Valdez, Alaska

 Ben and I jumped up to Alaska for a long weekend ​and stayed in the town of Valdez. It was a long drive up from Anchorage, but the scenery made the drive go by in a flash. Jagged mountains capped with snow surrounded us and it was absolutely breathtaking.

Valdez is a fishing town and is situated on an inlet. It was fun to watch the fishing boats come back and observe fisherman process the fish as we were enjoying dinner at the Roadside Potatohead. There were several really tasty restaurants that we visited, but the Roadside Potatohead had delicious fries and sandwiches. 

Overall, it was a very low key trip, but we did go to Wrangell National Park. Don't feel too bad if you have never heard of this national park before. We hadn't either, but funny enough...it is America's largest national park at 13 million acres. This is not the easiest park to observe. The road in is incredibly rough and it takes almost an hour and a half to get to much of the "Easy to Observe" areas of the park. The wild thing about this park is that it is surrounded by a lot of publicly owned land and so it feels like a hodgepodge of activity and very unlike a pristine national park. 

If you make it to the center of the park, you will have the opportunity to go to a historic and beautifully preserved mine. After crossing a bridge, you pay $5 to some locals to haul you up in a bus to the mine. We paid for a tour and learned a ton about the area and saw the inside of many of the buildings. Tour was great...but it was a VERY LONG wait to get back on a bus to go back to the car. If I hadn't been pregnant, we would have huffed it down the hill on foot. Ate at Roadside Potatohead in the park and then made the drive back to Valdez. 

Other than the national park, we visited a hatchery that had sea lions swarming. I could have stayed there all day and recorded them! So much personality! It was a great little getaway and fun to see another part of a state that we enjoy visiting!