Kenai Fjords NP

Our last morning on the ship was spent eating breakfast and waiting in the Rendevous lounge for our turn to disembark. It was sad that the cruise was ending, but I'm glad we had the land portion of our trip to look forward to. At this point, we just weren't ready to go home!
We started the morning in Seward off by hiking to Mile Zero-- the true start of the Iditarod. While they do a "fake" (for show) start in Anchorage, the real starting point is on the coast in Seward. As husky owners, we felt obligated to see the starting line!

We spent the day on a catamaran tour out of Seward into the Kenai Fjords National Park where we saw a pod of Orcas, lots of Dall's porpoises, and some humpback whales. It was neat how close they were to our boat! I was thinking a 6 hour tour would be a bit long, but every minute of it was spent enjoying the scenery or snapping photographs of all the wildlife.

We even got to see the Colgate glacier calve 100's of feet of ice into the ocean. It was as loud as thunder and enough current was generated to really rock our boat!

Following the catamaran tour, we boarded the Alaska Railroad for our journey to Anchorage. This has to be one of the most scenic train routes in the world! We got to enjoy it from the 2nd story glass-domed cart. Simply beautiful!

Upon arrival for our quick night in Anchorage, we were happy to find that we had been upgraded to the penthouse suite at the downtown Hilton. We had a wonderful view of McKinley at sunset (even though this was almost at midnight!). We had to be up early the next morning for our train to Denali, so we only had a chance to spend a little bit wondering around downtown Anchorage.