First day in the Land of the Midnight Sun

So after leaving our house at 8 in the morning on Saturday, we finally got into Anchorage about 20 hours later. It was a little bit exhausting, but it was so amazing to finally get to Alaska and see the mountains poking through the clouds -- and sharp snowcapped mountains at that.
It looked like this:


That picture was taken at eleven o clock at night. Notice the high level of daylight. We were super excited about getting to experience so much daylight. It's so novel to be walking around outside at midnight when it's light (and on our way to the hotel from the airport, we saw people playing frisbee golf at midnight), but when you have to get up in the middle of the night to pee, and daylight's streaming through the cracks in the curtain, and your internal clock is already four hours off... Not so much novel as disorienting.

But we got off to a good start this morning. Mark and I rented a tandem bicycle and went for this 30 mile bike ride through the city trails of Anchorage.


Anchorage is an interesting city. There are a lot of neat paved trails running through the parks, but we also rode along some roads. Anchorage pretty much looks just like the rest of America -- roads, cars, discount storage places -- but like somebody dropped one of those painted backgrounds behind it. You know, like a stage set or like the picture of a home library that they sometimes put behind families at Sears Photo. Except the backdrop is an everpresent picture of these gigantic mountains.


Towards the end of our ride, we came to the most amazing part of the bike ride -- the coastal trail. We came out of the woods and the view opened up before us... we were on a bluff overlooking Anchorage's inlet. It was low tide, so there were miles and miles of sand and small pools -- blue grey and brown -- and then beyond the water, mountain ranges. Some of the mountains were close and dark brown and we could see downtown Anchorage nestled between them and the water. But other mountains were jagged and distant and altogether snowy. They were so amazing, but I had to keep reminding myself that they were there -- since they were so white and far on the horizon, my eye kept reading them as clouds. Take a look -- don't be fooled; those are mountains on the horizon. Of course, it's so hard to get a good picture to do it justice.


We saw some people playing frisbee golf up on this bluff, and Mark immediately felt sorry that he didn't have his discs. "I bet this is the best frisbee golf course in the world," he said. "I bet so," I said back.


That was definitely the highlight of the day. We rode our bikes back into Anchorage and had some lunch. On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at a "Fur Factory" near our hotel. $3,000 fur coats, silver fox pelts, and, of course, fur lingerie. I'm not sure how anyone could actually wear this and not feel like a R rated Betty Rubble.


Tomorrow we're planning exploring the downtown and maybe eating some Mexican.
We'll let you know how it goes.