July 2, 2018

Adios Alaska

Our string of nice days continues—we now have two in a row.  We have a 12:50 flight home so a lazy morning.  The hotel breakfast area is packed but we manage to do the waffle and scrambled egg deal.  We have signed up for the 10:15 shuttle but switch to the 9:45 because we’re bored and packed.

The Delta desk isn’t open when we try to check in but they showed up a few minutes later. We ask for directions to the Delta Lounge and are told that they had a working arrangement with the Air Alaska club, but they have now discontinued the relationship. So you’re telling us there is no lounge.  Bummer!

Mary survived the flight here without an early morning shot of booze so there is improvement. But since it is now 10:30 a Bloody Mary might be in order. We find Lynette the bartender who makes a mean bloody, tells us fishing stories with pictures, shares recipes and generally helps us pass the time.

The details of the rest of the story are that the plane left a few minutes early, got to MSP a few minutes early, and we were Ubered home with a load in the wash shortly after 10:00 central time.  Why is it hot and dark here? We now have a sense of Alaska, made some new friends and will have these memories for the rest of our lives.  We’re happy we went and happy to be home.

The texture of our trip home was out the window.  The pilots were beside themselves with a constant play by play pointing out the various landmarks of the St. Elias, Wrangell and Chugach ranges. They said this was the best day ever to see the sights of Alaska.  We’ll finish this edition of the blog with airplane pictures.

July 1, 2018

So This Is What Alaska Looks Like

That is Mary’s line this morning as we stick our heads out on a perfect mountain morning.  The sun is well up at 6:30 when we crawl out and is shimmering off Summit Lake.  The temperature is probably in the low 50s with promise of warmth to come.  We have been mired in clouds and fog with only peeks of sun for so long that this, our last full day of the trip, is when we get the full Monty.  Better late than never.

Breakfast is included with the cabin and the restaurant is full service only for guests.  Mary gets a very nice omelet and John has the eggs, reindeer sausage and home fries.  We meet Marty, the owner, this morning as he is hosting in the dining room.

He was born in New Ulm MN but has had this lodge for 30 years.  He is ready to retire and has two daughters (Meagan from yesterday’s check-in is one of them) ready and willing to take over with their husbands and little kids. They grew up in the business and want the same experience for their kids. Outside of cabins instead of Lodge, this is Manhattan Beach Lodge all over again.  Marty’s 30 years in the business is pretty darn close to when we started 28 years ago.  His dining room furniture is Old Hickory and he had his cabin furniture made by a company in Nisswa, MN.  Just so happens it is the same company, run by our pals Matt and Jeff, that made our lodge furniture.  Small world.  We could have had long conversations about the business but he was working and we weren’t.  He kept coming over to the table whenever he had a minute.

This is a top ten Alaska day.  We only have to get back to Anchorage to turn in the car and check in at our airport hotel, so we have time to dawdle for a while.  We walk around the property for a while and spend a few minutes on the lake shore.  The temps are low enough that the mosquitoes are staying in bed which is an additional treat.  There are a bunch of employees who live on site and they are all scurrying around ready to tidy up cabins as the sluggish guests get ready to leave.  They’re all young folks who clean, bartend, cook, wash dishes and wait tables as needed.  And, of course, there are a couple Uzbeks and Czechs among the group.  Thanks to tour guide Marc who talked us out of last night in Soldotna and forced us to find this place.

Mary hops behind the wheel this morning.  We are giddy about our abundance of gas as we can clearly get to Girdwood and maybe Anchorage on our lawn mower allocation. The drive through the mountains on the Kenai Peninsula and the along the Turnagain Arm is breathtaking.  Everywhere we look there are rivers, lakes, waterfalls and snowcapped mountains without low hanging clouds.  The highway is buzzing this morning with people heading both ways to enjoy the upcoming holiday week.  There is a lineup at the gas station in Girdwood but we decide to stop to grab a few gallons and then will top off at the Costco in Anchorage.

Since this is such a great day we decide to stop at Potters Marsh where we braved the cold and high winds a couple weeks ago.  We get out onto the boardwalk through the wetlands and stop at an outlet to the Turnagain.  Lo and behold there is a school of salmon almost tight underneath us sort of holding in place.  There is a monster on the upstream side with slightly smaller ones behind and the smallest in the rear.  Whenever the big boy moves all of the smaller ones scatter and get back into the right pecking order.  On our last Alaska day we have seen our first swimming salmon.  Amen brothers and sisters.

