First Moose Sighting

This morning Travalon and I went to a fun coffee shop called the Flying Squirrel for breakfast, then we drove to Talkeetna, a very touristy place much like some towns in northern Wisconsin. There were all kinds of little shops selling souvenirs. Then we stopped at Denali Brewing Company and tried a flight of their delicious beers. We got on the road and drove towards Denali, and in the distance, rising out of the clouds, we could see the crown of it for a moment! We couldn't pull off to take a picture until a few minutes later, when we got to Denali State Park (not the same as the national park), where there is a good viewing point. By then the clouds had covered it entirely, but we could see lots of other mountains, including one with a glacier in it called Ruth Glacier, and a woman standing next to us showed us the shot she got of Denali. It was exactly what we had seen. We hiked there to a higher spot from which you could see the mountains, but Denali (or Mount McKinley, as it is also known) never showed itself to us again today. We drove to the national park and watched a video on how not to get eaten by a bear, then we drove to our lodge on a ridge overlooking the park and had a good Alaskan seafood dinner at the restaurant here with a sweeping view of the valley. We took a ride into the park, and a big moose stepped out of the trees and crossed the road in front of us! That was exciting. We took a short hike but didn't see anything else, although we heard lots of birds.

This is a picture of the sky last night at 11:15. It still wasn't completely dark yet!

 Ruth Glacier

View of mountains from Denali State Park

These next couple of signs were among the humorous ones on the road up to our lodge.

Here is a picture of the moose we saw. It isn't a very good picture, but Travalon did get a better one on his camera that we can upload when we get back home. The moose is on the left side of the photo.

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Chugach State Park

This morning Travalon and I went to Mass at Holy Family Cathedral, then we got on the road and stopped by another beautiful church called St. Andrews - I have a photo. We couldn't get into it, though. We drove along a beautiful road with breathtaking views of mountains covered in mist till we got to Chugach State Park by Eagle River. We hiked to Thunderbird Falls, which got me my steps for the day and the equivalent of over twenty flights of stairs. The trail was muddy and kind of scary because it had a drop-off on one side, and then the falls weren't that big. Our next stop was Eklutna, a Russian settlement from the 1800's with a little Orthodox church where they still have liturgies and a really cool graveyard that looks like a miniature village because each of the graves is covered by what looks like a dollhouse. Then we drove to Eklutna Lake, stopping at Rochelle's ice cream place, where we had a great view of a peak called The Miter. Travalon had fireweed honey ice cream, which was the best flavor we had ever tasted. It was fruity-tasting and purple colored. The lake is like Devil's Lake on steroids, with mountains around it, including The Miter with its snow-covered peak. We stopped at Reflection Lake, which had a path all the way around it. It was a pleasant, flat hike with sweeping views of mountains in the distance. It was a popular hike, and we suspect most of the people were locals, since they had dogs with them. We went to Wasilla, the hometown of Sarah Palin, and had dinner at a delightful Chinese restaurant with a very friendly proprietress. We also stopped at a megastore called Fred Meyer that has absolutely everything: food, clothing, camping gear, etc. We loved this store and wished we had one back home. Our final stop for the evening is the adorable cabin in Talkeetna in a place called Love-Lee Cabins where we are spending the night. We rolled in at 10 pm and it was still light out. It is only starting to get dark now around a quarter to eleven.

St. Andrew's Catholic Church

Mist rolling off the mountains

Thunderbird Falls

Mountain visible from the trail to Thunderbird Falls

St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church

The cemetery

 Close-up of a house over a grave, with a tiny icon visible in the window

Another view of the cemetery and St. Nicholas Church

The Miter

Mountains behind Rochelle's Ice Cream Shop

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Jagged peaks near Reflection Lake

Reflection Lake

Another view of Reflection Lake

Tomorrow we go to Denali, so hopefully I will have photos of that up sometime soon.

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Our Day in Anchorage

I am not sure how much of a chance I will get to blog up here in Alaska. I brought my laptop Boethius and am blogging on it right now, at our hotel in Anchorage, but internet access may be spotty in the other places we are going. Our flight to Anchorage was eventful because our plane had an electrical problem, so eventually they moved us to a new plane, and we were two hours delayed flying out. We landed in Anchorage after three am local time, which means it felt like almost time to get up to us, but we did go to bed and sleep for five hours.

