Day 21: Just an itty-bitty update

And I do believe I skipped a day, but...sorry...I'm tired. So it's brief today. Tomorrow, on the drive to Seward, I'll sort out some pictures and hopefully post them tomorrow night.

As for today...

We went to the Anchorage Museum. There we saw photographs from the late 1800s/early 1900s Gold Rush days. We also went through this huge exhibit on mammoths, mastadons, and elephants. There was a lot of interactivity, touching of "artist's renditions" of different sorts of tusked mammals, videos, and even--amazingly--the preserved 1-month-old baby mammoth called "Lubya". How this museum in Anchorage, AK got THAT specimen, I'm still wondering. But good for them, and good for us. We saw another large exhibit on the different Native tribes of Alaska and a meandering exhibit on the history of Alaska. The first exhibit finally gave me other languages' word for "welcome" so that will be fun to reference. Also, this first exhibit was a Smithsonian exhibit, I forget what the actual name was. But for a moment, being in a Smithsonian "museum", I felt like I was home. The second exhibit had everything from the beginning of people coming from Siberia, all the way to the Valdez spill. There were even replicated houses and huts along with several taxidermied animals. We couldn't touch those animals, I guess because they weren't just some artist's renditions... Then there was were several art exhibits, and a "Discovery Center" and some other hands on thing. Ashley and I played with bubbles (hands-on) and looked in tanks with alligators (not hands-on) and starfish (not hands-on). It was a really great museum.

Then...hahaha...we climbed almost to the top of a mountain. And I don't mean South Mountain. This one was called Flattop Peak. It was 3550 feet up, of which we drove up a good portion to the trailhead, and then...we didn't get quite to the top. It got extremely scary, and it was a long way down, and the footing was not good, and there were a lot of rocks....I could keep going. I'll put up pictures tomorrow. We didn't get what one of our tour guide books told us was a "God's-eye-view" of Anchorage, but...I'm pretty sure I don't need to feel like God. I was doing okay until we got to the last, oh third, of the last really steep part. Then we paused, I got a good look around me, and...there went my equilibrium, and there went all my nerve. We still did get really, really far up. So, I'm just gonna make myself a t-shirt that says, "I made it ALMOST to Flattop!" Ha.

That was enough adventure for me, plus there were swarms of mosquitoes on the lower end of the trail--not the upper end, that was feeling pretty close to freezing to me. Or at least my hands were numb by the time we made it back to the car.

We managed food reconnaisance following the adventure up a mountain, and then crashed. Well...Ashley and I crashed. Mom and Dad went on their own adventure looking for postcards...They came back with postcards and Reese's, so...it all worked out.

Til the next time I post...