19 May 2026
For this year’s birthday/anniversary trip, we’re heading to Alaska!!! We’re also going to go on our first cruise!
And unlike most recent trips, this one is starting after the sun is up!
A month or so back, we got an email saying our flight would now be departing 4 hours later. Normally, that would throw a serious wrench in our travel plans, but the downside of flying out of our local airport is the very limited flight times; we were looking at a 9 hour layover, now it’s only 5 hours! Definitely not complaining about that!
We did have a bit of a delay when they couldn’t get the door to close…
Even the pilot came out to take a look. Eventually they figured out a pin was out of place and they were able to reset that and get us on our way.
And honestly, the 5-hour layover went by fairly quickly and before I knew it, we were boarding our next plane:
I like window seats, Matt likes aisle seats… so we took a chance and left the middle seat between us open.
That backfired.
Some dude preboarded and filled that seat (so no silly selfie for us 🙁 ).
Lame.
So we both popped in our earbuds and occasionally typed messages on our phones to talk around him, but mostly Matt watched stuff on his phone and I watched the world go by. Look- ice!
and mountains!
And a mere 6.5 hours later, we landed in Fairbanks!
(and spotted an Alaska plane in its natural habitat)
Today was a long day. We landed here a little before 8pm local time, met a representative from our ship to pick up an information packet for this first part of our trip, and meet the shuttle that would take us to our hotel for the night:
This was the only picture I took- I was absolutely ready to crash, but Matt needed dinner (our flight, despite its length, just gave us snacks) so we headed down to the hotel’s restaurant where Matt took like 2 bites of his dinner then fell asleep.
Well, not quite, but as soon as we sat and stopped moving, Matt also hit a wall, so back up to the room we went and called it a night.