Alaska Day Six: Float Planes and Eisenhower

Monday morning we both managed to finally sleep in, our exertions of Sunday catching up with us.  We lazily got up and got packed and ready to check out of the hotel.  For the first time since arriving in Alaska, we had no car or hotel room to call home. 

We started by finishing up some souvenir shopping in downtown Anchorage, with the highlight of that journey being me breaking the mug I bought for mom about 37 seconds after I bought it and about 3 inches in front of the store.  We went back to our go-to Starbucks, and were waited on by a barista who had just come from living in Bartlesville, OK for a few years while she went to school.

Our next idea was to go to Lake Hood to see the float planes, so we went to the Visitor Center to figure out how to take a bus there.  They were not too helpful but did point us in the direction of the bus station and a post office.  The route to the post office took us by two guys smoking pot and hanging out on the stairs.

At the Transit Center, we bought day passes and were off on a bus to find Lake Hood.  By following our route on my GPS, I was able to tell when we needed to get off the bus.  We arrived a couple blocks away from Lake Hood and walked in the rain to find the planes.  We saw several take off and land, and a dog named Kiki jumped up on me and got muddy footprints on my jacket.

Our next destination was Earthquake Park and we determined we could get back on the bus we got off and make it there, but there were about 30 minutes before the bus came.  We opted for lunch at Wendy's with frosties for dessert.  The frosty sounded better before we had to wait in the rainy cold for 10 minutes as the bus was late.

Earthquake Park turned out to require a very long walk before you could even see anything, and we wound up going way farther than we wanted to on our post-race day.  Eventually we reached the coastal trail and had a nice view back toward downtown Anchorage.  Other than, not much to say about Earthquake Park.  To get back to the bus, we had to walk uphill several blocks through a residential neighborhood and when we finally reached the bus stop, we learned it would be 50 minutes before the bus came.

At this point we had basically run out of energy and things we wanted to do, but we had nowhere to go.  We browsed a few of the shops again and visited the Eisenhower Monument.  Frances was excited to see somebody else besides the state of Kansas interested in Eisenhower.  Alaskans like him because he made them a state in 1959.

It started raining again with a very ominous sky so we opted for the dry seats of the 5th Avenue mall food court.  It was a relief to sit down and be dry with access to a clean bathroom.  We chose Humpy's, an Anchorage classic, for our last Alaskan meal.

From there, we returned to the hotel to pick up our luggage and get a shuttle to the airport.  The desk clerk told us when we checked out that he couldn't pass along our request for a shuttle, that we'd need to do that ourselves 30-60 minutes before we needed to leave.  We waited 60 minutes and when the shuttle driver came, they told us he couldn't leave because he was the only one that knew how to fix the dryer.  Finally we were on our way to the airport, and I was no fan of the service from the desk clerks.

Our flight departed Anchorage on time at 10:40 p.m. and arrived in Denver at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday Denver time.  I managed to get a little sleep on the flight as I was not interested in watching Cars again.  After a brief layover in Denver, we headed for KC, arriving at 9:30 a.m.  Cindy picked us up, and the highlight of the ride home was Frances discovering she had gum on her arm, which she then got on the car seat.

And that's the end!