My first stop was Earthquake Park, which commemorates the 1964 Earthquake that devastated the city.
When Pat, Patrick, and I visited the city in 2003, you could look out over a devastated slope heading down to the waterline where nothing was growing and nothing remained that had been there before the quake. Well...the trees grew since them and you can't even see Cook's Inlet from the Park. Nice memorial, though, and the Park is filled with people hiking and cycling around.
It really is a nice place and it's nice to see families out enjoying the outdoors.
My next stop was the Alaska Aviation Museum at Ted Stevens International Airport. I had visited here before, but it's still interesting. The museum and the airport are on the shores of Lake Hood, and there is a lot of float plane activity with planes taking off and landing. They even have a control tower just for the lake to control the traffic. Here are a couple shots of the lake:
The plane in the second picture is taking off. It's not a real big lake.
Inside the museum they had a nice collection of vintage airplanes that flew the skies in the early days of Alaska aviation. Airplanes were very important in those days, and are still today, as there are many communities that cannot be reached easily by road or rail. Here are a couple nice examples:
My next stop was the Anchorage Museum in downtown Anchorage. This was very nice and they had a very nice collection of Alaska-related artifacts, but, unfortunately, you'll have to take my word for it, because they don't allow flash pictures inside. They did have a nice entrance, though:
After taking a break at Starbucks, I headed uptown to the Captain Cook monument overlooking the waterfront. He stopped here in 1776 while he was searching for the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
And, I made a stop at the Railroad station. We disembarked here and spent a couple days in Anchorage in 2003.
That's the Little Engine that Could on the pedestal.
Anchorage has a population of about 300,000 residents and it's is very nice, very clean, and very pretty. I didn't realize this, but the city only dates to 1914, where it was the terminus of the Alaska Railway that was being built between Fairbanks and the sea at Anchorage.
One more thing...this was on the wall of the men's room at the Aviation Museum:
Sorry...had to include it!
Tomorrow morning I'm heading south to Seward, a port city and where many of the Alaska Cruise ships come and go. There are several glaciers along the way, so I should be able to stop at a few.
Miles today: 44
Total: 6,333