We are full of ourselves walking back to the other end of the boardwalk when Mary says, “stop.” Right is front of us is a Mama moose checking us out from 30 feet away.  Deciding that we were not friend or food she ducked back into the woods and left us with our final wildlife experience of the trip.  It is now Moose 6, and Whales 6 with a remarkable comeback at the last minute by the moose.

We continue to kill time in Anchorage, get gassed up at Costco and split a Schlotzky.  Our phones are suddenly non-functional which we later found was a limitation of our roaming capabilities on the ATT network in Alaska.  We are GPS-less.  We have to find the airport and our airport hotel without our security blanket.  The airport is pretty easy but we dance around in circles trying to figure out how to get to the hotel we can see from the highway.  We finally arrive, unload our 3-week’s worth of mess and make arrangements to get picked up by the shuttle when we return the car.

We can walk to dinner at the Lakefront Inn, right on Lake Hood, the seaplane base at the airport.  They have a very big patio with great lake views and on this most beautiful night they are absolutely slammed.  We are seated inside where a real Alaskan is playing the guitar and singing in the first of several dining rooms.  It takes 15 minutes for us to be acknowledged and finally the Assistant F&B director gets us a beer.  We place our food order at the same time in hopes of jumping the line a little. The beers and food arrive pretty promptly but Mary asks for mustard from the food runner and it all goes downhill from there.  John is eating his jalapeno chicken sandwich while Mary is waiting for her mustard.  A harried waiter shows up after another ten minutes apologizing for being tied up and Mary asks again for mustard.  Ten minutes later Mary has taken a couple bites of her sandwich with no mustard and we get the F&B manager again.  She says she will give us a credit and get us the check.  There is a $5 credit on the bill which Mary explains nicely is unacceptable.  Reluctantly the Mgr. takes off Mary’s food and the bill is finally settled. The restaurant in this case has screwed up at least three times on one table, the food is uneaten and they want to get cheap about it.  Say you’re sorry, comp the check (which might cost ten bucks in food cost) and move along.  Sheesh.

It is a nice walk back to the hotel, bad restaurant experience is in the rear view mirror and we won’t let it spoil this great day.

Last day conversation: We have immersed ourselves in the business of Alaska to have a sense of the place, a knowledge of the geography and a friendship with a few of the people.  What more can you ask from travel.

June23, 2018

The Road to Cicely, Alaska

Or maybe from Cicely, Alaska.  Cicely is of course the quirky fictional little Alaskan town that was the setting for “Northern Exposure.” There has been speculation about what the real model was for Cicely and yesterday’s Seward and today’s Talkeetna are included in the mix.  Skagway is also mentioned as providing some inspiration.

We have a real sit-down breakfast this morning.  Our $20 breakfast credit almost covers our two salmon omelets with avocado and hollandaise in the hotel casual café.  We are enjoying our very nice room and don’t get on the road until 11:00.  Talkeetna is about three hours up the Glenn highway to Palmer and then the Parks highway heading north.

We would vote for Talkeetna as the true Cicely but not today.  It is a town of 450 independent-minded souls in an old mining town 14 miles on a no-outlet road off the main highway.  It is hard on the Susitna River and allegedly moose on main street are not uncommon.  It also is famous for electing a cat as mayor and our host here proclaimed the cat to be, on average, one of the better administrators the town ever had.  It is also a base for sightseeing flights to Denali, about 140 miles away.

But today, a nice June Saturday afternoon, it is home to a couple thousand tourists and the parade of the big white elephants (tour buses).  There is entertainment in the town park, bar patios packed with folks and the feel of a state fair.  It might be Cicely in February but not today.  There are some true characters around, but in this setting they feel like they are just actors in the play.  There are also a lot of “Pride” signs and rainbow flags which seem either out of place or in keeping with the live-and-let-live you might imagine in this part of Alaska.

We check into our cabin at Denali Fireside about a third of a mile from the center of town.  Our desk host is a jack-of-all trades from Montenegro.  We interrupt his cleaning of the rooms and later he will be out with Don, our host, building a new cabin on a back corner of the property.  It is an easy walk into the center and we explore for a couple hours spending some time in the park and more time on a bench on Main street watching the action.  We expected a more rustic experience, but so probably did everyone else who is here today.

