Planning a Trip to Alaska - Is it Right for You?

First of all, if you’ve never looked at a road map of Alaska, check out google maps for a minute. There are VERY few roads in the entire state. So unless you’re a bush plane pilot there are really only a few locations that are even accessible by car.

Creating an Alaska Itinerary

We’ve divided Alaska in to the 3 most visited regions in the state:

1. Interior Alaska: the home of Fairbanks, The Dalton Highway, Denali National Park and the cute town of Talkeetna

2. South East Alaska (we did not visit)

3. The Kenai Peninsula

The Perfect Alaska Itinerary - The Kenai Peninsula

In our opinion, if you are flying in or driving to Alaska you really can have a TOTAL Alaska experience by just visiting the Kenai Peninsula. Here’s 8 quick reasons:

1. People fly in from all over the world just to fish the salmon in the Russian River.

2. If you’re looking for other fishing, you can always book Halibut fishing out of Homer or Seward/seward. Hope you catch more fish than we did.

3. Kenai Fjords National Park is home to the Harding icefield and its 30 outflowing glaciers….or nearly 40 glaciers. The National Park site said both numbers. We can all agree that’s a lot of ice.

4. The Kenai is packed with wildlife: bald eagles, humpback whales, orcas, sea otters, sheep, bears…just to name a few. If you’re as bad at spotting wildlife as we are, you can always visit the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and see just about everything including musk ox, which might be our new favorite friends.

5. In the Kenai peninsula alone you’ll find some of Alaska’s best museums, aquarium and again, the Alaska wildlife conservation center. You should seriously go here. They have Musk Ox, again, which are awesome.

6. This is also one of the best jump off points scenic flights or sea plane adventures, including a trip over to Katmai National Park: Home of the famous brooks falls for brown bear viewing. Maybe you can get a shot of a fish going into a bears mouth. We didn’t.

7. The Alaska Railroad comes down here for a reason. It’s a beautiful trainride which we didn’t take ourselves, but we saw them next to us on the road pretty often. The road was beautiful drive therefore the train must be a beautiful ride. Also, online reviews say its awesome.

8. Whether you're hoping to explore mountains or ocean, from the coastal rain forests around Seward and Kodiak to the rough Arctic chill of glaciers flowing off the Harding Icefield—there’s a huge range of diversity here.