Anchorage Alaska!

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Our first day in Alaska!

After a long (well, it seemed long) and uneventful flight we landed in Anchorage late last night. Strangely enough our suitcase was one of the first out! And when we stepped out to look for a taxi there was one right there. I hope this is a sign of things to come.

We got to our room at the Historic Anchorage hotel in the center of town. Our room is huge! And really nice. The name fits the hotel, yet the WIFI works well, TV, coffee machine, fridge. Historic but not run down. Anyway we crashed.

We were up for breakfast, which was usual hotel fare, and went out. We rented bicycles from just up the street from the Downtown Bicycle Rental. Very nice, pleasant team who set everything up for us. We took two regular bikes and a tandem. We just had to try it! Two people riding one bike takes some practice, but we got it after a few false starts. We rode down to the Tony Knowles Coastal Bicycle Trail, a lovely ride. There were lots of people on the trail, most on bikes but also some walking their dogs or jogging. We could immediately tell the locals from tourists like us - they were in short sleeves and shorts despite 16^oC and cloudy! It even rained a little bit and it didn't bother them. Crazy.

The trail goes around the Anchorage airport and some people stopped to watch everything from piper cubs to jumbo jets taking off over them.

Along the way we switched bikes around between us, and at one point it was Gilat and I on the tandem and we got ahead of the kids. Don't ask me how that happened! Anyway, we got further along and the kids didn't show up. We waited a bit, then turned back to see what was keeping them. Turns out just before we reached them Ethan took a dive and tested the hardness of the pavement with his face. Ouch! He also tore his pants and scraped a knee.

Note to self: Always have some first aid handy!

I washed the scrape on his face as well as I could with water, and Gilat did some first aid on his pants with a sewing kit that Tamar had with her, purely by chance. Two ladies on bikes stopped to help and they had some first aid stuff with them - disinfectant and a band aid. Ethan is still swollen up under his eye but it looks worse than it is. And he has a good war story for his friends. We were debating whether to turn back when some folks said there was a moose up ahead. That decided it! About half a kilometer later we saw the moose! Actually there were two of them munching on the leaves in the forest, totally oblivious of the strange beings on wheels that stopped to gaze at them from the trail. We walked a little bit into the forest to get a better angle for the camera. We got about 10 m' from one of them and decided not to get closer. What a life they have. Peacefully wandering around in an all-you-can-eat buffet, nobody bothering them!

We went on for a while after that, but it was already afternoon and we were getting hungry so we turned back. This time it was Ethan and I on the tandem. We stopped along the way a few times to drink, to rest and to take a selfie with the Pacific in the background. We also stopped to watch a jumbo take off over us. Quite impressive to see something so big just lift off the ground.

We got back to the bike shop, told the guys there how Ethan tackled a grizzly ("you should see what happened to the grizzly!"). Then we collected our car and went to eat. The bike folks advised Sagaya's Market, a supermarket that also sells prepared food and has some tables & chairs. So we got a good, hot meal of soup, salad and a main dish for about 35 bucks. Not bad at all! And tasted good too. And while we were there we did some shopping too.

We sat at Sagaya's and looked at the map to see what else we could do before heading back to the hotel. There's the Ulu factory nearby, so we went to see what an ulu knife is. It's six in the evening and the souvenir shop is still open, so we got an explanation on the ulu. It's a knife with a curved blade and the handle is above the curve. It's used in a shallow wooden bowl to chop or dice fruit, vegetables, spices, nuts, meat, fish, you name it. The locals have been using ulus made of shale or other stones for millennia until the Europeans arrived in the 17th century and brought steel.

We walked out behind the factory to Ships Creek and watched fishermen wading in the creek hoping for, and sometimes catching salmon. We watched for a while, watching schools of silver salmon swimming upstream, and one giant red king salmon swimming around, teasing the fishermen. The thing was huge! Must have been over a meter long, bright red, and it's as if he knew they couldn't catch him! Even if they somehow did, they'd have to let him go again - he's protected. We watched for a while until we got too cold by now so we returned to the hotel, but you can still have a look:

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