We go next door to “Latitude 62” for dinner and grab a seat at the bar. John is still in beef mode and has the Saturday special prime rib with mashed potatoes.  Mary has the “Wendy’s Dinner,” a bowl of chili and a loaded baked potato.  Next to Mary is a transplant from Boston who was moved to Anchorage as a Walgreen’s manager.  She is very chatty about her life in Anchorage and her visits to Talkeetna to visit a friend.  The owner of the restaurant makes an appearance.  She is about 60 years old, 6’2” and about 240 lbs.  Her personality is as big as she is and she definitely makes an entrance as she works the room.  Maybe we have finally found Cicely, Alaska.

Back to our cabin.  We are 100 feet from the main rail line between Fairbanks, Denali and Anchorage and have been warned that there is a midnight train.  If it passes through, we are unaware of it.  Must be the mountain air.

Today’s Question:  Would the people of Talkeetna be happier if we all weren’t here visiting, or are they now too dependent on the tourist dollars?  Four months of noise and cash is probably a fair trade-off for 8 months of quiet.

June 22, 2018

Errand Day

We’re at the halfway point of our trip which in this case is laundry day.  After laundry we are going to transition between our “water week” into our “mountain week” which will require a one nighter in Anchorage tonight.

We mention our lack of housekeeping to the desk guy at checkout this morning which gets us a $50 credit. Seems about right. We (Mary) have separated our laundry into a couple big plastic bags which we drag into the “Suds and Swirl” a couple blocks from the hotel. The hotel had a guest laundry but we like a place with multiple machines so we can get it all going at once. We’re all folded and repacked by 11:00 and on the road.  There weren’t a lot of machines and people poured in after us so we were lucky to get it done so fast.

It is spitting rain this morning—what else is new. The Seward Highway is really a pretty drive with gray skies, and we can only imagine it with blue skies and sunshine.  We’ll have to buy the Chamber of Commerce book. At one point we were passing a low marshy looking area where an adult moose was munching her way to the other side. We nosed around the property of the Summit Lake Lodge where we will be completing our circle back to Anchorage and our trip home next week.

We’re all the way back to Girdwood before we get hungry enough to eat and we remember the local Subway.  Perfect. Costco is our next stop on out way back into Anchorage where we check out their inventory of dip nets, kayaks and gin.  We only buy one of those.

We had booked the Voyager Inn again for our hotel tonight but we got the “plumbing problem” call from front desk guy Michael.  They have upgraded us to a junior suite at the Captain Cook across the street.  It is a corner room on the 15^th floor with great views to the east and south and separate living and sleeping rooms.  Nothing junior about it.  We get the $12 Voyager parking instead of the $30 Captain Cook valet and a $20 credit for breakfast in the restaurant. It is the best of both worlds. We complained about the high cost of lodging in Alaska, but part of that is our own doing. Our room in Seward was referred to as the Presidential Suite and they weren’t kidding.  This place tonight is very special indeed.

Dinner tonight is at the Glacier Brewhouse once again.  We made reservations before we left last week.  There is again a line out the door and this very big place is packed.  Our server is from Serbia, has been here for three years and she is very professionally friendly. We need to take a break from salmon and halibut.  John gets a flat iron steak cooked over a blazing alder wood fire and Mary has a very rich Cajun pasta.  If we were to ever return to Anchorage we would eat here every night.

We finish the night watching the midnight sun from our 15^th floor living room window—gosh that’s almost like home.

Today’s news:  A 72-year-old kayaker from California drowned in the Kenai River.  He wasn’t wearing a life jacket. He died from stupidity.

June 17 - 18, 2018

Unfulfilled Plans

June 17, 2018.  Our city days are done and now we’re off for our water week on the Kenai Peninsula.  It is still spitting rain this morning.  Whatever the giant crane was used for last night is not evident to us.  We got up at 6:00 this morning and the crews had already dismantled the big derrick attached to the crane and were packing up the rest of their supplies.  Round the clock daylight comes in pretty handy for jobs in traffic areas.

We’re on the road before 10:00 which is pretty good for us.  It is not a long driving day but there are some stops we want to make along the way.  The first is Costco where we pick up some breakfast bars and try to buy some booze but liquor is not available on Sunday until noon. 

