Day 18-Tuesday-May 30, 2017-Denali National Park to Portage, AK

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Up at 5:30 a.m.,temp. 28deg.,overcast. Plan is to travel 265 miles today with brief stop @84 mile point south to see if we can get clear view north of Denali (formerly Mount McKinley) then side trip to Talkeetna, a jumping-off point for most climbing expeditions to Denali, elevation 20,320', highest peak in N. America. Then we'll travel to Portage, AK, passing thru Anchorage & Wasilla (hi Sarah...maybe we'll see Russia from there too!).
At 8 a.m. just as rain started, we unhooked our rigs and were on the road again, saying good-bye to Denali National Park. The rain stayed pretty heavy as we headed south, stopping at one of the turnouts about 45 miles south of the Denali to see if we could see the mountain as the rain had stopped. No luck. We motored on and took a spur route to Talkeetna, a quaint little town which Tom and Peggy had visited previously. Population of Talkeetna is 876. On clear days, (which we didn't have today) there are great views of Denali and the Alaska Mountain Range. Talkeetna is a popular day-trip destination, just over 100 miles north of Anchorage. Peggy wanted to pick up a T-shirt for Matt and Tom, Dorrie, and I stopped for lunch at the Road House. We had a great reindeer melt pasty with chutney sauce on the side. Back on the road and a couple of hours later stopped at Walmart in Wasilla so Alan & Sue could pick up some last minute items. The beautiful Talkeetna mountains surround Wasilla and day was clear and you could see the top of Sovereign mountain, elevation 8849'. We continued on toward Anchorage as traffic started to build around this largest city in Alaska with a population of 300,549 in the heart of the state's southcentral gulf coast. More than half the state's population live in Anchorage and it remains a major logistics center and cargo carrier for Asia, Europe and North America. I've gotten so used to driving the wide open spaces of Alaska and its sparsely populated areas that city traffic is a major headache, especially driving a 33' RV. We continued south on the Seward Hwy. toward Portage, 50 south of Anchorage, our destination for the night. The Seward Hwy. continuing south, permits a panoramic view of the south shore and Kenai Mountains on the Kenai Penninsula, our destination on Wednesday. We arrived at Portage Valley Cabins & RV Park around 5 p.m., just in time to join Ray, Sandy, John, & Diane who had arrived earlier, for cocktails, surrounded by mountain ranges and idyllic lake setting. After dinner, we took a short walk around the lake and skipped some stones across the lake...Ray will dispute the fact that I had one stone skip 6 times to his measly 4. With sun still shining brightly into bed, at 11 p.m. after posting prior day's log.

Miles for day-318

Total--4464

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