Cerebral Gibberish

8/8/2007: Wednesday
Nothing special to report for the morning that did not happen yesterday morning. I got up, had breakfast and went to the local company office and did some work. There was some minor drama related to the mail migration I was up late for last night but nothing that my group back in Raleigh could not handle.

Since Chris and I have already traveled North to the Knik Glacier and South to the Portage Glacier there was no where else to go that did not require a several hour drive. It would have been nice to see a real, as in big and breaking up in the water, glacier but that will have to wait until next time. It would have also been nice if we could have gone to Denali National Park and see Mt. McKinley up close but that would be a 6 hour round trip drive not including the time to go site seeing. So we decided to go back downtown to do some shopping, get dinner and look around.

One souvenir that I wanted to get was an Alaskan ULU which is a multipurpose cutting knife. It kind of reminds me of a one handed, single blade Klingon Batleth. A lot of the typical souvenir stores downtown had cheap, made in Hong Kong / China knock offs that most likely would only be nice to look at but not actually use in the kitchen. As luck would have it there was a store downtown call “The ULU Factory” which hand makes ULUs from 100% USA materials. I picked up two ULUs, one to look at or maybe a gift and one to use in the kitchen.

Behind the ULU factory was a restaurant called “The Bridge” which as the name implies is a restaurant built on a bridge over Ship Creek. It would have been nice to have dinner there but was a little pricey and you needed to have a reservation. Below the restaurant in Ship Creek were a whole bunch of people were fishing. From the bridge you could see the fish in the water but they did not seem to be hungry since no one was catching anything. There was one part of the creek where there were a line of people fishing from each bank and Chris and I joked that any fish pass though that section would be running the gauntlet of death and fishing lure temptation. A little further up the creek was a spillway which had a no fishing behind this point line right before it. As Chris and I walked across the spillway bridge we could see why they did not want anyone fishing there. It was to protect the large schools of fish that were all grouped together at the bottom trying to make it up stream.

After leaving Ship Creek we headed back to 4th and 5th street downtown to do more souvenir shopping. We hit three stores and I picked up a few little gifts for the guys back at the office and a few shirts for me. We then headed to this restaurant we passed by earlier called “Snow Goose Restaurant & Sleeping Lady Brewery” which had a two level deck which provided a nice view of Cook Inlet.

After dinner we headed back to Woronzof Point to since we had to cut our sightseeing short yesterday due to the email migration I had to do. It looks like this is a popular place to come in the evening for tourist and locals. Looking over Cook Inlet you could see mountains and rain falling in the distance. This made for a very nice back drop for a bunch of sunset pictures. Another interesting thing about this spot is that it’s located at the end of one of the runways of the Anchorage airport so every now and then a big airplane will roar over head.

Well that is pretty much all for Day 4. Stay tuned for Day 5.