Today is Sunday, and a shopping, taking care of business day. We did the grocery/Wal Mart/Sam’s Club thing, found out that Anchorage McDonalds does a McKinley Burger
( after the mountain, which is round the corner somewhere) and generally did boring things all morning.
In the p.m. we went to downtown, for the tourist walk. Anchorage is a typical big city, and unfortunately doesn’t have anything note worthy to brag about. It is the surrounding mountains and scenery which make this place great, not a bunch of boring buildings, so there wasn’t a lot to see.
There was a neat flea market, with most of the stalls selling “made in Alaska” stuff, with one stall selling dolls with the “made in China” labels badly scraped off!
In the downtown touristy part, they have a lot of “theme” salmon, by local artists, which are statues of decorated salmon, similar to the Houston Cow Parade, only not as big. The best one was the salmomopoly, see pic.
We wandered down to the Ulu factory.
What is a Ulu?, I hear you ask.
A Ulu is an Alaskan knife, with a funny shaped handle and blade and is sold with a fancy board made from spruce. The Ulu is supposedly used to cut food, but looks very awkward to use, and we didn’t buy one.
However, if any of our readers want one, let us know. All donations to the Marlipops/Captain Cautious fund will be gratefully accepted!
We then went to the local salmon viewing area, and watched lots of humungous red King Salmon milling about, under a bridge. There were no obstacles in their way to prevent them from going upstream, they were just circling under the bridge.
Not nearly as many as in Valdez a few days ago, and the place itself was on the industrial side of the city, so we didn’t stay long, coz it was a bit skuzzy.
We have finally found out the reason for the long lines at Dairy Queen.
This place has only been open for 18 days, and is the first DQ in Anchorage for 16 years, and for some reason the locals and the imported people love it. We stood in line for 15 minutes to place an order, then had to wait another 20 minutes to get the order.
We spoke with the owner, who told us that on the weekend they opened, the line of cars for the drive through was blocking traffic on the roads around, and had to be moved!!
Wildlife watch today was a 50 pound seagull, as big as a dog, chasing all his rivals away.
