It wasn’t supposed to take 24 hours to get to Valdez!

The longest thing was supposed to be the four hour wait in the Anchorage airport for the flight to Valdez!

So I got to Anchorage, grabbed some lunch, found a place to pray, and sat down to read The Brothers Karamazov, when I hear my name on  the p.a. I was being paged!

At first I wasn’t sure if it was me, but then how many Rukhsana Khan’s can there be?

It turned out it was the lady in charge of my tour. The flight to Valdez was cancelled due to poor visibility (a blizzard) and we could either wait till Sunday for the next flight or get on a van that was driving there. I opted for the van. I have a talk tomorrow night at the librarian’s conference and I didn’t want to miss it!

The driver said it would take all of six hours maybe even seven and he was right. We left at around 4 pm got in around 11 pm, and there were times when I was staring out the windshield with a horrified look on my face, making sure my seatbelt was fastened securely and clutching the armrest a bit tighter.

My hubby had told me, “Don’t drive in Alaska! Don’t drive in Alaska!” and now I completely understood why.

Not that I was going to, but gee! I never saw conditions like that before!

See that bent pole thing in the picture above? That’s not a light post. It’s actually there to reflect the headlights of cars so you can see the edge of the road in blowing snow!

Saw those things in action tonight. Wow!

We passed glaciers

Didn’t look like this, but kind of. This is a picture of it in the summer. I couldn’t get a picture because the van window was iced up.

But just beautiful beautiful mountains!

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t that disappointed that we had to go by van.

But the driver said that the flight to Valdez from Anchorage, on a clear day was the prettiest flight in the world. He said you didn’t know which side of the plane to sit on, both sides were spectacular! One sid eglaciers the other side Prince William Sound.

Tomorrow I’m going to really try to take some proper pics.

But the nicest thing about the drive was the company. Met a bunch fo the librarians that were equally stranded, and one of the authors who’s speaking at the conference: Helen Frost.

But for now I need to pray and get to bed.