There are just a few highways in Alaska and while they have numbers, they are usually referred to by name. Today we are on Alaska 1 south which is the Seward Highway.  When we went to Palmer we were on Alaska 1 north which is the Glenn Highway.  Our first stop about 15 minutes into our trip is Potters Marsh.  This is a several hundred-acre wetland across the road from the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet.  There is about a mile of elevated boardwalk that allows humans to invade this natural area without disturbing the flora and fauna that exists there.  It is mostly a habitat for birds but there are bears and moose who venture in from the nearby woods and hills.

There is a small problem for us.  The wind is blowing at a sustained 40 mph with gusts into the 60s.  It is 57 degrees so walking into the wind is blinding which is inconvenient on a sight-seeing trip.  We do see an eagle in it’s nest and tons of geese with brand new hatchlings.  Our only other discovery is a collection of moose tracks paralleling the boardwalk.

We are staying in Girdwood tonight at Hidden Creek B&B which is near the Alyeska ski hill.  We explore the neighborhood around the ski area and nose around in the Alyeska Hotel.  The hotel, at this time of year, seems to be a wedding destination.  They also have a restaurant on top of the mountain which couples a dinner with the tram ride up for 39 bucks.  It would be very attractive on a sunny day.  There are leftovers from our last two dinners in our backseat that become lunch at the base of the ski hill which is also very attractive if you’re hungry.

We continue south for our next adventure, the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. But, and this will be a continuing theme, it is starting to rain.  There is a mile and a half walk or drive which is one of the highlights of this facility, but we would prefer the walk and we aren’t going to do it in the rain.  We will go past here two more times this week, so we will wait for better weather.

We veer off to the east to Portage Glacier.  There is a well maintained welcome center manned by the National Park service where we spend a couple rainy hours watching movies and meandering through displays of all the stuff we would be looking at outside if it were sunny. There is a “Salmon Viewing area” just up the road and we pull up our rain hoods to look into this shallow clear creek, but the salmon didn’t get the message.  None present.

We give up for the day and head back to Girdwood and our B&B.  The hosts aren’t here but have left a note to get us into our room.  They have three guest rooms on the lower level of their very nice home and all are occupied tonight. John visits with hosts Ron and Michele and dog Bailey when they return from a walk while Mary gets us settled in.  They recommend “Chair 5” for a burger and beer which is our preferred dinner for tonight.  We change our tune when we arrive however and each get a dinner salad and split the “Halibut & Chips” dinner.  Everything is mediocre but the place is packed by the time we leave (including a walk-in party of 22) so it must be a local favorite.

It is cloudy, spitting rain and mosquitoes so we forego an after dinner walk and go back to reading and computer stuff until bed time.

Today’s observation:  Weather affects attitude as much as activities when traveling.

June 18, 2018. There is a reason these two days are combined. Because today was non-existent. We are up and at ‘em at 6:00 this morning.  At 6:10 the power in our room goes out.  Host Ron has a generator that keeps some upstairs lights and the pump running.  That means we can shower by the light of the Kindle and pack by the light of a borrowed flashlight.  The stove is gas so we can join fellow guests Gary and Nonnie from Roanoke and Georgia and Dennis from Indiana for a candle light breakfast.  There is a lot of smoked salmon and reindeer sausage with scrambled eggs and bagels.  All’s well that ends well.

It has been raining all night but it is letting up as we get our stuff to the car. We have a glacier cruise scheduled today and need to make the 10:30 tunnel opening to get to the port city of Whittier. We backtrack our route from yesterday heading east to Portage.  As we go through Portage the wind is going crazy and the rain has returned in full force.  The car is rocking back and forth and the windshield wipers can’t keep up.  The phone chimes with an email message from the cruise company telling us all cruises have been cancelled today. Our lodging reservation is in Whittier tonight so we have nowhere else to go. We make it through the tunnel, check with the hotel (Whittier Inn) and they hope they will have some rooms available for check-in about 1:00 pm.  The guy at the desk says the problem is that none of the people currently there want to leave in that weather.

There is no sense dragging this out. We do the five minute drive around town and the only point of interest is the skeleton of a building that housed 1000 soldiers and sailors in the 50’s.  Now it is only a shell.  We read until we can get into a room at 1:00 as promised.  Then we have some really good smoked salmon chowder with a beer.  Then we read.  Then at dinner we have some really good smoked salmon chowder, a bottle of wine and a flatbread.  The we go to bed.

