Continuing with our Anchorage update after our run down to Seward yesterday we were pretty beat last night and decided to spend today just in and around Anchorage doing little driving and visiting a few select locations.
We started out with breakfast here in the hotel. Breakfast has been very interesting here in that it has been so packed both mornings that it is hard to even get in to get food and extremely difficult to find anyplace to sit and eat. Apparently many tourist buses use this hotel and their clientele are generally in the lobby and at breakfast in that 7: 00 am to 9:00 am window when we try to get breakfast. Since we went a little later in the morning today we were able to get food and a table to sit and have breakfast at the hotel before we left for our first stop.
Our first stop was actually in walking distance of our hotel although we didn't know that when we left,. We went to Lake Spenard which is just a little ways across the street from our hotel. That lake connects with Lake Hood to form a float plane airport. We found a great bench right along the lake from which to watch planes take off and land. With some beautiful morning sunshine it made for a nice relaxing hour of activity. We got a number of videos of planes landing and taking off but Blogger seems to have a problem with my videos and won't play them once they are uploaded. I'll keep working on that.
After the clouds came along on and covered up our sunshine it got a bit chilly so we decided to move on and find another activity. There is a park area north and east of here that is called McKinley View park. We had heard that Mt. Denali(McKinley) was visible from Anchorage at certain times so with the name of the park we thought maybe this was the place from which we could see it down here if the weather permitted. Since it was also by the harbor we thought maybe we could see more seaplanes and boats as well. The map we were using was a map of the bus routes in town and they were less than forthcoming with street names and navigational details but we thought that once we got close to the area we would find street signs or something that would lead us to the park. Didn't happen. We made some guesses as to how to get there but that only ended up taking us to the actual port downtown where the lady at the entrance gate said she didn't even know of McKinley View park so we ventured off into downtown Anchorage.
We stopped off at the visitors center downtown and got some free postcards to mail out and snapped a few photos in the area. We have Debra in front of the old city hall, me by a big blue bear and Debra trying to crawl up on the sod roof of the visitors center.
We got a few photos wandering up and down the streets and finally stop for coffee at the Downtown Grind. It was a nice little coffee shop with a very likable young man who was the co-owner of the shop and most importantly great coffee. I even did a check in on Facebook and added my recommendations for the place. After the coffee shop we made one last stop at a street vendors cart to get a reindeer sausage. It also was excellent. It was spicy and I had added some spicy brown mustard to it to spice it up even more and it was very tasty.
After that we found our way back to the hotel and are deciding on a dinner location. More to come.
Happy Trails,
Tom & Debra Stephens
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