Heading to Alaska

 With all the horror stories we’ve been hearing about travel right now, we were very cautious about expectations on this trip. I planned the flights with a week of travel time before the cruise, a couple of days 

after the cruise and hope for the best. Well, we head down to GR the night before the early morning flight and have dinner with Tara and Thad and park our car for the duration of the trip. We get the 5:30 shuttle to the airport and check in easily, get through security easily and have a little time before it’s time to get on our flight. We take off for DFW---yes, we are flying to Texas to then fly to-Alaska---I can’t explain the workings of the American Airlines matrix. But we make it to DFW so soon, that we have to wait for our gate to clear up before we can get out. We spend a couple of hours enjoying the tram to the new terminal, creating postcards from around the world at the 

Coco-Cola section and get some lunch before boarding our flight to Anchorage. Now, the real leap of faith here was that we let them check our bags for free in GR, but we can see a couple of them being loaded on the flight before we get on….so, that’s good. We arrive in Alaska early, but there’s no waiting for a gate here and we get to get off and deplane way faster than our luggage. We

walk around and see the airport because we’re not leaving from here and this might be the only time we get to see the airport. After taking pics of the animals, the pretty art and waiting for a second, all 3 pieces of baggage come off the carousel and we grab at taxi to go pick up our Turo car. We get that and it’s a nice car. Make it to the Holiday Inn Express and try to go to the hottest pizzeria in town…..the online wait for a pizza is 135 minutes, so that’s not going to happen. There’s a pizza place right by the hotel and the internet says that it is 

the best place for halal pizza…..uh, okay. We go in and order our pizza, get it in 20 minutes and get to eat in our hotel room. And it happens to be the best pizza. Halal or not, I don’t think we could have done any better with the recommended place. We’re amazed at how we don’t feel like we’ve
been traveling all day or that it’s too late in our time zone, but we are ready for bed for sure.