Day 1: Anchorage to Cooper Landing

Pete and Kristina Are Riding in Alaska
We are in Alaska for two weeks. We'll be riding our bike for about 6 or 7 days, weather and legs depending. We are traveling with Patty (Kristina's mom) and Bill (Patty's husband). They graciously offered to drive our gear on the days we'll be riding our bike. For us, sleeping in a real bed at the end of a 100 mile ride is just the way to go, rather than camping.

We arrived on Friday evening and we amazed that at midnight the sun was down but it wasn't really that dark. The sun rose the next day at around 4:30 am. It's crazy! We have to sleep with eye masks to keep the light out. We spent Saturday putting our bike together, provisioning (can I make that a verb?), and picking up Patty & Bill at the airport.

Here we are Sunday morning ready to hit the road from Anchorage. That's our sexy minivan behind us; turns out the bike fits in it without having to use a rack. What luck, as the rack got damaged in transit and would have required a little kludging to make work .

We started the ride from our hotel in downtown Anchorage. We rode along a series of well-maintained bike paths through town. Here is a sculpture installation near an office park in south Anchorage that we thought was somewhat interesting.

As we rode through town we only had to stop once to consult the map; not too bad for never been here before. Once we got out of town, the rest of the route was easy: Just head south on AK-1 for about 80 miles to Cooper Landing on the Kenai Peninsula. The ride would end up being a total of 112 miles.

Here we are cruising along the Turnagain Arm, a long inlet to the southwest of Anchorage. As you can see, it was pretty overcast, and a bit chilly. It was really gorgeous along here. To our left, the mountains rose dramatically straight up from the road. Often we would see little waterfalls that come right down to the edge of the road.

It's still spring up here, so we saw an abundance of wildflowers, some of which were huge. But this is Alaska, so everything up here seems huge! When we stopped for lunch in the Bake Shop at Girdwood, we took a sweet roll to go that was the size of my head.

While many things are large, here I am with two of my little friends. This was around mile 95 for the day and was our last water stop. You see a bench like that, how can you not take a picture. As we got back on the bike to head off, a few rain drops started to come down. Fortunately it didn't develop into anything serious and we were able to make the final few miles without any incident.

Tomorrow we will go hiking, although the forecast is for rain. I think that it'll be a little easier to deal with the weather walking than riding. It doesn't take much rain to get you really wet when you are riding a bike.