Wednesday, September 16, 2009

[Travelogue] Best barbecue west of the Klondike

The weather here in Alaska seems to turn on a dime. Yesterday was gorgeous, today is once again gray and rainy. Fortunately, we didn't have any plans to disrupt. We're in Seward, Alaska, on a transition between the first and second of the five legs of our cruise. Only a few dozen people from the first leg are going on to the second, and the ship is nearly empty except for the crew. It feels kind of eerie.

We walked around Seward for a bit but there's not a whole lot of there there. Like every place else we've been it's bracketed by beautiful mountains, but the town itself is not much to look at. You can walk the entire business district from end to end in about ten minutes.

We decided to have lunch in town and ended up in a restaurant called the Smoke Shack, which occupies one of four old rail cars in a complex aptly named the Train Wreck. It has six tables, and apparently we've become thoroughly citified because Nancy and I were both astounded at how slow the service was. It took us about half an hour to get a pulled pork sandwich and a bowl of soup. But it was worth the wait. My sandwich was served with an assortment of three home made barbecue sauces, any one of which would almost have been worth a trip to Seward to try. If you ever find yourself here and you like barbecue (and you're not in a hurry), I can definitely recommend this place.

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