Sitka, Alaska 2008 - Day One - Wednesday, July 23rd

Dave set the alarm for 5:00 am...and it came fast since we couldn't fall asleep.

Ali woke up so easily and was pretty happy for it being so early. We put our bags in the truck and did one final check of the house. Cat had plenty of food and water, I wrote about 3 notes for my sister and left them on the counter...then we were off.

We arrived at the airport and parked in the long term parking, caught the shuttle and went to our gate. When we got to our gate we looked at the clock and we had an hour and 25 minutes still to wait. We decided to walk back and get some breakfast. After Breakfast, Ali wanted to snap a few pictures of us while we were waiting. She was so excited!!



We flew to Seattle, our plane left at 8:20am. We landed in Seattle at 10:30am (9:30 Seattle Time) we were at terminal A and we needed to find our next gate with Alaska Airlines which was in terminal C.

Ali loved pulling her suitcase through the airport with Clarence (the horse) strapped to her luggage.

She also loved riding the train underground in between the terminals.

We found our gate so we would know where we had to be, but had almost 3 hours to kill in the airport.

Two years ago when Dave and I went to Sitka, we at at Anthony's in the airport. The clam chowder was fabulous! We also shared an order of halibut fish and chips...YUM! Dave and I wanted to eat there again and it was about lunch time for us. We weren't sure about Ali, as she doesn't like fish...or at least if she knows it is fish...she won't eat it. We found Anthony's and asked her if she wanted some chowder, told her it had potatoes and that she had eaten that soup before. She said yes, I love that soup. So we ordered three chowders. Ali practically licked the cup clean. She loved it. By the way...it is refered to as chowder.

Ali called Zach to check on him, he was doing just fine and happy. Told us all that he missed us...we of course told him the same thing. He was just playing transformers with grandma and watching Batman Returns.

After we ate we waked back to our gate for some more waiting.

Ali kept her self pretty entertained on the plane. She didn't do to bad for sitting on a long flight. She did open and close the window about 100 times but other than that...she did great.

We arrived in Sitka at 1:45 pm which would be 3:45 Utah time. Octobre picked us up at the airport and said to Ali... "How ya doin Midget?" Ali loved that right off. Octobre is the owner of the charter business that we booked with. Ali thinks that she should be called midget all the time now. Tim (Octobre's Husband) and our captain for most of the time we were there, started to call her midget too. She liked that. Octobre took us to our hotel, gave us our food vouchers and made sure we were all checked in etc. As she left she said, see you at 5:30 out front. Our food vouchers are $10 each for breakfast, and $25 each for dinner. There were about 6 to 10 restaurants we could go to and use our voucher. If you go over the voucher amount you pay the difference. You think, wow, $25 for dinner..that's a lot, even $10 for breakfast is plenty here. Not in Sitka...(more later) We went up to our room and called Zach. All was well still.

After we called Zach we walked around town a bit. We went to Castle Hill to show Ali. Castle Hill is the location where the Russian flag was lowered, and the American flag was raised, in 1867, marking the transfer of Alaska to the United States. Also, in 1959, after Alaska was admitted as the 49th U.S. state, it is the location where the first 49-star U.S. flag was officially raised. The United States purchased Alaska from Russia while Russia was in financial trouble. The president of Russia feared that Russia would lose the territory without compensation in a future conflict, (with the British) so they decided to go into negotiations with the United States regarding the purchase of the territory. The negotiations concluded after an all-night session with the signing of the treaty at 4 o'clock in the morning of March 30, with the purchase price set at $7,200,000 (about 1.9¢ per acre). It is amazingly beautiful on Castle Hill with a great over look of the town and the ocean. There are also wild raspberries growing everywhere you walk. They weren't ripe and tasted sour, but that didn't stop us from trying them here and there in hopes of having a good one. LOL!

We walked down by the pier also and mailed a post card to Zach that we bought in Seattle. We ate dinner at Kenny's, a Chinese food restaurant...it was delicious. It could have been that we were all starving by the time we walked around town and found it, anyway it was great. Then it was back to the hotel for some shut eye. The alarm was set for 4:00 am.