My travels to Alaska began at 4:15am. I got my four hours of sleep in so I was ready to go. I never “failed” going through security before so I was very surprised when I had to go through a manual pat-down by TSA. It was surrealistic to be out in the open, more or less spread eagle while someone touched me all over. I’ve had dates where I wasn’t touched so much.
The trip to Seattle went quickly and we found ourselves in the private club of Alaska Airlines. If you’re on vacation, there is no reason not to start drinking in the morning. The bloody mary was great. I topped it off with a bottle of champagne on the flight to Anchorage. There were these cool ipad-like screens so on the flight so we could choose whatever we wanted to watch.
Our taxi driver from the airport was informative and served as our initial tour guide. After we dumped our luggage, we walked around town and went to the local museum. Since I’m fresh off reading about how awful white guys were to Hawaiian residents, I got to learn how a different set of white guys were imperialistic, arrogant and disrespectful to the Alaskan natives. When Alaska was purchased from the Russians, any non-white was not given American citizenship. grrrr.
We met the other 28 people on our trip, had drinks and dinner. Most of the other participants are retired professors and teachers in chemistry and physics. We’re looking forward to a great adventure.