{"id":9352,"date":"2011-09-06T01:46:47","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T08:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cruisingdoneright.com\/?p=9352"},"modified":"2011-09-06T01:46:47","modified_gmt":"2011-09-06T08:46:47","slug":"gateway-to-an-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/?p=9352","title":{"rendered":"Anchorage: Gateway to Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>ANCHORAGE \u2014 In most of North America, this would be considered a small city. In Alaska<\/a>, where everything else is big, it is the largest…and home to about half the state’s population. Along with its temperate climate \u2014 relatively speaking \u2014 that makes it something of an oasis in the wilderness…and a wealth of information.<\/p>\n

From Anchorage<\/a>, on a clear day you can see majestic Mount McKinley. This happens about half a dozen times a year. From Anchorage, you can take a train to Fairbanks, the next-largest city, if you’re okay with spending 12 hours on the rails. From Anchorage, you \"\"<\/a>go south to meet a cruise ship, either to Whittier where Princess<\/a> ships have exclusivity, or to Seward, where ships from all the other Alaska-bound lines dock.<\/p>\n

It’s in Anchorage that we learn about the rest of Alaska.<\/p>\n

As industries go, oil is No. 1, mining No. 2 and fishing No. 3. The irony about the oil is it has to be piped or shipped south to be refined and sent back to Alaska as gas. Consequently, what you pay at the pump in Alaska is what you pay in the rest of North America. And as many people as the cruise ships bring, tourism ranks at least fourth among what pays the bills for Alaskans.<\/p>\n

If you think you’d have to be paid to live here, well, that’s exactly what happens. Each Alaskan \u2014 man, woman, child \u2014 receives an annual oil dividend of between $800 and $2,000, depending on what kind of year oil has and, yes, that does help to pay the heating bills. Like most states, the residents seem to gather at the warmest point. Winter temperatures dip to between minus 10 Fahrenheit and minus 25, depending on whom you ask.<\/p>\n

Alaska has 17 major roads and no interstates (duh) and more pilots per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. Either one in 9 Alaskans have a pilot’s license or one in 53, depending on whom you ask, and small aircraft are parked in Anchorage back yards the way swimming pools are in most cities. Most of the state is inaccessible by road.<\/p>\n

As former governor Sarah Palin so famously said, you can see Russia from here…but “here” is a small island at the end of the Aleutian chain, just three miles from its Russian counterpart. The city of which she was once mayor, Wasilla, is just north of Anchorage and every tourist who passes through gets a glimpse of one of the homes where the Palins once lived before “she hit the big time” and moved to Arizona.<\/p>\n

You can still see the impact of the 1964 earthquake that shook the ground for FIVE minutes at 9.2 on the Richter scale. Thousands of dead trees stand like spires of the past, \"\"<\/a>the victims of the tsunami that followed the quake, and there’s a movie that plays regularly in the visitor’s center about the tragedy. However, in Anchorage, where the streets of downtown are alphabetically arranged from A to S, the only thing really missing from the past is J Street because when fire ravaged the city 60 years ago, that’s where the red-light district was, and city fathers decided to rebuild it and turn out the light.<\/p>\n

Captain James Cook, whose presence is all over this part of Alaska two centuries after his death, is martyred with a statue of the explorer, peering into the inlet that bears his name. The hotel named after him is the nicest place to stay and has the nicest place to eat, the Crow’s Nest. When the captain was searching for the Northwest Passage in the 18th century, he wound up in what is now called his inlet’s Turnagain Arm, so named by his crew because tides in the inlet forced the ship to “turn again” and tack its way back and forth up the arm.<\/p>\n

For cruisers who’ve never been here, like us, there are many options. Princess has more than 30 land tours that take you into the heart of Alaska, before or after your cruise. Or you can just fly in and cruise out, or cruise in and fly out, but then you miss a lot of what Alaska is. Cruising in and out is a two-week trip where you see the same ports twice.<\/p>\n

Any way that you see Alaska, if nothing else it is an education.<\/p>\n

For more on our Alaska adventures, click on Ports and Bows<\/a>.\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014 In most of North America, this would be considered a small city. In Alaska, where everything else is big, it is the largest…and home to about half the state’s population. Along with its temperate climate \u2014 relatively speaking \u2014 that makes it something of an oasis in the wilderness…and a wealth of information.… Continue reading Anchorage: Gateway to Education<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,31,19,15],"tags":[45,707,51,526,2208,27,64,708],"class_list":["post-9352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-ports","category-ships","category-stories","tag-alaska","tag-anchorage","tag-cruise-ports","tag-cruisetours","tag-ports","tag-ports-and-bows","tag-princess-cruise","tag-princess-cruisetours","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}