So for the past week I have been mostly off the grid on a family vacation in Anchorage, Alaska. It was amazing. I have wanted to go to Alaska for such a long time (yes, partially due to Son of Neptune, but it counts). It did not disappoint in beautiful scenery and adventuring time.

My favorite part of traveling anywhere new is the food. It is often slightly different that local fair, but something to make it special. In Alaska there were some very unique types of foods, elk meatballs, for example. One of my pizzas had reindeer fennel sausage. The sushi in Alaska was of such good quality because of the freshness of the fish, highly recommend at least once. One of my family’s places to go when traveling is to local dive restaurants it’s normally really good homey food where you get a sense of the local flavor.

Alaska is well-known for it’s wildlife and it is in fact recommended that you buy bear spray no matter where you hike. We luckily never needed it. We actually didn’t see a lot of wildlife except for a couple very cute harbor seals, a fat moose, and a lot of birds. Actually one of the highlights of my trip was explaining to a man from Hawaii that chipmunks were full grown and not just babies. (Apparently chipmunks do not occur in Hawaii). One of our best tourism stops was the the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center where they rescue and rehabilitate or permanently home wildlife. We saw some amazing creatures there. Also, Santa’s reindeer were most likely girls.

As a PS there were two porcupines, this one is Kit-Kat (and missing a leg) and the other one is Snickers!

All family vacations are hard because it is 100% of your time is spent with the same people. Which fyi is hard no matter how much you like your family it is a lot of exposure! So that can become emotionally draining. As well as especially if you hard-core tourist like me either have a very long day of walking and/or driving in a car. So it can be physically wearing also versus the relax you may be expecting. We ended up averaging about 5-7 miles a day. It was absolutely incredible, except that time when we ended up getting lost down a bike trail on a mountain. No matter how taxing the views were always worth it.

Overall, Alaska is 100%, maybe 98% worth the journey, plus no sales tax.