Alaska Cruise Day 7

Our last day, and really a transport day. A couple of nights earlier we took the photo together at a dining room. We disembarked the ship at 6:30 AM on Sat. We were docked at Whittier, AK and driven from there to Anchorage. It was actually an interesting drive. Whittier can get up to 30 ft a snow some years as opposed to Anchorage's average of 5 ft. And Anchorage is north of Whittier. We had to drive through a long tunnel and saw more glaciers on the other side. Our bus driver told us that once a year they close the tunnel to vehicle traffic and people are allowed to walk/run through it. People often wear crazy costumes. But they have to wear a hard hat because the tunnel has rock walls! Too funny. Anyway, we drove past Turnagain Arm in the Cook Inlet, the water you see in the photo. The first whites to explore the inlet were Captain Cook's expedition. So the inlet was named after Cook. He hoped to find a Northwest Passage to Great Britain. Due to the massive run off of glacial silt the arm is not navigable, meaning Cook's ship constantly had to turn around. That is why Cook named it Turnagain Arm. The sandy area is called the mudflats. The mudflats are made up of glacial silt carried to the inlet by rivers. Our driver told us the sand is very deceptive and that people walk out there every year. When the high tide comes in they get stuck in it similar to quicksand. There were a lot of forests along the way as we drove and it is an area frequented by moose. Flocks of moosen for those Brian Regan fans... we did pass one but I didn't see it. :( But we did see a black bear (that is a picture of a stuffed one from the Anchorage airport because I could not get one of the live bear we saw). We got a really good view of this bear. He turned and looked right at our bus. He was so cute.

So then we got to Anchorage and waited a couple of hours for our flight. Apparently, Drew's hands set off an alarm. Yeah. They couldn't explain that but of course held him up even longer than at SFO. He was talking to a airport security guard later (not part of the security process) and he said maybe residue from the metal on his wheelchair got on his hands. Or something...