Today Travalon and I went to the Alaska Native Cultural Center, where we saw a performance of songs and dances from various Alaskan native peoples, and then we took a tour around their pond to see traditional houses of the various peoples. Then we came back downtown to go to their outdoor market, which was really cool. It was kind of like our Farmers' Market, if it sold reindeer tacos and knives and lots of stuff for dogs. We took a trolley tour of Anchorage, and I found out that the state of Alaska shares a birthday with me! Also, there was a HUGE earthquake in 1964, and you can still see evidence of the damage. Most of the people who were killed did not die during the quake itself but during the ensuing tsunami. The trolley driver gave us coupons, so we went to a couple of shops downtown to redeem some of them. We had dinner at a very quirky Japanese restaurant with delicious, authentic food and then walked on a shoreline path and looked out over the mud flats. We ended the evening by going to Kincaid Park to try to see moose; we didn't succeed, but we did see a charming small lake called Little Campbell Lake.

I have pictures! This is the first thing we saw in the Anchorage Airport. Hopefully we see a live one at some point!

Cool building in downtown Anchorage.

Actual sign at our hotel.

These next few shots are from the Alaska Native Cultural Center.

Ceremonial drum

 Totem pole

This next shot is of a bird I see all over here in Anchorage. It is like a big, black and white crow. I think it might be called a magpie.

And here is a shot of Little Campbell Lake.

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Waiting at O'Hare

I do not have much time, only 30 free minutes to blog, so this will be brief. This morning Travalon and I went to the house of the Daughter of Denni for the start of her annual Birthday Drinking Biking Bash, only this year we didn't have time to bike. We just got commemorative T-shirts and had mimosas. Then we took the Van Galder bus to O'Hare, which is where we are waiting now for our flight to Anchorage. This is not a very exciting post, but I just wanted to let my readers know what I was up to today. The only exciting part was that my bus ride was "free," because I had a voucher from years ago, when Tiffy and I went to Salt Lake City and I'd planned to take the bus to the train station in Chicago. The train was canceled, so we drove out and flew back, and Van Galder wouldn't refund my bus ticket but they did give me a voucher for another ride to Chicago any time. So that saved us a little money.

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Lunch with the Leprechaun

Last night Travalon and I went to Oconomowoc to attend a lakeside concert with his mother, like I did last year. He goes most weeks – he’s such a devoted son! His mother loves getting out into the fresh air and hearing live music, and really, who doesn’t? Last night a band made up of Legionnaires played music from movies, e.g., a Disney movies medley, a Star Wars medley – but at one point they were joined by a young fiddler and did “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band, which so far as we know has never been featured in a movie. Travalon's mother particularly enjoyed seeing all the cute kids playing on the beach and running around the park where the band shell is located. I liked that too. I have seen some photos of myself from that recent gig where we showed kids how to play our instruments, and I had this silly, sappy smile on my face. I always do when kids are around. It must drive them nuts – I’m like that crazy aunt who thought you were “soooo cute!” Come to think of it, I WAS that crazy aunt when my niece and nephews were little.

Rich’s old roommate The Leprechaun is in town for a few days, and my only chance to see him was at lunch today, so I asked Rich if he would want to go to lunch at Brocach, sort of as a joke. The Leprechaun is originally from Cork, so I wasn’t sure what he would think of an “authentic Irish pub” in this country, but he did agree to meet there for lunch, so he, Rich, Travalon (who had never met him), and I all got together there. He was duly impressed that I am trying to learn Irish; he had to learn it himself in school but said it was definitely a foreign language to him, and he admits that he has forgotten most of it. Cork is not in the Gaelteach, the area in the west of Ireland where people do speak Irish as their first language. However, most of the time we talked about politics, since none of us can get over this crazy election. It is definitely the strangest one I ever remember! It was so good to see The Leprechaun again. He now lives in New Jersey and, from the sounds of it, spends as little time on his bike these days as I spend on mine. Back in the day we put many miles on our bicycles. He was one of the people who used to do those long fundraiser bike rides with me. I remember one year our team name was “The Radiant Rosary Riders.” Yes, once I was in good shape and could easily bike 75 miles a day for two days in a row. Sigh…

