The kids and I have returned from Alaska. We got home Friday night, after 28 hours of travel. Robbi stayed behind to finish up the fishing and pack up the compound, so I got the chance to polish my advanced parenting skills, such as they are.

But today, I’ll rewind the clock two weeks to the day we departed. And over the next week or so, I’ll share some stories of our adventures this year.

I believe I already told you about the first few hours of our trip, but to recap, we departed from Philadelphia on June 27, knowing full well that we would not arrive on the tundra until June 28.

Eventually, we landed in Seattle, where exhaustion ensued.

Even more eventually, we landed in Anchorage, a thing which pleased almost no one.

It was the middle of the night, but the sky didn’t seem to notice.

We set up camp in the baggage claim, and settled in for a 14-hour layover.

The next day, we boarded a jet for King Salmon, a small town at the top of the Alaskan Peninsula, a major jumping-off point for fishermen heading to various places on the bush.

On the way, we passed over snowy mountains.

The one-room King Salmon airport is evenly divided between two types of fishermen: those who are working for commercial fishing outfits and those who are embarking on exotic sport fishing expeditions. The two groups are dressed differently, carry different types of luggage, and tend to smell differently, though this latter difference is far less pronounced at the start of the season than it is on the way home.

In King Salmon, we picked up another cooler and an extra member of the family. Cousin Raiden and Aunt Tracy joined us for the final leg of the journey.

Kato opted not to join us for the final leg of the journey.

Because there were six of us, we opted to charter a plane to get to our final destination, a strip of flat beach about six miles from our compound.

If you think this sounds rather fancy and that we are rather important people, then you need to spend more time in Alaskan bush planes, which err on the side of not being luxurious.

But they sure do afford some spectacular views.

I’m not sure how it happens, but the tundra invents meandering streams that seem that seem bent on carving the path of greatest resistance.

Conditions were foggy, so we had to fly low.

The pilot followed the river until we got to the bay, and then turned a sharp angle across the point up to the place where we would land. Below is a shot of Ward’s Cove, a place three miles upriver from our compound, the turnaround point for my daily run.

About 20 minutes after departing King Salmon, we arrived at ISA (the name of a company that used to be located there, International Seafoods of Alaska; even though the processing plant is now owned by Coffee Point Seafoods, I guess no one feels like changing the name of the place).

Robbi’s brother was waiting with a truck to carry us up the beach. We loaded our stuff into the back…

…and the people into the cab.

Well, most of the people. One of us was asked to sit on the coolers and take photos of the people enjoying the warm, dry confines of the interior.

The view was worth the sacrifice.

About 30 minutes later, we reached our compound, unloaded our coolers, and settled in. But that is a story for another day.