Anchorage, AK

So, we were heading out of Denali NP down to Anchorage (slightly disappointed that we didn't see Mt. McKinley) when Dustin looked back to see nothing less than...Denali. We were 150 miles away and it was still incredible. The picture is pretty lame, but at least we got to see it. It looked way cooler than this picture portrays. (If you're having trouble seeing it, the snow covered top of the mountain is what looks like clouds.)

When we got to Anchorage, we decided to have a 'splurge night'. We got a hotel room (after a pretty long stint sleeping in the car) and went out to a really nice dinner. We had the best margaritas, best salmon, and best cheesecake we had ever had before. The salmon was caught that same day and cut up about 2 hours before it was on our plate. We were told by our waiter that they keep the good salmon in AK and then ship everyone else the leftovers. Nice of them. But, we appreciated this time. We weren't sorry for deciding to splurge.
Look at this huge cabbage!
We're pretty happy about actually sleeping in a bed instead of a car seat...

Since we weren't going to see a polar bear, we decided to go to the Hilton and visit a used to be real one.
Anchorage has the largest hub for float planes taking off and landing. It was pretty cool to watch.
This is a boring picture, but a cool story...This is gravity hill. When you go to the bottom of the hill and put your car in neutral, your car goes up the hill. Crazy! We have video proof for any of your skeptics out there.

At the last minute, Dustin decided to run the Anchorage 1/2 marathon even though he hadn't really trained since his last one in April. Since he was doing that, I decided to do a 5.6 miler. Due to lack of showers, we haven't been able to run as much as we would like, so we were proud to finish well. Dustin finished with about the same time as his last 1/2 and I ran the whole 5.6 miles without stopping. My motivation for running was the fact that if I did stop I would be completely eaten up by mosquitos.



We got to watch the summer solstice sunset, which was absolutely incredible. We found that summer solstice is actually a big deal in AK. For one thing, it actually means something here. After the longest day of the year, it's all downhill from there...shorter days mean closer and closer to winter. They have all kinds of summer solstice festivals, softball games that go all through the night and lots of other things going on. We actually heard a lady (obviously a tourist) while on the phone say, "Yeah, it's summer solstice up here in Anchorage". As if that doesn't exist in the rest of the world.

It was a beautiful drive out of Anchorage along the Cook Inlet to our next destinations of Homer and Seward, AK (posts of that to come)!