Downed a hearty breakfast before traversing the breathtaking mountainous roads that leads to Anchorage, dropped KatieBug off for a much needed grooming and settled in for a day of discovery.  Always first on our list is the Visitors Center, Anchorage has two, to gather as much info as possible to plan our next few days.  The little cabin was closest and looked far more interesting.   The little cabin, built in 1954 using logs cut in Homer, was built wilderness fashion with a sod roof but includes a window not found in remote cabins and a stone, rather than metal, stove.  The cabin also faces North, opposite the direction of most cabins.  Very neat, very cozy.

The second is the Federal Building across the street.  You check your guns and knives, walk through a metal detector and are visually checked by Federal police before entering.  There is a theater with movies that rotate, Gold Fever, A Gathering of Bears, Heartbeats of Denali, Alaska’s Coolest Animals, throughout the day and life size stuffed wild animals that are local to the area.  With the exception of Dall Sheep, we have seen all of them in person, but our pictures were not taken in Alaska…in fact, most came from British Columbia, Canada.

We parked outside the Alaska Mint, a large store with offerings of gold and silver coins and jewelry intermixed with early 1900’s safes, vintage miner portable gold weight scales, cash registers, huge bank weight scales, estate jewelry and the ever present Alaska Eskimo tourist souvenirs.

John wanted to take the trolley tour, so we hopped aboard and our guide chatted throughout the hour about the interesting and entertaining facts of Anchorage.

Our tour led us through the airport and we were told that 1 in every 8 residents own small planes, the age to get a license to fly is 14 but the age to drive a car is still 16.  Surprisingly the statistics for plane crashes isn’t extremely high considering you can see many small planes in the air at any given time and some of them are probably young teen flyers.

Someone spied a moose on airport grounds so our guide pulled over and we took pictures of the grazing Bull Moose.    Later, driving through a neighborhood, we past a lot, or so it looked but was actually an underground home with only a few pipes sticking up and two rounded sky lights visible.  That was the particular moment that darn camera decided to freeze up and refused to click.  Luckily that was the only thing I missed that day.  It was an enjoyable tour but a bit on the pricy side.

Next we walked back to the Weekend Market and enjoyed rambling through all the tents and checking out their wares, shared a yummy salmon quesadilla and took home some freshly smoked King Salmon to enjoy later.  The music was spunky and fun and the parade of dogs that let us pet them was enjoyable

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And of course, there were the Pissin off Texas shirts and signs…goodness, it never ends!

We walked by the Railroad station and got a picture of one of the first locomotives, brought back to Anchorage a few years back and had last been used as a moose gooser to clear moose from the tracks so the larger locomotives wouldn’t smash them flat resulting in major damage to the train…or so the story goes.

We boarded the free trolley to the Ulu factory.  I love my Ulu knife.  I got it at a garage sale years ago and we use it for slicing pizza, quesadillas and other gooey things.  Works fantastic.  They had a clearance section so I got an Ulu cutting board before we headed back to pick up KatieBug at the groomers, had dinner at a local diner and drove back to Wasilla for the night.  It is still light out until almost midnight.