Alaska

While I anxiously wait on the photographer's photos to share some of our wedding details, let's talk about our celebratory vacay : our Alaskan honeymoon.  Matt and I came back to Durham for about 24 hours before heading to the airport to fly to Anchorage.  We spent a couple days in Anchorage (which has some cool spots, a great museum, and a hell of a ham, cheddar, and scallion scone) but otherwise doesn't feel very "Alaskan."  We went to dinner and a movie - why aren't all theatres like this?? - and drank some local coffee before heading up to Denali.  

I still think we did it exactly right : our days got progressively more awesome.  The first day in Denali we did the shuttle to the Eielson Visitor Center - it's 8 hours round trip and gives you a lazy intro to the park.  It's not the most interactive or immersive experience, as most of your time (save for some stops along the way) are from a school bus, but you get your feet wet.  The next day we went riding around on ATVs through the park, which was really cool - Matt got to drive, I got to take some pictures, and this time we actually got to walk around in the park a bit.  That afternoon we did some road-tripping up to Nenana - TINY town directly north of Denali and where our road trip took us.  We saw some moose, took some cool pictures, and walked through another museum.  

The first major highlight of our trip was a flightseeing tour of Denali / Mt McKinley.  We loaded ourselves, a solo traveler, and a pilot into a Cessna 185 (small.) and flew from Talkeetna up to Denali.  We flew through mountains, around avalanches, and landed at the climbers' base camp to do a snow angel on a glacier.  It. Was. Insane.

After geeking out over the GoPro-mount on the wing of the plane, we drove down to Seward, which is one of the more beautiful drives we took.  When I tell you the water is blue, I can't stress it enough - it's like cyan / aquamarine / Caribbean blue.  We went kayaking all through Resurrection Bay and finished out the trip with greasy bar food at the biggest time-warp of a bar you've ever seen.  

We were very, very happy to come home and get settled back into life - married life! - but the experience and photos that we brought home with us are once in a lifetime.  I gave Matt a DSLR for a wedding gift so we both got really into capturing some details - I'm sure he'll post some photos eventually over on his site.