If you’ve followed along our travel journeys, then you know we’ve visited almost every state in the United States. One of the last states remaining is Alaska, and for the next week we’ll be riding planes, trains, and automobiles exploring the last frontier!
We flew out of JFK airport around 7:30AM (EST) and arrived in San Francisco around 10:30AM (PST) for a 2-hour layover before boarding our final flight to Anchorage around 12PM (PST).
We arrived in Anchorage around 4:30PM (AKDT) and were ready to explore. On trips where we want a wide-open adventure, we typically rent a vehicle…sometimes even a campervan. However, when planning for this trip we noticed that good rental options were few and far between (some were ridiculously priced), so we decided to use Turo for the first time. For those of you who were like us and haven’t heard of this service, we can now highly recommend it. The easiest way to describe the business is like Airbnb for cars, where people can rent out their private vehicles using a pretty straightforward app on your smartphone.
We took an Uber from the airport to pick up our car rental in downtown Anchorage for the next few days. We arrived at the home of the person renting their car to us, hopped in our Toyota RAV-4, and began our drive to Talkeetna. We’ll be staying in Talkeetna for the next 2 nights in an Airbnb, and chose this area because it’s about halfway between Anchorage and Denali National Park…and because it’s a cute little historic town that we want to spend more than one night in.
On our way to Talkeetna, we decided to stop for dinner at Cafe Khao Neow which is a Laotian restaurant in Wasilla (about halfway from Anchorage to Talkeetna). We were pleasantly surprised to see Laotian cuisine in Alaska, and as soon as we entered the restaurant, the aromas and sights brought us back to our Laos trip. We ordered a pork dish and a rice dish, and everything exceeded expectations!
After dinner, we stopped at a grocery store to stock up on water and some food items for our Denali National Park adventure (we played it safe with some bread, peanut butter, bananas, and granola bars). We plan on waking up early tomorrow morning to make our 8:30AM hop-on/off bus reservation at Denali National Park. Though this national park is massive (over 6 million square miles), and has one main drivable road that stretches over 80 miles, visitors cannot drive past mile marker 15 in their own private vehicles. Therefore, if you want to venture past mile marker 15, you will need to reserve a bus ticket (we’ll share more on this service in tomorrow’s post).
After a long day of traveling and preparing for our week in Alaska, we finally arrived to our Airbnb around 9pm…though we couldn’t really tell how late it was because of the extreme daylight hours Alaska receives during the summer months. We tried to fight the jet lag a little once we got settled into our little cottage, but we found ourselves asleep before we knew it. Tomorrow we’ll be waking up super early to start our Denali adventure….so be sure to stay posted!