Anchorage to Girdwood-Monday

Monday morning, we had breakfast (which are always awesome at Embassy Suites...made to order and FREE!), packed up, and headed south to Seward.  This post only covers the first half of the drive down to Seward.

The Embassy Suites had a couple of cool animals on display in the lobby.  The kids loved the bear.

Onto the drive...

It was another rainy day (notice a trend starting that lasted two weeks), and the mountains had a lot of cloud coverage.  Still, it was a beautiful drive.  You can see the road down at the bottom of the mountain.  We were overall impressed with the roads in Alaska. They were by far, better than the Southern California roads we drove for three years while in Arizona.  Most of the drive down was a two-lane highway, with four lanes at times.

Here, we are driving south on the Seward Hwy toward Seward.  That's the ocean there.  You follow the ocean down to Girdwood, and then you move inland some until Seward, when the ocean is on the other side of the peninsula.

The railroad tracks run right next to the ocean.  The Alaska Railroad is big business here.  MANY people travel by rail.

Yes, that is snow on the mountains.  We loved that.  In Girdwood, we stopped for the snow (post to come).

It was COLD that day and very windy.  The high was around 50, if that.

We pulled off to view this pretty waterfall.

All of the rivers were very full.  There was a lot of extra snow this year across the state, so the snow melting made for some overflowing rivers.

 I'm standing in the parking lot.  This is the view of the waterfall.

 Our ride for our two week adventure.  We were given a Chrysler Town and Country at the rental counter, and it was a sweet ride for a rental! It had leather seats and a dvd player.  We made sure Alex didn't get his hands on dvds to stuff into the dvd player as he has done with our minivan's player.

Dall sheep-We were very excited to spot these.  They are rare to see in public like this, even though there are apparently a ton of dall sheep.

 SO pretty and hard to capture in a picture

 This is near Beluga Point, but we didn't see any beluga whales.  We also witnessed the crazy tidal change on our drive back north here.  A half hour after low tide comes a massive wave-like of water, filling the area up again. 

This is at the turnoff for Girdwood, which is a small town down the Seward Hwy. The last bathrooms are here before Seward (which is still a couple of hours south).  We learned very quickly to stop at the gas stations when we saw them, as rest stops are like in Arizona...NONE!  In Girdwood, we ventured up to the ski resort, which was closed for the season, but we had a great lunch and snowball fight...pictures up next.