Mooseless in Alaska
Day 97 – July 6, 2003 – Sunday
We spent a leisurely day in Anchorage before flying back to Seattle.
Seeing a moose (somewhere other than at a zoo) was a goal, so Bozzie Jane researched this, and we drove to a wooded area on the outskirts of town. There we took a walk along a path. We saw a lot of warning signs about bears, but we never saw a bear…and nary a moose.
As we drove back into town, we spotted a Chili’s Restaurant. It’s against our Rules of the Road to eat at chain restaurants, but after two days of bad food at local Anchorage restaurants, we screeched to a stop at Chili’s. The food was great — as it almost always is at Chili’s, and the service was extremely good (Katherine) — as it always is at Chili’s.
The rest of our Anchorage day was spent seeing the sights in and around downtown. Anchorage is small and not very old, so there wasn’t much to see. The highlight was the statue where the Iditarod Dog Sled Race begins each year. We saw Resurrection Point and the Captain Cook statue, and we saw the beautiful flowers in the City Park. Victoria took good care of us at Alaska Airlines and upgraded us to First Class. We also met Alvin and Bob — two security people.
Our flight was especially nice as we sat next to interesting people. I met three children as they boarded, and Elizabeth, Jessica, and Zeke were excited to receive beads. The Senior Flight Attendant, Terri, enjoyed wearing her beads as well. Boz sat next to Gary. He was very kind to send us a photo of a moose that he took while in Anchorage. I sat next to Beth. She saw a moose on the drive to the airport. Everyone saw a moose but us, it seems. We were mooseless in Alaska.
Beth and her husband, John, are adventurous outdoorspeople. She’s a tiny young lady, but she hikes on glaciers, spends weeks with grizzly bears, kayaks in the oceans, and is about to take a mule ride down the Grand Canyon. I rarely talk on planes, but Beth and I talked non-stop. On their travels, Beth and John met some folks who went around the world — took them four years.
On the shuttle to the Doubletree Hotel, we met another flight attendant named Terri, and she now has her beads. Same goes for Jeanna at the front desk.
Random Comments:
I have spent entirely too many hours online and running various programs to try to rid my laptop of a virus that causes annoying popup ads to harass me every time I boot up. I’d bet I have 12 hours invested with no success.
There is a lot to see and do in Seattle, so we may need an additional day. Currently, the schedule calls for us to return to Atlanta on August 17 and then fly to Hawaii.
The lesson for the day is that sometimes the best part of a day can be what doesn’t go as planned. Not seeing a moose in Alaska provided more laughs and enjoyment than we would have had if we hadn’t gone mooseless.
The Daily Journal of Round America:
Each day, we collect our thoughts on a web page just like this. We drop in some of the photos from the day. Our goal with the Daily Journal is to write about the towns we visit, the sights we see, the people we meet, and the pie we eat. We write about where we are, where we’ve been, and where we are going, but we also make observations about what we’ve seen and done as well as about life in general.
You can follow our travels from the Daily Journal section of this website. Other pages of interest include the running report of “vital statistics” on the Trip Scorecard, our nominations for the Best & Worst of the trip, as well as a rating of the pie we eat. If you’d like to see information for a specific state or town, click here, and then click on the state of interest, and the full itinerary is shown.