Day 24: Happy Birthday! (Also Days 22 & 23 but they weren't birthdays immediately important to me)

Day 22

We drove a couple hours down to Seward, AK from Anchorage. There we went through a really awesome aquarium called Alaska SeaLife Center. We also found a bunch of murals in the town. Both of these are best to be seen rather than read about, so I'll leave that to the pictures. I drove back up to Palmer, AK. We stopped to climb up to a glacier. I got pulled over and given a ticket for speeding. We stopped and hiked to see "Thunder Bird Falls". They weren't thunderous nor had many birds. Definitely no thundering birds. Did I mention I got a speeding ticket?! First one. Ever. That was a bummer. We stayed in Peak Inn in Palmer. It was...cheap... The same people who ran the Inn also ran the Peking Garden restaurant and the Peak N Brew coffee shed. I believe they were Chinese. Hilarious. But sketchy apparently because--tho I slept through this, so you must take my word about my parents' and sister's word--people were shouting, "I'm gonna kill you all!" in the parking lot... That's an issue. But it didn't wake me up, so...

Day 23

We drove. And drove. And drove. And drove. And stopped in Fairbanks to grocery shop a bit, let Mom and Dad walk, and eat lunch. Then we drove. And drove. And drove some more. We were driving, by the way, to the Arctic Circle. So we drove and drove and drove some more. Then the paved road ended, the rock/dirt/gravel road began, and we drove and drove and drove some more. The pavement started and stopped and started and stopped. Finally, at like 10 pm, we made it to the Arctic Circle. 66 degrees, 33 feet north, I believe. And it was still incredibly light outside. The sun was still quite a bit above the horizon. We decided to stay til sunset. I don't know when that was. I fell asleep. Oops. I wake up momentarily as the sun was blazing through my closed eyelids as it was setting. It felt like it should have been 8:30, but it definitely wasn't. Then we turned and drove and drove and drove and drove and drove back to Fairbanks.

Day 24

Happy birthday to the United States of America!
Happy birthday to Roberta Lara Plantak!

We slept a few hours in Safeway's parking lot. Then we went over for a 3.5 hour "Riverboat Discovery" tour. It was okay. It was very touristy, with a lot of cruise people, and you could hardly ever hear what the tour guide was saying because people wouldn't shut up. We tracked down Thai food--finally, it took 3 tries--most of the town was shut down. Then we got into our motel for the night. It's cute. There's a "TV Room". Ashley and I got our NCIS fix. We also watched "A Capitol Fourth", PBS' presentation of the 4th of July celebration on the Capitol West Lawn. This was the only way for us to get to see fireworks. The music stuff was okay, but it was...nice...to see my city again. I miss it. I miss seeing fireworks there (it has now been 2 years...this cannot become a tradition).

I'm going to put up some pictures. They don't run through today. I think they run through the aquarium.