Alaska Trip: Day 5, Alaska Railroad

 Tuesday July 27

Train day! We woke up pretty early (before 6am) to pack. We were served a hot breakfast of potatoes, scrambled eggs, and sausage crumbles. The couple that run the place are elderly (I’m guessing in their 80’s). It is impressive to me that they are still running a B&B after 30 years and manage to make a big breakfast every single morning. I wore some of my beaded earrings that morning. The old owner apparently liked them so much that he asked if he could take a picture of them haha.

The only bed and breakfast that actually made us breakfast!

Boarding the train in Anchorage

The train ride was long. Twelve hours long. There was a whole lot of sitting, snacking, reading, and staring out the window (at least the scenery was gorgeous). Thankfully we were able to walk around the train at our leisure so that we didn’t get too stir-crazy. Masks were required, but I wore my mask maybe 20% of the time haha. No way I’m going to wear anything covering my breathing apparatus for 12 hours. Just no. There not much else to say about the train ride. Erik took some pictures of the scenery along the tracks. We drove by a few houses that were right next to the tracks and made a few stops along the way.

The dome section of our car was a good hideout to avoid the mask nazis.

Lots of greenery and fern-like plants along the way.

We crossed a huge trestle going over this little creek.

Apparently we came close to Mount McKinley, but it was too cloudy to see anything.

The clouds cleared up as we entered Denali National Park.

We got out for 10 minutes at Denali to stretch our legs.

Several groups of rafters floated by far below us.

Towards the end of our train ride, Erik called and ordered a pizza from House of Fire. It took awhile to get our luggage. Once we had our luggage, we picked up our rental car (again, from a random person via Turo) and headed to the pizza restaurant. It was good timing because we had to wait only a few minutes before our pizza (white pie) was ready. We split a 12” and it was pretty yummy.

Then we went to our new rental house which was located in North Pole. This was to be our last place to stay, which was nice because we had the entire place to ourselves and didn’t have to share any common areas with anyone else. We got to our rental house around 9am. It was a clean, newly renovated, and well-stocked little house.

It's not much to look at from the outside, but the inside of the rental cabin was new and quaint.