Touring in Anchorage

We left the hotel this morning to go to the welcome center to make boat reservations. Someone yelled Hi, Santa. It was Ed, from Texas, our new "A" friend that helped us on the Alaska Highway when we had the wheel bearing problem. His wife had join him and they were going to tour Alaska for a few weeks. (The top photo)

Wednesday, we are going from Whittier to Valdez, a 6 hour boat trip. We will be able to see the glaciers and hopefully lots of sea life. Tomorrow we will have a lazy day but the good news is we have been invited to an antique car club solstice picnic. It has a lot of Model A's in it and there will be a variety of older cars. Ray & Jim plan to clean up our cars tomorrow prior to the picnic. 

We wanted to take our cars to the bay for photos but everywhre was off limits. I guess that is because of the Homeland Security Act. One place that we visited was the Ulu Eskimo Factory. These are fan shaped knives that Eskimos used to skin meat. Someone told Jim & Rose about a bird sanctuary and how nice it was. It wasn't anything more than a paved walking trail beside railroad tracks. Oh well at least we got some exercise. On the way out, we went by the Alaska statehood monument. It had a nice setting. Our travel brochures mention a dog sledding show. It turns out that it is not open on Monday but they were willing to let us walk through the kennels for $15.00 each. We passed on that. The Anchorage Museum was full in interesting facts about the different Eskimo tribes and their clothing, tools, etc. There were a lot of gold rush pictures too. When we were ready to leave, I saw a group of school children with clip boards drawing some of the items on display.  The teacher in me had to ask what they were doing. I met their teacher, a native who has made some reproductions of natives tools, shields etc. on display at the museum. He gave is his card he told us that he has things on display at Valdez, where we are going Wednesday. I am hoping to go the the museum in Valdez. We headed back to the hotel for a few hours to rest before dinner. Humpy's Restaunant came highly recommended and all of us wanted to have salmon in Alaska. So we went there. I got the crab & everyone else got the salmon. I was the only one with a good meal.  What a bummer!

We didn't add much mileage today because we just stayed in town.