Alaska #2 - Anchorage
Thursday's adventures
Event and wildlife tracker:
Mountains: many
Black-billed magpie: a bazillion
Moose: 1
Reindeer (caribou?): 1 herd
Secretary McMahon: once on TV, zero times in the state though we did walk by the federal building downtown
Screws in the rental car’s tire: 1
Orthodox cathedrals: 1
Started Thursday off strong with some smoked salmon bagels and coffees. The mountains here are crazy. Reminds me of Salt Lake City. We walked a lot, including this pedestrian/bike path along the mudflats where we saw lots of birds - I’d never seen a magpie before; they’re larger than I would have guessed.
After that we explored downtown Anchorage, and went to Anchorage Pel’meni which has Alaskan dumplings (beef and potato) plus a record player! I’ve never used a record player before but it was pretty easy to figure out (to my record fan friend: you know who you are, and yes I did think of our many music conversations while figuring out this record player).
Outside of city hall was a street vendor selling reindeer hot dogs, which we had to try. Also, the populace in Anchorage really runs the whole range. We saw lots of business/government people dressed for work at lunch, people wearing casual clothes, and also people who looked like time travelers plucked out of the 1849 Gold Rush.
We visited 49th State Brewing and had a gem of a waitress. Amethyst was so friendly and spent 10 minutes at the end of our meal writing down recommendations and local tips on the back of our receipt, not just in Anchorage, but also for Denali and Seward.
After finishing downtown, we attempted to visit the Native Alaskan Heritage Center, which was unfortunately closed for a private event. We were very excited to visit, but alas. We may try to hit it on our way passing back through Anchorage.
In our second fail of the day, we attempted to visit St Innocent Orthodox Cathedral. I love St Innocent of Alaska (though the cathedral’s primary patron is St Innocent of Irkutsk) and saw they had an akathist for St Herman on Thursday night, so I was hopeful someone would be in the building early. No luck, so we had to make do with the outside view.
In our third fail of the day, we found a screw in our tire. So that was nice. Set us back about an hour and a half but only $35. If you’re going to be stuck somewhere needing to repair a tire, there are worse backdrops you could ask for.
Finally set off and hitting the road, we zoomed north, heading towards Cantwell, our base of operations during our Denali leg. These mountains y’all. This place is right out of Narnia.
P.S. Sasquatch? Yeti? Bigfoot? Zoom in - you tell me.
P.P.S. I’m behind on posts and will clearly not be doing daily updates. Stay tuned for Denali NP, Talkeetna, and the drive south to Seward… plus whatever comes after that that I haven’t experienced yet.