We celebrated one child’s birthday while in Alaska – the one who was born up there. It was fun to show her where she was born, the house we lived in and the church she was baptized at in real life, rather than just in pictures. One of her wishes while we were in Alaska was to go polar-bearing (going swimming in very cold water). We couldn’t quite manage that request, but we did take them to the Knik River so they could wade around a bit. Maybe we could call it polar-feeting?
We spent an afternoon shopping in Anchorage’s downtown tourist shops. Everyone found a few great souvenirs. I found a neat small quilting kit that has a mountain and fireweed. Hopefully I’ll put it together this winter.
We stopped by Earthquake Park in Anchorage. It’s a biking/walking trail that shows how much the land shifted in the Good Friday earthquake in 1964. The earthquake lasted for four and half minutes and was a 9.2 quake. Anchorage had shifts up to 8 feet, but some places south had shifts of land up to 30 feet! (A great book about it is The Great Quake by Henry Fountain.)
On our last day, we went for a hike at the Eagle River Nature Center. We saw a baby moose bedded down. Mama moose will “hide” their babies while they go off and look for food. It wasn’t an easy thing to spot, but my husband found it about 20 feet off the trail and pointed it out to all of us.
Our oldest took a ballet class in Anchorage and then we went back to our cabin and got packed for our flights home. On our way to the airport, I was watching for wildlife and saw a black bear just inside the fence of the military base! The child who wanted to see a bear missed it, so we turned around and when we drove by back the same area, there were two black bears! We got a video, but it’s hard to see them if someone doesn’t point them out.
Everything went smoothly going home, it was just tough doing an overnight flight. We left our cabin at 10 p.m. for a 3 a.m. flight. Then, we had a two-hour layover in Seattle before heading back to Ohio. At least we were back home shortly before our normal bedtime. Most of us adjusted back to the Eastern Time Zone pretty quickly, but two of the children took a few days. We had just been in Alaska long enough to get used to the time (4 hours behind).
Alaska definitely has a special place in my heart and I see my husband and I going back several times in our lives. We still want to see the finish line of the Iditarod in Nome and see Denali (Mt. McKinley). There’s so much to explore up there! If you get a chance to go, do!