a remote Alaskan town with the school kids I used to work with and I was admittedly giddy to see this statue outside the headquarters.

Inside the building was lots of memorabilia and newspaper articles about the Iditarod race.

And you thought seeing little baby booties was cute. Check out a display of sled dog booties!

They even had them nestled on the tree branches outside.

Back outside, one of the employees offered the group to sit on a multi person modified sled and be run along the road by the sled dogs. I believe it was an optional activity in exchange for a $10 donation. Neither of us opted to do that. I had something else catch my attention nearby.

By the time we'd come back outside from checking out the museum space, one of the employees had brought out sled dog puppies to get some loving and socialization. Go on your sled dog ride everyone else, I'm getting me some puppy love! No worries on not contributing a sled dog ride donation - made a proper donation to their gift shop while we were there.

Lori had another idea for a stop before we got out to Kenai and had the bus driver take us into the center of town in Anchorage. We were given an hour to do whatever we pleased whether that was shopping, lunch, or sightseeing. Dad immediately decided we had to ride the trolley tour around town that he remembered from his time being in Alaska for work. It's an hour long narrated ride with a guide and costs $20 per person. We arrived at the Visitor Center where the trolley boards just in time to hop on one that was about to leave. It was a nice touch that before each tour left, one of the employees would move around the trolley cleaning the outside of the windows. 

You may have tried hot dogs from a street cart but have you tried Alaskan Reindeer Sausage from a street cart?

The trolley was packed and we learned about local history, flora, and fauna. One of the questions they are often asked given the geographic location on the "Ring of Fire" is how many earthquakes does Alaska get. Or when was the last earthquake they had. Our guide always replied "We probably had one this morning." He explained how they have so many tiny ones that you may never feel that you could have multiple ones a day and never realize it.

All in all, it made for a nice break up of the extra time it would take to get over to the Kenai Peninsula. Stay tuned for when we trade our hotel rooms in for some more rustic accommodations.