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Another Bahama Bob Show

Yesterday evening Jilly Moose came to my house, then we drove to a restaurant in Sun Prairie called Buck & Honey’s to see Bahama Bob play. Travalon went straight there from work, and he arrived at the same moment as we did, which seemed like a fortuitous sign. However, when we got to the patio where Bahama Bob was playing his steel pan (or, as most people refer to it, his steel drum), we were told the patio was closed for a private event. I can be a pretty successful whiner, so I mourned that we had come ALL THIS WAY to hear Bob perform, and they said we could sit on the couches on the edge of the patio to hear him. They even allowed us to order food at the bar and bring it out, but when we went inside, a young waitress said no worries – she would bring the food to us. After that little snafu, the evening was wonderful. Bahama Bob played some songs we hadn’t heard him do before, and the special event people did not seem the least bit perturbed by our presence. (It wasn’t anything that private, like a wedding, just a chef cook-off that you had to buy tickets to, and then you got a five-course meal.) Nobody seemed to mind us eating our regular menu food and drinking our Blue Hawaiians over on the side of the patio. When we told our waitress how attentive she was, she said we were the first table she had ever waited on! Afterwards Bahama Bob came over and talked to us for a while. He has this gig every Tuesday, but he’d had no idea this particular Tuesday was going to be a private event. He is very down to earth, but then we are about what he has for groupies, other than Travalon’s mother and her peers at the retirement homes where he plays. He is living my dream: not famous (no privacy, plus it takes an average of 30 years off your life expectancy), but just renowned in certain circles. That is all I ever really wanted to be.

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Rodney's 17th Birthday Party

Sorry I didn’t write on Thursday. Travalon and I hung out with our neighbors on our dock for Thirsty Thursday, then they all left but we kept hanging out. Sometimes you just need to hang out on the dock on a beautiful summer evening. Then we watched the movie Zootopia, which was a very clever take on race relations. I said to Travalon, “Everyone should see this movie!” and then I googled it and found it had grossed over a billion dollars, so apparently everyone has. If you, gentle reader, have not seen it yet, I highly recommend it. It is an animated movie about different animal species living together in a big city, and it spoofs cop movies and Mafia movies brilliantly.

Friday evening Travalon and I went to a Mallards game. It did not start off in a most promising manner, because the Mallards gave up three runs in the first inning, but at least they got one themselves. As the game went on, they tied it up, pulled ahead, and got a home run! Then the Green Bay Bullfrogs got a home run and tied things back up, so the game went into the 10^th inning. The Bullfrogs didn’t score at all, and I told Travalon, “I really have to go to the bathroom, but if I leave now, they’ll get a walk-off homer.” I decided to sacrifice for the team, and my strategy paid off: the Mallards did indeed get a walk-off homer while I was in the bathroom. So I missed it, but they won!

Saturday morning Catzookz wanted a friend of hers to meet some other “sociable” Catholics in town, so Jilly Moose, Rich, Travalon, and I met the two of them for brunch at Off Broadway. I was curious to try this new restaurant anyway, since it was recently opened by the relative of a coworker, and it is very good! It is where there used to be a dive bar called the Paradise Lounge, which has apparently moved downtown. I had the cherry waffles and Travalon had the spinach bacon omelet, and we split them. They were so good! Then Catzookz’s friend had to take off, but the rest of us went to a park in Monona and then walked a few blocks to another park on the shore of Squaw Bay. Rich, Catzookz, and I explored a woodsier part of the park, which was quite an adventure since I was wearing fancy sandals instead of sneakers. Later in the afternoon Travalon and I went to the Hop Garden in Paoli to sit in the shade and drink their version of shandy, made with kambucha, then we headed to a restaurant in Monticello called the Dining Room because we had heard it was a) amazing and b) closing soon. Both turned out to be true, but they will still be open through most of September, so you do have a chance to try them. They are not closing for lack of business but because the proprietors are getting a divorce. How sad.

Yesterday Travalon and I went to Grampa’s Pizzeria for brunch, since we had seen a sign in their window that they now have brunch and we had never been there. It is a beautiful space in an old gun shop (the “Grampa” in the name refers to the name of the gun shop), and the food was really good, but we seemed to be the oldest people in there by a long shot. I guess it’s a really hip, trendy place. So many places in town are now because of all the twentysomethings with money who work for the big software company in town. Then we got Rodney and took him for a birthday “walk” (he was carried for a lot of it) at Pheasant Branch. We could hear a party in the distance, so we took a stairway that seemed to lead up toward the sound, and we discovered Colombia Fest. The music was wonderful, lots of salsa and cumbia, and people were singing karaoke but they were actually all very good. Perhaps Colombians have a better sense of their vocal talents than the average Anglo in a karaoke bar. Travalon and I were about the only Anglos at the festival. Then we met Rich, Cecil Markovitch, the Single B-Boy, Jilly Moose, Catzookz, Twins Fan, and OK Cap at Greekfest because who can get enough of ethnic festivals? The music there was wonderful too, and the food was really good. Then we all moved to the Union Terrace, where we were joined by Prairie Man and Michaela the Pomeranian, my OTHER choir director, and Kathbert for Rodney’s 17^th birthday party. It was a beautiful evening, and we had a wonderful time. Can you believe Rodney is 17? That is an age you would expect for a cat, not a dog. He loved being fussed over by everyone. 

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