The evening news tells us that we had 4 inches of rain today with a brutal wind. One of the front desk guys says his other job is on one of the cruise boats and they have never cancelled—today was the first.  The only boat that would have gone out would be an Ark piloted by Noah.  It was biblical.

More News:  The “Slam’n Salm’n” fishing tournament has been cancelled because there are no fish.

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.

June 15, 2018

On the Hunt for Critters

We’re on the move today.  We have been without a vehicle for our first few days in Anchorage as we explored the center of the city.  As city folks ourselves, we are pretty good at walking a few miles in an urban area, so this fits our normal lifestyle.  We pick up a car today for the rest of our trip as we spend next week south and the following week north. 

After breakfast we Uber out to the airport for our car.  We use Mary’s phone for the Uber this time and it works just as it should.  We still haven’t figured out what is wrong with John’s.  The driver is a good guy, retired military and has been an Alaskan since the 80’s.  We have rented the car through Costco and the fellow at the counter is really impressed with our rate.  Cars are painfully expensive here—usually well over $100 per day on a longer-term rental.  Ours is about $72 which is still too expensive but better.

Our destination for this day trip is the Mat-Su Valley and its anchor cities of Palmer and Wasilla. This is farm country about 50 miles north of Anchorage with wind whipping up through the Cook Inlet and funneled through this valley between mountains.  In the 30’s a bunch of Minnesotans and Wisconsinites were enticed with an offer of free land and transportation to settle this area and start growing food crops.  As our trip consultant Marc said, where do you think Sarah Palin got her accent.  She was a realtor and mayor of Wasilla before moving to the Governorship and beyond.  The folks from our part of the world were apparently unfazed by the climate.

Our first stop is the Info center in Palmer.  There is a Kentucky woman (Neil Diamond song) tending the counter and she gives us a few pointers about sites to visit.  She is not big on Wasilla because they apparently are the chief rival of Palmer.  Huh!  There is a little market underway outside the visitor center but most of the vendors have shut down because they couldn’t keep their tents anchored with the high winds.  There is weather coming in for the next few days and we feel the beginning of it.

Just east of the city there is a Musk Ox farm that is dedicated to the preservation of these big furry creatures.  We take a half-hour tour and get the dope on why these things live in the uninhabitable tundra and why they seem to enjoy bashing their massive heads into things.  Our guide, Delta, is a pre-med student and a direct descendent of one of the original settlers.  She is going full circle as her next move will be med school in Minnesota.

We go back into town and see what’s left of the market.  It isn’t raining yet but will soon.  It is Subway for lunch today.  There is a line at the counter, so this must be the place in town for lunch. Our next recommended stop is a rescue farm south of town where they have misfit reindeer, moose, yaks and every other sort of abandoned creature.  As we arrive there is a steady rain, lots of wind and the temps have dropped into the low 50’s and since this is a walk-about tour we decide to leave it for another day. As a consolation prize there is an adolescent moose grazing along the highway and we stop for a few pictures.  He was a very accommodating model.

On to Wasilla. The attraction in town is the Iditarod Information Center.  The Iditarod Sled Dog Race is about 1100 miles long from Anchorage to Nome and passes through Wasilla along the way.  We have been told that there is always a musher and team on-site as well as a lot of race memorabilia.  Well, the host at the center tells us that he has been there a few years, and this is the first summer day he remembers that there hasn’t been a sled team present.  What else are we missing?  He tells us that Tom Brady and the lovely Giselle were there about 4 hours ago.  And it’s raining.  Not our most successful day of travel.  We do watch the movie about the race, the dogs and the process in a darkened room where we both get a refreshing 3-minute nap.

After a short drive around Wasilla and the neighboring lakes (no Sarah visible--are Tom and Giselle staying with her?) we head back south to Anchorage and our hotel.  It’s after 4:00 when we get back for a quick rest before our manager’s happy hour. We sip a wine and discuss walking a few blocks to Humpy’s for a burger and a beer.  It is a steady heavy rain now, and a couple at another table are ordering a pizza to eat in.  Hmmm.  Why wouldn’t we do that?  So we do.  Again, for those folks who accuse us of writing a food blog, our meals today were a weak hotel buffet, a tuna sub from Subway and a delivery pizza from Capri.  The pizza was good though and we have some left.

