Alaska Day 16: Return to McMinnville

In our hotel room in Anchorage, getting up to the annoying alarm on my phone at 0445 was no joke. Given that we were all packed except for our toiletries and sleep clothes, we brushed our teeth, finished packing, and were in the hotel lobby by 0500 only to discover that it was pouring rain. I walked down the street to fetch the car and we loaded our luggage under the cover of the hotel portico.

We had no issues getting gas or returning the rental car. We would have had issues if I had followed the directions to the rental car return on the Garmin, but despite the obnoxiously early hour, I had enough wits about me to know that we needed to return the car to the garage where we got it and not to whatever office the Garmin wanted us to visit. At 0520 there was nobody in the garage, so we left the car in the return lane and dropped the keys into the drop box.

Inside the terminal at the Air Alaska counters, there were good lines to check baggage with a lot of people trying to get bulky and overweight items through, especially guys making their commute to the North Slope oil fields. Baggage dealt with, security was a non-issue and there was a coffee stand just on the other side of the screeners. Coffee, finally, a few minutes before six.

Masked and Seated at 0645: An Exhausted Camper

We boarded without issue and we had front-row seats in first class going back. I joked with Ann that it was a very different experience than flying co-pilot in a Cessna bush plane, which we both did on our respective flights to Katmai. The climb out through the low rain clouds was uneventful. I expected worse. Above the clouds between 10-15,000 feet, we had a touch of clear air instability, but it was trivial in the grand scheme of air turbulence. Above the clouds, we had sunshine all the way into PDX, but terrifically warm temperatures when we arrived.

Check Out the Flat "Meat" Product

We preordered breakfast the day before and it proved to be somewhat edible. Ann’s omelette came with a dubious flat meat product reeking of artificial smoke. She did not partake of that particular delicacy. I preordered a pork bowl consisting of layers of black beans, shredded pork shoulder, scrambled eggs, all topped with a bit of sour cream. The eggs and pork shoulder were lame, while the black beans were nicely seasoned with salt and cumin. It might have been a touch better had it been warm all the way through.

My Breakfast was Slightly Better Than Ann's

Back at PDX, we had to wait on the tarmac for a few minutes before pulling to a gate. Like everybody else in these days of COVID, Alaska Air was having staffing difficulty. We needed a ground crew to help park the plane. Ten minutes or so of wait was enough to get us to the gate. The half-hour wait for our baggage at PDX was excruciating. All we wanted to do was get home.

Baggage in hand, we needed to get back to the Ramada to get my truck and start the trip back home. We called the shuttle number only to find out that the shuttle was not in operation, another COVID issue, I imagine. The hotel called an Uber for us and the driver met us within seconds of us getting to the pick-up area. That couldn't have gone any smoother.

The trip from the airport home was as easy as it gets and that is a major blessing from the Portland traffic gods. We skipped the ride into Portland on I-84, opting to take the I-205 bypass which dropped us on I-5 just about Wilsonville. It was a smooth ride on a route that we do not normally take.

During the hour drive home, we decided to stop at the store and grab a few things for an early dinner. After over two weeks of really pretty bad food, we were desperate for a competent meal. We needed something flavorful yet comforting, comforting being our code word for high carbs, preferably pasta. You really don't know how hard it is trying to eat well and foregoing pasta for months on end. We could live quite happily on pasta every day.

We stopped at the local Grocery Outlet, a small store that is far quicker to get in and out of than the big grocery store. GO, being primarily a seller of overstocked goods, usually has at least one kind of Italian bronze die-extruded pasta on the shelves. The markup on these pastas at specialty groceries is unbelievable and so a lot of unsold pasta gets farmed out to the overstock sellers. At our GO, we usually will not have a choice of brand or cut, but at least we can get a bag of decent pasta, unlike the grocery where Barilla is as good as it gets. Today it was fettuccine.

Grocery Outlet is only a couple minutes from the house and groceries in tow, we were in a rush to see the dogs. If you've ever been away from yours, you know the enthusiastic greeting that you get after you've been in the bathroom for a minute. Imagine the greeting after two-and-a-half weeks away!

That's a Happy Pile of Puppies!

We had planned to have an early dinner, but not eating anything since o-dark-thirty, we moved things up and I got to work making our dinner. Along with the pasta, we got a head of broccoli to put with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes from the pantry, garlic, red pepper flakes, and a big handful of fresh basil which exploded in the garden while we were away. A swirl of butter and a grating of pecorino romano finished our super flavorful and comforting dinner, easily the best meal we’ve had in three weeks.

And that concludes the saga of our 2021 Alaska trip. I'll do a brief wrap-up post next.