We flew into Anchorage, but the ship actually leaves out of Seward.  This problem was easily rectified by a couple hours on a bus. We made a short pit stop at Chugach State Park to finally see more of Alaska than a big city…and it was awesome! There’s a series of elevated walking platforms to get out over the creek.  I bet you could get some really good wildlife photos out here.

The only road from Anchorage to Seward runs along the scenic Turnagain Arm.

I was having fun taking pictures out of the bus as we rolled along, but we made another photo/snack/pee pitstop at the Portage Glacier.

We all headed back to the bus only to be told that there was a traffic accident and it would be a little longer… and then we heard that it was a bad traffic accident and the road could possibly be closed until 7 at night. 😮 well, shit. Luckily the driver of the other bus in our convoy pulled some strings with the Alaska police so we could get an escort out and be able to safely cross the highway through the stopped traffic and go on our way. If we had been another 15 minutes late getting to the glacier we would have been right at the accident.

Link to an article about the crash.

Turns out a guy with a camper stopped in the highway to let someone turn across traffic and got hit.  There was a tour bus involved as well.  There was hardly anything left of the camper. Pretty sad scene.

We finally made it to Seward only a few hours later than planned, but we found out the next day that some people were stuck in traffic until after midnight and our ship didn’t leave until 2-3 in the morning. WAY past when we were supposed to leave.  Unfortunately this meant that we didn’t have time to see the Hubbard Glacier and had to just motor on through to our second stop of Juneau.  Although given the circumstances, no one was overly upset that we had to miss a stop.  “First world problems”