Interesting fact:  Tom and Giselle do the same things we do, and they missed the sled dog team too.

June 14, 2018

Native golf bag totem

Big Plans

We have some plans today other than just wandering about.  Later we will learn that plans can unravel quickly or just be ill conceived.  Maybe both.

We start with our usual hotel breakfast.  Our primary entertainment at breakfast is watching the hordes of people line up on the sidewalk across the street at the Captain Cook Hotel waiting for their buses.  Luggage spills almost to the end of the block going away from us.  In Greece the locals referred to this as the march of the elephants as the big white buses come lumbering up the street.  The Alaskans seem to be members of a unique social culture, but ‘there is gold in them thar buses that bring strangers into their midst’.  Everyone seems to be having a good time.

We hike in a new direction this morning down 6^th street heading, we think, east.  We get our first peak at some of the big shopping that we missed while on our sweatshirt hunt.  There is a Penneys and Nordstroms in full throwback mode to downtown free-standing department stores.  There is also a real downtown mall with smaller retail.  There are a couple Costcos on the outskirts of town and REI is moving into a 49000 sq. ft. space that formerly housed a Sears.

Destination number one is the Alaska Heritage Museum.  This is a four story monster sitting on nicely landscaped grounds.  Any city would be proud of the facility.  We are instructed to start on the fourth floor and work our way down.  That seems to be the chronological approach as we are starting with early art and artifacts of the original inhabitants. We are a little surprised (but shouldn’t be) that there has been trade, commerce, battles and comingling of the original clans between Alaska and Russia for thousands of years.  Included are all of the original native tribes that spread across the western half of North America.

Spices of the Americas

Moving downstairs the history moves through tribal customs and relations, hunting wildlife and coping with a less than ideal environment.  Then the relationships with government, oil companies, railroads and military.  The continuing theme throughout is the loss of heritage through “civilization” and the recent rediscovery of the culture that had been feared lost.  The whole thing was very interesting—three hours interesting which is a record for us.

It is after 2:00 when we get back to the shuttle bus pick up spot on 4^th street.  If you want to get to any interesting sites in town this is where you get the shuttle to them.  Our next destination is the zoo which specializes in critters of this part of the world.  There is a hand-written sign on the shuttle schedule that tells us that the last shuttle to the zoo is at 12:15 and the zoo will be closed at 3:00.  We haven’t mentioned that this is a top ten Anchorage weather day with temps pushing 79 and bright blue skies.  Why didn’t we go to the zoo first?  Why didn’t we do the museum tomorrow with rain predicted? Idiots.

OK, new plan.  We will get another sausage sandwich from the guy on the corner and then catch the shuttle to the Ulu factory.  We opt for bratwurst today which is a more sensible choice and go with the kraut instead of the jalapenos.  The Ulu is a native cutting tool that looks like a pastry knife but is suitable for making salsa or dismembering a whale or sea lion.  It is also used for cleaning and prepping a salmon for drying.  They are sold all over town but the reality of using one seems like a losing proposition.  We have spent 3 hours today looking at pictures of native Alaskans wielding their Ulus in all sorts of scenarios so now we get to see them made.  That is a semi-interesting half hour and we succeeded in escaping the gift store without buying ulus for all of our friends and relatives.

We grab our late afternoon beer on the roof of the 49^th State Brewery along with ahi nachos that are dynamite.  It is 70-degrees out and we loll around watching the planes land and the tide come in.  A good way to finish the day.  And finish we did.  No hotel happy hour and no dinner.  A little TV and we almost got to sunset at 11:37. A low activity day and we will only have a couple more of those on this trip.

Sun almost set 11: 35 PM

Observation of the day:  No sales tax on anything.  What a surprise when a restaurant check comes and it only includes the prices on the menu.

June 13, 2018

Getting Acquainted

We’ve settled in to our first few days in Anchorage and first impressions are out of the way.  Today has been set aside for exploring our immediate surroundings in and around downtown.

Our hotel breakfast is as expected.  One chafing dish with the premade cheese omelets, sausages and a potato onion mixture.  There is also a robotic pancake maker that creates a little flat thing that looks and has the texture of a white lily pad. When we think machines are going to take over the world this one ensures the future of human involvement.  Oh well, it’s all about butter and syrup.

