I've been flying since 2004. I trained at a Class D airport on the outskirts of Boston, and a couple years later moved to Alaska.
An alternator failure is actually one of the least scary things on the "things that can go wrong" list. The engine continues to hum along just fine... you just realize that you're running all the electrical stuff (like the radios and transponder) on battery power and you don't know how long it'll last. In my case, it was the first time I'd ever had any kind of failure in-flight, and it was just a "oh. huh. guess I'd better turn nonessentials off, and land before I lose the radios" kind of event.
I was on a summer-long "airplane road trip" at the time, and keeping a blog about the whole experience:
http://beetlejuiceadventure.wordpress.com
If you rewind it all the way to the beginning, eventually you'll find the Sac Exec story.