Traveling By Train in Alaska
This is an epic experience and adventure you don't want to miss!
Since we started traveling full-time in 2020, one of our goals has been to check off all 50 states on our list and say we’ve visited them all. Last fall, we finally made that happen with an epic trip to Alaska.
I’m going to start in the middle of the trip for this post, because our train ride was one of the most amazing things we did while we were there. We flew into Fairbanks to begin our trip, spent a little time there, then took the train down to Denali National Park. But the second leg of the train trip is when it began to get amazing!
We spent a couple of days in Denali Village, and when our time there was up, we were shuttled back to the train station to board the train for Anchorage. I was expecting everything to be the same from Fairbanks to Denali, but we were pleasantly surprised to find a different train and a different experience!!
The experience on the first leg was amazing but this was even better! We had a tour guide who told us all kinds of fun things about what we were seeing all the way to Anchorage. She played some hilarious games with us, and she just made the whole trip incredible! Our guide’s name was Jane, and if you ever get to ride the train with her, you’ll love it!
You know you have an amazing tour guide when your train has to pull off and stop for TWO HOURS to wait for oncoming trains to pass because they have priority, and you don’t even bat an eye at the time you have to sit and wait. She made it so fun that we weren’t even worried about sitting there that long!
Another thing that was different about this train, and something that also helped the two hours pass by quickly, was a dining car. We went downstairs for lunch, and they had the whole lower part of our train car as a dining room and kitchen. It was really cool! I will say the food was a little pricey for what it was, but it tasted good, and the experience was fun, so it was worth a little splurge.
We were hoping to see some wildlife as we traveled through the wilderness, but sadly, we did not. (If you know anything about James, you know he’s been trying DESPERATELY to see a bear since we started traveling.) We did see an eagle, which was super cool! And the funny thing was, I snapped a pic of the area before I even realized it was there because it looked so pretty and then discovered I’d captured the eagle! #winning
This train trip was definitely a highlight of our trip. It was SO much fun. Interestingly, it wasn’t supposed to be the highlight of the trip. It was supposed to be just some fun we had exploring Alaska before the highlight of the trip — an Alaskan cruise from Seward to Vancouver, British Columbia. Sadly, when we arrived at the cruise port later that week, we discovered our ship had mechanical problems, and the entire cruise had been cancelled. Talk about devastating.
That’s a story for another day, though.
Here are a few more photos I took on the journey south. This is just a fraction of what I got, but these are some of my favorites. Photography from a moving train through a window isn’t always the best but I was still able to capture some incredible beauty I think. The crazy thing is, pictures never do the view justice. It’s always so much more beautiful in person than a photo ever shows.
If you’ve never been to Alaska and taken the train, we hope you get the opportunity.
