Our Next Adventure….Alaska!

We made it! We left Tuesday afternoon and flew to Minneapolis. We then took off around 9 p.m. and literally chased the sunset the entire 5 1/2 hour flight. We arrived in Anchorage around midnight local time….about 3 a.m. Nebraska time. We all crashed hard when we got to the hotel but spent a full day exploring Anchorage.

We are staying at the Lakefront Lodge…where all the Iditarod dog mushing groups stay each year. Lake Hood is right behind the hotel and it has the busiest seaplane base in Alaska. I went out and took some photos this evening of the planes on the lake and some landing. We left this morning to go downtown and took a trolley ride around the city. The driver’s name was Alice and she was a hoot! She really knew her stuff about Anchorage and Alaska. She sang to us parodies about life in Alaska…about eating roadkill to being a single woman in Alaska. (where the odds are good but the good are odd – referring to the male choices). She had us laughing hysterically most of the time. However, I really didn’t know too much about the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. It was a 9.2 earthquake that lasted 4 minutes. Only 7 people died….and she talked about why it wasn’t several thousand, as it should have been. A lot of God things….high school basketball games cancelled because the Catholic moms called the school district to complain that the game shouldn’t be on Good Friday. It happened in the snowy part of March…in the dark, as it was 5:30 p.m. The neighbors held on to each other as they literally rode the waves of the earthquake and houses got washed into the sea. Because it was Good Friday, the city had closed down early, so most people were home. The earthquake caused a huge crack down the middle of the main street of town. The story was amazing. After the trolley ride, we walked down to the train depot and the Ulu factory. We then walked along the coast…and walked…and walked…and walked. We finally caught an Uber back to the main part of town and had dinner at the 49th State Brewing Company. Rich and Lily had blueberry cream sodas which were bright pink and tasted like liquid cotton candy. I had a yak burger. Yep. When in Rome, people.

I have to say that it is gorgeous here. The flower beds all around the city are amazing. They are so colorful. There are also views of the many different mountain ranges. There are so many walking paths. We walked several miles today. I forgot my watch but Rich’s watch had 22,000 steps at the end of the day. We move to Talkeetna tomorrow. I need to head to bed and get ready for an early start tomorrow, but I leave you with some photos from today. By the way, the temperatures were a full 50 degrees cooler than Las Vegas. It felt wonderful!