This year I wanted to do something a little different for my birthday. Since we had such a great time on the Alaskan cruise, I thought why not just tour around Alaska. When you actually sit down and look at a map of Alaska, you realize how big the state is. After much research, we decided that we would fly into Anchorage and use it as our base to explore.
We did not want to drive down this morning to the aiport, so we were lucky enough to get an invitation to stay over last night with Karen’s brother Ross and his wife Susie. They were also kind enough to drop us to the airport this morning at the ungodly hour of 5:45am.
Since we have quite a few Aeroplan miles, we decided to use them for the trip. We were suprised at how many miles we needed to fly to Anchorage. It is the same amount of miles that it would take to fly to Florida (25,000 miles + $189.51 CAD in taxes / person). We were supposed to leave Toronto at 8:00am but we actually did not leave until 8:45am. Even with the delay, we got to Vancouver at 10:30am local time.
Because we were flying on Aeroplan tickets and we each have a TD Aeroplan Visa, we were able to get into the Maple Leaf Lounge. There are many benefits to the lounge … free food, drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and WiFi. I think the best part is that there are many comfortable seating areas so that you can relax before your flight. We got there just as they were serving lunch … sandwiches, soups, salads and dessert. We made to sure to fill up since it would be quite a while before we would be having dinner. The second flight seemed to take longer. I think it was because the seats on Air Canada Rouge flights are so small you have no room to get comfortable. As we were approaching Anchorage, we were struck at how beautiful the scenery was.
We landed in Anchorage at 4:00pm local time and were greeted with sunshine and warm temperatures. After picking up our bags, we headed over to Enterprise to pick up our car (Nissan Sentra) which we rented through Costco ($389.34 USD, 1424 miles driven).
Alaska’s tourist season is short and therefore hotels are very expensive at this time of year. By expensive, I mean at least $300 USD/night. Since we had such great experiences renting places through VRBO, we decided to try it again. We were lucky to find a townhouse that ended up costing us just over $200 USD / night.
We dropped our bags off and headed to the Olive Garden for dinner. It is only two minutes from the house so I’m sure we’ll get here more than once. After dinner, we headed over to Kohl’s to do a little bit of shopping. On our way home, we stopped at Safeway to pick up some groceries.
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