There is a huge difference between Anchorage in June and Anchorage in January.  We haven’t been here in January, but downtown today is packed.  The tour groups and countless others like us have been unleashed on the city so the sidewalks, parks and t-shirt shops are brimming with families and oldsters.  Actually, they would be t-shirt shops in the south but here they are more appropriately sweatshirt shops.  It is going to be mid-sixties with blue skies today and everyone is taking advantage.

Our itinerary involves walking from one end of 4^th street to the other.  4th street serves as the retail active main street of downtown with tons of shops and sausage vendors on every corner.  After browsing a couple of tourist traps (which we kind of like) we head for the Federal Building which houses the National Park Service information center.  Being a federal facility, we go through the heavy-duty scans which leads to a short conversation between John and an officer discussing new knees.  The center is well done with all sorts of stuffed critters, topographical displays and a series of movies and talks by park rangers.  The U.S. government claimed 150 million acres of state land to be set aside for parks and preserves in the late 70’s which did not sit well with the locals at the time.  Apparently, all is forgiven now with tourism booming and dollars rolling in.

We continue our stroll down to Ship Creek which is the only place in the country with an active salmon fishing river right in the middle of a large urban area.  There are several people wading or fishing from shore.  The river is down because it is low tide right now and we later learn that the best fishing is at high tide making it an easier trip for the fish upstream.  Nobody catches anything while we watch.  There has been a lot of talk on the news about the salmon population being down.  Kings are catch and release only until mid-July and the copper river sockeyes are being limited.  Fish prices will be going up

Fishing on Ship Creek

We move back to the streets and find a sausage stand that we picked out earlier.  We both have a hot reindeer sausage sandwich with a habanero sauce and John adds jalapenos.  There will be a price to pay for that.  We had reindeer sausages in Helsinki, but these are better.  John thinks there is a red glow from his sausage and concludes that it has been made from reindeer nose.

We do some more wandering about exploring a couple different streets and Mary returns to an earlier shop for a new sweatshirt.  The tourist info center has a stack of postcards and will stamp and mail them for you at no charge. We discover the Ulu knife that is manufactured locally.  It looks like a pastry knife with a curved blade and has its roots in native fish and critter processing. We saw the factory down by the creek and every store is selling them.

Time for a mid-afternoon beer. We go to the 49^th State Brewing Company which has a large rooftop deck.  There is a 20-minute wait for a seat up there.  It is 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon and the place is packed. Good grief. We move a couple blocks to Glacier Brewing (where we will have dinner tonight) and get the last two seats at the bar. Well, it’s nice to see folks making some bucks while the going is good. Repeat from yesterday.  A little laydown for more catch up to the time change and a couple glasses of wine at the hotel reception. 

4th Street Anchorage

Glacier Brewing has come highly recommended (Thanks Marc) with a much higher food concentration than most brew pubs.  We have a 7:15 reservation and there is a line out the door with people waiting for tables. We have been accused of using this space as a food blog, not much about travel. Well, here we go again. We are seated at 7:13 and we both have a classic martini and our server stuffs a couple olives with bleu cheese—they arrive at 7:25 when we place our order.  Mary has a smoked salmon spread with crostini and a cup of local seafood chowder; John has an Alderwood flame grilled halibut with a pinot demi, grilled asparagus and garlic mashed.  They arrive at 7:40 and both are unbelievably good.  Check please!  Great food, great server and we are out the door at 8:05.  Yes, sometimes it is nice to linger over a great meal and we could have had coffee and dessert, but to see a packed house like this figure out how to keep the process moving is a real nod to their professionalism.  And they have others waiting for our table.  That will help pay their staff in January.

Back to bed slightly later tonight. We’ll be on Alaska time when we are heading home.

Observation:  At least a hundred people standing outside the Captain Cook Hotel across the street waiting for buses with a couple hundred pieces of luggage lined up on the sidewalk.  Ouch!

June 12, 2018

Here’s to 50

This is our first “Big” trip in a number of years—three to be exact.  We’re off to Alaska for three weeks of driving around and seeing the sights.  We’re not exactly sure why we are doing this.  There is no burning desire to see a moose, bear or mountain goat.  We’ve done that.  Mountains and Oceans?  Sure, that’s always nice.  But Alaska has been on our list for a long time and perhaps we have forgotten why or how it got there in the first place, but now that it has risen to the top we are on our way.  Based on dozens of conversations we have had, we’ll find out why we want to go when we get there.

