The Alaska Chronicles: Arrival

It’s currently 1:45 a.m. We’ve just arrived at our condo in Anchorage.

The time change is tough at the moment. My body thinks it’s 4:45.

But before I call it a night, here are some details and observations from Minneapolis to Anchorage.

We left a little after 10 p.m. on a Boeing 737-900ER. For some reason, I had it in my mind that it wouldn’t be a huge flight, but I was wrong. Lots of people coming to Anchorage.

The flight was just over 5 hours, at 525 MPH into a 30-plus MPH headwind.

Based on the detailed seat-back screen that allowed me to track my flight in real time, about an hour out trip, if one could look out the left side of the plane and see impossibly far, my recent home of Gillette, Wyoming, was in the distance. It was fun to see its name pop up on the map.

We flew at an altitude between 32,000 and 34,000 to cover the 2,558 miles.

At the airport, which was basically closed save for the few unlucky souls tasked with greeting us at our gate and the rental car folks, we were greeted by a life-size moose replica (not sure if that’s the right word; don’t think it was a taxidermied specimen though). Humbling reminder of just how big those creatures are. Atop a restaurant was a full-sized vintage seaplane, which has to be one of the coolest airport decorations anywhere.

It was a crisp-but-not-unpleasant 47 degrees outside, and we drove all of 4 miles to our condo.

That’s about it for 2 in the morning.