We flew into Achorage a couple days early before Landtour #12 started (Anchorage - Talkeetna-Denali (2 nights)-Aleyska). We visited the Anchorage Museum, Cultural Center, Earthquake Park, Weekend Market, and 3 breweries (Glacier, Firetap, Humpys). Anchorage is a nice city with easy to navigate streets. We were able to go to the grocery store and buy snacks and water for the land tour. We took our rental car back and caught the Celebrity transfer to the Anchorage Marriott our starting point for the land trip. The hotel overlooks the bay and has mountain views though we had to crane our neck to see them from our room. You can walk easily around Anchorage to food, shopping center, souvenier shops, museums.

The next day we took the Wilderness Express to Talkeetna. The domed train cars are comfortable and Royal Celebrity cars are nicely detailed. Breakfast on the train was reasonable for Alaska prices and good. We saw a couple of moose from the train. We arrived into Talkeetna and did shopping in the tiny town that was modeled in Northern Exposure. The Talkeetna Lodge was fantastic although we didn't luck out with a view room. 50% get views, 50% don't. We couldn't take our Mt. McKinely flyer on the day we booked but lucked out and got to fly before we left for Denali at 8 am. Alaska is very cloudy and prone to rain, the Celebrity tour doesn't have instrument rating, there is another tour company that does in Talkeetna that was able to fly. The McKinley flyer is worth the money, the views are amazing.

Denali National Park was our next stop, this time lunch on the train. We had our 8 hour tundra tour and saw a wolf pack take down a caribou, bear, moose, dall sheep right next to the bus, magpie, ptarmigan, artic fox, snowshoe hares. A long trip but the views are amazing especially if Denali is out which we were lucky and saw at our first chance but clouds prevented us from the other two opportunities. We whitewater rafted the Neenana River, that was fun, we did the one you just hold on for, perfect for first timers and we visited the Husky Homestead. The Grande Denali Lodge was under new management and we did not have any bad experiences here as others have posted about. Read more