Day 2 Anchorage

We explored Anchorage on bikes today (thanks Jill and Mark!).  We biked down the miles of bike paths that wind through greenways and parks from our hosts' house to downtown.  From Hillside Park at 80th Street and Elmore Road, we headed north through U of A, past Goose Lake Park, and to the Chester Creek Greenbelt that extends west all the way to the water and downtown.  We were hoping to see some of the promised moose (supposedly everywhere!) but no luck.

With the weather being so wonderful, we couldn't bring ourselves to go into the museum to see the new gold exhibit.  We just walked the small area of downtown absorbing the atmosphere.  Had a great crab lunch at a tourist trap called Phyllis' Cafe & Salmon Bake (http://www.phyllisscafe.com/).  If that's a tourist trap, I'm fine with tourist traps...actually Alaska is pretty much a tourist trap.  Strolling along the main streets of downtown, it's mostly souvenir shops (check out http://www.grizzlysgifts.com/ for a taste of the immense amounts of useless stuff you can buy). 

Dinner at Moose's Tooth Pub & Pizzeria with Jill and Mark was awesome.  Lots of garlic, great pizza, great beer, friendly atmosphere, and packed.  A great way to end our first day in Alaska, but we were anticipating the real start of our journey the following day when we set off in a rental car to the Kenai Peninsula.

Planning and Day 1

Planning

Paul and I talked about Alaska for about a year before we actually started planning a trip. Immediately there was a debate about how much time we would spend. Our grand delusions of taking a road trip around BC and up to Alaska all in one go dissolved once we realized that it would take us about 40 hours just to drive directly from Vancouver to Anchorage - and that's if we didn't stop to see anything along the way. Needless to say, Paul and I opted out of the road trip option and hopped a plane directly from Vancouver BC to Anchorage instead. That decision resulted in an extra week spent in Alaska, as opposed to in the car. We also saved a ton of money by not taking our car on the ferry leg of our journey.

Day 1

Descending into Anchorage was fantastic. We could see the Alaska Range in the distance and Paul already had the camera pointed out the airplane window. We had braced ourselves for three weeks of rain (and maybe some snow), but somehow the sun was shining and it was ~60 degrees! This was the beginning of the great luck that followed us throughout our journey. We took a taxi to our gracious hosts' house (an old friend from High School and her husband) and planned our first day in Alaska - touring the state's largest city on bikes.

We used a GPS called SPOT with subscription service to send email to family about our location.  Here is the first one.

SPOT Check OK.

Latitude:61.1479

Longitude:-149.8047

Time:08/21/2009 17:00:01 (GMT)

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=61.1479,-149.8047&ll=61.1479,-149.8047&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1