Then there is the 50-state thing.  We have been to the other 49 multiple times.  As Mary has said we might be going just to tick the box.  Our expectations are really much higher than that, but what the heck, the box will be checked. 

Our first day did not start as expected.  We had an off-the-clock Uber driver scheduled for a 4:45 am pick up to get to the airport.  At 4:50 we called both numbers we had for him with no answer on either.  At 5:00 we cranked up our Uber app which for some reason would not let us get past the payment screen.  An advantage of living downtown, we hustled the three blocks to the front of the Hyatt and grabbed a cab.  No harm done.  We later received a text from the original driver that they were late at the hospital with an injured son and couldn’t make it out of bed for the pickup.  It’s always something.

There were a hundred people in our TSA line at the airport.  Really, there was a guy counting.  We are using miles for the front of the plane, so we skirted around to the preferred check in where there were five people in front of us.  Our question: “how can there be a hundred people in line at 5:30 am on a Tuesday?”  Unbelievable.

We had a 757 to Seattle and then a 737 to Anchorage.  Both flights were about three hours and it was 13 hours total from our 3:30 wake up in Minneapolis to being in our room in Anchorage at 1:30 local time.  Not bad.  Our Uber failed to work again—we have to find out what the problem is—and we took a cab from the Airport to our downtown hotel.

The cab driver told us that over half of the population of Alaska lives within 50 miles of Anchorage so there is a lot of open space.  Anchorage itself has a population of about 300,000, about the size of St. Paul without Minneapolis attached to it.  It is not as vertical as St. Paul.  The architecture is low slung and boxy.  It feels sort of western like a Sacramento.  About half of the downtown seems to be surface parking lots which have basically been banned at home, so it feels like there is a lot of sky.  The streets are very orderly with numbered streets going one way and lettered streets going the other.  We are at the Voyageur Hotel on 5^th and “K”, a boutique hotel that was once independent but is now owned by the larger Captain Cook across the street.  Our room is spacious with four actual chairs, a king bed and small kitchenette.  There is a manager’s cocktail hour in the afternoon and breakfast in the morning—very civilized.  Most of our fellow lodgers are cruisers who arrived on a bus and will take a train to Denali or be bussed back to their ships.

We need to move around, or crash and we opt to move.  Anchorage sits on a northern arm of the Cook Inlet with downtown on the water.  It’s a few block walk for us downhill to Elderberry Park on the shore.  We are a little taken aback by the quarter mile of mud and muck that leads out to the water until Mary wisely says, “it must be low tide.”  Ah, we Midwesterners.  We join a few others sitting in the park and looking at the water with the mountains in the background.   It’s 59 degrees and the folks in the park are in shorts and t-shirts and a couple have shirts off soaking up some sun.  Someone suggested we bring warm clothes.  We said in Minnesota we just call them clothes, but this is pushing it a little.

We walk for 15 minutes along the water past a large freight processing area.  It looks like freight arrives by tug and barge. We move back up the hill into the other side of downtown and work our way back for nap time.  We’re proud of staying up until now and we have to be alert for the Manager’s reception.

The reception is a quiet affair.  There are a few cruise/tour folks hanging out and discussing their plan to have their luggage in the hallway at 6:00 am.  This may appeal to us someday, but we aren’t there yet.  After a couple glasses of wine, we decide we will check out the casual bistro, the Whale’s Tail, at the Captain Cook across the street.  We have no ambition for a big salmon or halibut dinner and are looking for a snack and beer.  Two new things for us:  We must show ID to get into the restaurant (you have to be 21 to enter any place that serves alcohol); and they have a self-serve wine bar.  You buy a $10 card at the bar, shove it into the machine and pour yourself a 2 ,4, or 6 oz. pour.  They have a Caymus cab for $12, $24, and $36 respectively.  We skip the wine, get a couple local beers and split a burger and order of pretzels with cheese sauce.

We pull the shades but try to stay up as long as possible to get on Alaskan time.  Sunset is at 11:30 and sunrise is 4:30. We don’t last long but have made a little progress on our time adjustment.

The news today:  A local city politician when discussing a land deal in the works said, “The citizens of the city are going to take it in the shorts.”  She is obviously the heir apparent to Sarah Palin.