Little Norway

Last week I traveled for work to Petersburg, AK, also known as Alaska's Little Norway. You can do all sorts of cool stuff ... like seeing a tide water glacier, whale watching, deer watching, hiking, kayaking and tons more.

It wouldn't be traveling in Alaska if there wasn't some sort of story so here goes.

Because I'm an official Forest Service volunteer with a travel budget, I have to fly with USFS licensed/carded pilots. This means they sent a special plane over from Juneau to pick me up. (Which meant more $$ instead of flying over on one of the regularly scheduled commuter flights but hey, our tax dollars hard at work.) After that, I was allowed to fly on Alaska Airlines on their only daily southbound trip to Petersburg.

On the return trip, I was really wondering what was happening as I watched us fly over the Juneau airport. (It's not like you can land anywhere else anytime soon.) The 25-minute flight from Petersburg to Juneau actually lasted 55 minutes. After about 30 more minutes of flying in a holding pattern, we learned the pilot was "in training" and had overshot the runway. (Pretty sad that the flight time was shorter than the time we spent in the hold pattern.)

Instead of flying back to Gustavus, I got to fly in a float plane to Bartlett Cove, 10 miles from the Gustavus airport. This is the cove that I see out of my living room window. Also pretty cool. I could walk home from there, although Robin was there to pick me up because I had 3 boxes of groceries (including 5 dozen eggs).