I departed from Portland at 11:30 in the morning and arrived at Seattle about 40 minutes later. It always feels like you barely get to the right elevation, which takes about a half hour, before you’re coming back down to land again. There was a little turbulence over the Puget Sound but nothing serious and we landed shortly after. Then we took off for Anchorage. We arrived there around 3:30 (Alaska time, 1 hour behind Oregon time during this time of year) and had to walk across the tarmac to get to the airport. It was soo cold and the wind just cut like a knife right through my clothes! The pictures below are from the Anchorage airport. The view of the mountains was stunning!
After a couple of hour layover, we boarded for our final flight to Bethel. As I was walking down the stairs to the tarmac, I heard a flight attendant on the microphone announcing that it’s 18 degrees!... Below!!! I didn’t catch where she was talking about but I figured it had to be somewhere in Alaska, which isn’t quite the welcome I was expecting in Bethel. Luckily it was a whole 6 degrees in Bethel, so it wasn’t as bad as 18 below!
The flight to Bethel was much like the flight to Seattle. After 30 minutes in the air, you start to go back down again for the landing. I took a few pictures of the sunset which was magnificent! All of the colors of the rainbow all on the horizon. And a few pictures to show you how flat it is out here. When we started descending, I knew we were less than a half hour from bethel and started to get excited to see Jeff again. It’s been nearly 2 weeks which is about 10 days longer than we’ve been apart in the last 4 years. While I wes on the flight, there were amazing views of the mountain ranges which stretched for miles. The area there is very treacherous and I can’t imagine hiking there, much less getting lost. After we passed the last mountains, it became very flat and I imagine you could see for miles. The only disturbances were snow drifts and some high shrubs which you can see in the pictures.
As we were going to the landing strip, the plane was shuddering a little bit back and forth, but nothing serious because there was hardly any wind. The second the plane touched down, the pilot slammed on the brakes to get us stopped before we got to the end of the strip, which is much shorter than the ones at the larger airports. After he got us slowed down, we taxied toward the airport which is a 1 room building with a baggage claim and lots of chairs. We had to be careful crossing to the airport because the concrete was basically a sheet of ice.
Bethel, currently, is considered a “moist” town. You can buy non-alcoholic beer here, but if you want the real thing, you have to ship it. When the baggage started unloading, you wouldn’t believe how many cases of beer came through! For a plane containing about 100 people, there were probably 30 + cases of beer all taped up with their tags on tops. It was definitely something unexpected to see! There were also a lot of tubs of food items that people bring with them. Food in Bethel is very expensive because of the high shipping costs the stores have to pay to get the items up here. So when a lot of people go to Anchorage for one reason or another, they go on a grocery shopping spree and ship it back to Bethel, saving themselves money in the long run.
Bethel has more taxis per capita than New York city, which means that a large number of the cars on the road are just taxis. After we collected my luggage, we dragged it outside where there were taxis galore waiting for passengers. They charge a flat fee of $7 per person per trip from the airport to the town and if someone else along the way needs a taxi, they stop and pick them up. In a way, the taxi’s here are much like the bus transit system in larger cities. You can get into a taxi by yourself and end up being one of 4 or 5 passengers before you get into town. That’s just the way things are out here.
WoW! I LOVE the pictures of the sunset on the mountains as you're going to Bethel. It's so beautiful!
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