June 16, 2018

A Day to Spare

Once in a while it’s too early to go to your next destination for one reason or another and you wind up with a day without having any planned itinerary.  That would be today.  There are a couple things that we were thinking about and another that is Saturday specific so we can fill up our time.

One way to get the day started is to watch a bit of US Open golf.  The good news is that it comes on at 7:00 AM here.  There are also people in our parking lot who are assembling a huge crane.  One of our nearby streets is going to be closed tonight at midnight and we assume the crane will be involved. One of us could watch that all day.

There is a huge outdoor city market on the water side of downtown every Saturday so that is definitely on our agenda.  It has a different feel than markets at home primarily because there is almost zero produce.  There is a main stage with some folksy type of entertainment and a few other buskers scattered about.  There is a lot of leather and furs and tons of things that have been carved from moose antlers and other creature horns, teeth and bones. A big item is of course wildlife photography and most of it is very dramatic.  One river photo had 42 brown bears in the same shot.  It is lunch time when we finish our market rounds and John decides that of all the choices, the reindeer fried rice look like a great idea. Early on it becomes apparent that not all good ideas turn out that way.  Live and learn.

We move along to peek into the big retail in town.  We enter the Penney’s store that leads us further into the downtown mall.  The mall ties into a skyway the takes us into Nordstroms.  We look at each other and wonder why we are doing this.  Let’s move along.

In new cities we always enjoy taking one of the hop on – hop off tour buses. The Anchorage version is a trolley that does a 45-minute tour around town.  We’ve been watching it since we arrived and there is always a very long line.  We cleverly think that if we come back around 3:00 today the line will be shorter as the tour groups get moving into their next activities.  That gives us time to catch up on the Open and the crane from our room.

When we get back the line is still way too long for us.  We give up and decide to do one last walk. We come back past the trolley and it looks like with a 15 minute wait we could still make this happen. It’s good to take the tour to get the lay of the land a few hours before you leave town. It is interesting though. We pass the park that hosts the local midnight sun softball tournament with fifty teams starting at midnight on June 21^st each year. It is a single elimination one-pitch tourney; a strike and you’re out; a ball and you walk; if you get on you’re given a beer and you have to finish it before you can score. Our driver said by the time they finish at about 5:00 am the finalists can hardly stand up. We pass Hood lake which is the home of the largest seaplane base in the world. Alaska leads the country in the number of private pilots per capita by a wide margin. Very impressive.

We are very proud we got that box checked before we leave town in the morning and we have done a nice job of filling up our spare day.  It is out for dinner tonight at Simon & Seaforts a block from our hotel, They have a nice dining room overlooking Cook Inlet but we are shuttled back into a corner.  It is an early Saturday night crowd and the view tables were taken a long time ago. We are lucking out with the bleu cheese stuffed olives in martinis.  Mary has a very nice shellfish pasta with cream sauce and John has a sautéed halibut on King Crab Risotto with sautéed wild mushrooms and a beurre blanc.  We continue to be impressed with the quality of the food we’ve had.  Sticking to seafood might have something to do with it.  Our server had a slight accent and Mary found out he is from Siberia—a first for us.

We took a quick stroll around the neighborhood and paid our respects to the captain Cook monument overlooking the inlet.  We did a final check of the monster crane project in the parking lot and people were milling around at 11:30 waiting to get to work.  It was way too late for us to spend any more time supervising this project.

Today’s Beef: Our hotel is very nice and the people seem pleasant, but the breakfast buffet is always out of something (silverware?  Coffee?) and our room was cleaned today after 5:00 PM.  They just aren’t crisp.