June 30 - A-Town

Sunrise 4:11 AM. It was a very early morning to get to our 5:40am flight to Juneau and onto Anchorage.  The Sitka airport, small to start with, but even smaller when they had to divide

it up to provide TSA room to screen.  This morning, social distancing was difficult, but we managed to survive.  All our COVID-19 testing had returned “none detected”, which was a good thing.   For “breakfast” we had a choice of Coke, Diet Coke or water and a little bag of snacks!  After we retrieved our rental car and baggage, we dropped Ann of at the clinic.  We drove to Katie & Brandon’s house in southside Anchorage.  Jenny made grilled cheese sandwiches from the bread Katie & Brandon had forgotten to take with them fishing.  John made some excellent tomato soup! 

Glacier National Park from the 30,000 ft.  The 250' high ice wall in 2017 with a harbor seal in the foreground

We did a quick trip down to Potter Marsh, a wildlife viewing boardwalk.  The marsh was created almost by accident as the Seward highway separated a low lying area from Cook Inlet.  It was a lovely day.  While birds and turtles were plentiful, we saw no eagles.  We did see some young fish in the stream, maybe smolts getting ready to head to the ocean, but no salmon headed up to spawn. 

For the afternoon activities, John and the young folk went fishing at Ship Creek, while Bennie & Jenny went downtown to rent e-bikes at Pablo’s.  We rented two Aventon Pace 350 Step-Through Ebikes.  They were powerful.  Pablo told us to do a test ride in the nearby parking lot.  He said don’t turn on the bike until we were on the trail and not to use power to make turns!  Wow!!  He was right.  Although these bikes were pedal-assist bikes, they had quite a bit of oomph.  They had 5 levels of assist and we largely stayed in level 1 except on big hills.  Jenny had some issues after being in a high level for a while and the bike seemed to give out.  But back on the flats and level one, the bike seemed to recover.  We rode the entire length of the Tony Knowles trail to Kincaid park.  I had the bear spray with me.  When a rider coming toward us reported seeing a bear, Jenny thought we should turn back.  No bear was ever spotted.   Anchorage had a constructed a series of signs representing our solar system along the trail.  Each step (if you were walking) represents 186,000 miles, or the distance light travels in one second.  Though we didn’t backtrack to where the sun was a few blocks east, we rode from Mars to Pluto or about 11 miles (~3 billion miles in reality).  As the week went on, according to Jenny, our ride of 22 miles got longer and longer.  

The fishermen were not successful in bringing home dinner, so we did Hawaiian take out of barbecued pork and chicken thighs at our AirBnB in downtown Anchorage.  We walked across the street to the New Sagaya City Market to get some ice cream, but since they didn’t carry Tillamook (A-Town’s version of Blue Bell), we drove to a nearby Carrs (Safeway) to get Mountain Huckleberry & Peaches and Cream. 

Sunset in A-Town:  11:39 PM