In this 2‑hour travel slideshow, Randy Dean, known as the Email Sanity Expert, recounts his solo 3.5‑day Alaskan adventure from late June to early July 2019. He frames the video as a morale boost for viewers stuck at home during the COVID‑19 pandemic, emphasizing his excitement to travel again. The narrative follows his itinerary: a long flight from Michigan to Anchorage, a drive down the scenic Seward Highway to Whittier, a unique car‑and‑train shared tunnel, and a 3.5‑hour glacier cruise with close‑up views of massive glaciers, calving ice, towering waterfalls, and abundant wildlife (sea otters, sea lions, bald eagles, moose, etc.). He notes record‑high temperatures (near 90 °F) and pervasive wildfire smoke that drifted over Anchorage and Whittier. Randy highlights the beauty of the highway, the dramatic water jet from a melting glacier, and the coastal wildlife refuge created by historic railroad construction. Personal anecdotes include his wife’s encouragement to visit his 50th state before turning 51, and his recommendation of Phillips Cruises. The episode ends with a preview of Day 2, which will cover his Denali National Park bus tour.
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Alright, hello everyone. This is Randy Dean. Many of you know me as the Email Sanity Expert. And you can find out more about my work at my website, randaldean.com. But this is sort of a fun little episode. On this one, I'm actually going to be the 2-hour traveler again. It's been a little while since I've done one of these. And what's great about this is I'm actually going to be featuring my 3.5-day trip last summer to Alaska. I know many of us are in the stay-at-home orders because of the coronavirus as I'm producing this right now. And I just thought it was time to put together something that can get us all thinking about those days when we can get back out and traveling and seeing the world again. I know I personally cannot wait. So, let's dive into this and hey, there I am. Hi everybody. And let me show you one of the things that was pretty cool about this trip to Alaska too. I saw 6 moose. So, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the animals and things that I saw while I was on the trip too. Now, while I was on this trip, I will tell you that I spent time— obviously I flew in and out of Anchorage. I spent a day down in Whittier, Alaska, which is where you can actually go on the glacier cruise, as you can see up here in the background. And then I also went from Anchorage up to Denali, and did the bus tour through the national park. And I did all of this in 3.5 days. So, what I wanna do is actually take you on a little bit of a slideshow tour. I'm gonna be the geeky dad that does the slideshows of his trips, but I'm gonna bring this in and make it a YouTube video too. So, let's talk a little bit about this. As you can see, here's Alaska. And I flew into Anchorage, which is right here. And as you can see, The first full day we went into Whittier. What I want to do is I want to jump out to my Google Photos. And what I'm going to do is actually show you both some of the pictures from the flight coming into Anchorage. The very first night, I flew in in late afternoon, evening, right before sunset. And so basically, that was a long day. Took about 8 hours, I think, to get there from here in my home base in Michigan. And so, what we did is we flew in. I got— grabbed some pictures of the mountains as I was flying into Anchorage. And then, what I want to do is show you Whittier. I want to share a little bit about the day heading down to Whittier because one of the interesting things is, as you can see, this is called the Seward Highway. It's Highway 1 in Alaska. It goes by the pretty famous Alyeska Resort. And then, what happens is you come down here. If you keep going this way, you'll go down to Seward. But you'll see there's this little side road that takes you over to Whittier. And when I go into the slideshow, I want to tell you one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It's one of very few simultaneous use car and train tunnels in the world. And so you're going to see a picture of this when I'm going through. What was interesting about it is it's a one-lane road. So basically the way it works is they let the cars go through to the east, and then they stop it, turn around, let the cars go through to the west, unless of course there's a train coming. Because the train, you can actually take the train from Anchorage all the way down to Whittier too. I got a rental car instead because I wanted to adventure a little bit more. But what was interesting is that then you just sort of sit there and wait for the train to come through before you can go through. So all of this is gonna be the first full day. So let's go take a look at what we have here. And so I'm not in the way, I'm gonna turn this off. And I think I'm going to even try turning on a little bit of music over here. Let's try this. Now, one thing I have to tell you, a couple things here. One, notice how hazy some of these pictures are. I went, I landed in Anchorage on June 30th. I started checking things out on July 1st. If you remember, two things were happening. One, they were having record high temperatures. The first two days I was there, it was almost 90 degrees, which was almost unheard of. The second thing that was sort of fascinating is that because of the high temperatures and the long dry spell, off to the west there was a ton of forest fires. And what was happening was all the smoke was coming over toward Anchorage and it was also going over toward where I was in Whittier. Now, as you can see, what I did is I got on one of the glacier cruises here. So what you're about to see is more of the glacier cruise. Information and part of the trip. So it was absolutely amazing. Now notice, one, we're on inside waterways. So they were connected to the ocean, so it was saltwater, but you can see the waterways were fairly calm. So it wasn't too bad at all. The other thing that was sort of interesting about the trip was that not only were the waterways fairly calm, but it was surprisingly windy, especially when the boat got up to speed. So I, you know, it was going pretty, pretty fast. It was about a 3.5-hour cruise. And so you're gonna see a couple times in here where I actually had to flip my hat around backwards in order to be able to make this work. But, you know, if you ever get a chance, you got to go do this. This is one of the coolest things that I've ever done in my life, is going on one of these glacier cruises. And as you'll see coming up, We actually made it up to within about a quarter mile of one of the big glaciers. And I can't tell you, it won't do justice as to how big it was. And we did see some of the ice calving into the water a few times. You know, we stuck around long enough to see some of that. Oh, there I am with the hat backwards. And as you can see, I took on one of the Phillips Cruises and Tours when I was there. And strongly recommend it. If you get a chance, you just got to go do this. We did see wildlife. There was sea lions and saw some bald eagles while we were there. You know, a few other things. Now, one thing I will tell you earlier in the video, I was also showing some pictures from the Seward Highway as I was driving in. And that was one of the prettiest stretches of road I've ever driven on. You know, I've been in Northern California. I've been north of Seattle. I've driven Northern Michigan, obviously. I've been up to Maine. That roadway was really pretty, and so if you get a chance and you get a good weather day, you might want to take advantage of that. We spent a good amount of time just sitting here watching these sea lions. They stopped the boat and they let us all watch as the sea lions were doing their thing. So, I'm going to go back and turn the music back on, so we'll continue this little virtual tour. Yes, that's a sea otter, not a sea lion. That's a sea otter. Once I started taking my selfie, almost everybody else on the boat started doing it too. Some of these waterfalls were literally hundreds, if not maybe 1,000 feet tall. There's our first sight of the Big Glacier up on top. That was our first sign of, uh, glacial ice that was floating in the bay. There's the glacier, and I cannot tell you how huge it was. I think it was 500, 600 feet high right there in the space. Those waterfalls were huge. They even pulled the ice out of the bay because it's pure fresh ice water, uh, and, um, that's what they use for ice in the drinks on the boat as well as to keep the beverage which is cold. Little bit of a close-up to the glacier where you can see the blue coming through, which is fresh from the ice under all that pressure over the thousands of years, uh, which turns it into a visible blue color. That just shows you how much ice is in the bay. I think this was about as close as we got. And just wow, that's all I can say, just wow. One of the neatest things I've ever seen. And from here, we could easily see when there was calving taking place with parts of the glacier falling off into the bay. You know, the one thing that I will say about my trip to Alaska too is that everywhere you looked, every place you looked, it was just so pretty. Just about everywhere. So, you know, if you get the chance, take advantage of it. It was actually state number 50 for me. My final state. That's why I went there on a solo trip, because my wife knew I was closing in on turning 51 years old and I had a birthday coming up, and she said, why don't you go get that last state before you turn 51? And with everything that's happened this year, boy, am I glad she gave me that green light. Look at that. This is fascinating. Uh, let me zoom in on this a little bit. Look at this up here. This is an inverted water jet right up here. Uh, see this? What happened was the water was coming down with such force that it actually went back up and went above vertical for a minute. So, the water came down and shot up like a giant fire hose and then came down in these other parts. That's how fast the glacier was melting because of the high heat at that time. Here's a natural waterfall for you. Ah, now take a look at this. I think, yeah, that's where I caught a little bit of calving. That is when it fell into the water right there. Let me see if the previous picture was catching that too. Maybe not. Alright, let's keep driving. This is on the way back. There's a couple sea lions again. More waterfall for you. This was actually the second part of the glacier that we came into. They took us into two different bays to see two separate glaciers. This is the second one. You know, it was so pretty there, but I have to tell you, if I could have been there when it wasn't so hazy and you could see the backdrop mountains even better, would have been unbelievable. This is about when we started coming back into Whittier, and even as we were on our way back in, we went over on the far side of the entry approach and there was just walls of waterfalls. I must have seen a couple hundred waterfalls on this one trip. Oh, nesting birds too. They were nesting right into the cliffs. A little hard to see, but they're there. There was a couple walls where there were just thousands of birds. That's actually the birds right up next to the waterfall. If I zoom in a bit, you can see that's a rookery right there. It was pretty crazy. It's a pretty cool shot. As you can see, it was the base for one of the big cruise ships. I think it was one of the cruise ships that might have had one of the big coronavirus outbreaks, but obviously that was way before then. They said, fascinating thing, this ship had more passengers than the number of people that lived in Whittier. So the town where the cruise ship comes to park, and people can actually take the train off the ship to go up to Anchorage to do some exploration, but the ship had more people than the town, I believe. Here I'm back on the Seward Highway heading back toward Anchorage. And as you can see, I made this basically one big long day. It was just, you know, stop and explore. It was wonderful. Oh, I believe that that little white dot is a mountain sheep. There were several people looking at those with binoculars. I forgot to bring mine on this trip. There was a ton of places where you could pull out also and just get down by the seashore. Um, all these little— it reminded me a lot of Northern California. That's what it reminded me of. Now, on my way back into the city, I was getting, you know, they had 20 hours of daylight basically. It was starting to get a little bit later in the evening, and I noticed that as you were coming into Anchorage, they had the Coastal Wildlife Refuge. And you could park your cars, I don't believe it cost anything, and then you could go on some raised walkways out over this basically estuary area. And it's sort of an interesting story about it. They built the Great Alaskan Seward Railroad that went down the coast, and when they built it, they built in this barrier to build the train tracks on. And without meaning to, they went right through what was a river outlet into the bay, and it filled in with the sediments and turned into this wildlife refuge. It's just an amazing place. If you get a chance, you want to stop. I will give you the one thing, you can still see moose and bear even inside the city limits of Anchorage. I didn't see any moose or bear when I was here, but I was definitely keeping my eyes open. As you can see, if you look deep into the background, that's some of the homes outside of Anchorage. Bridge right there. So as you can see, it's coming right into the city limits. Not a bad view. Some of the native plants and, um, animal trails. Tons of animal trails through here. All right, might be hard to see, but that right there is a bald eagle. It flew right over me as it was heading across the area. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, let's go back. It's a little hard to see. Those are salmon and a few trout. And as you were walking, it was pretty amazing. They may not look like much. Those, a lot of those were 3 feet long. They were huge. So, and a lot of people were like saying that some people go out near that area to catch the fish. Ah, wait, here you go, little video. All right. So that was day 1. Now let's go and talk about day 2. Thank you for joining me for day 1.5 of my trip to Alaska. Come back tomorrow for days 2 and 3, including my visit to Denali National Park. I will see you tomorrow.
