Anchorage

The occasional truck going by last night did not keep us from sleeping through the night. Of course heading south in the morning we immediately find some much better fully paved rest areas that would have been better boondocking sites. 

We have light rain as we have a two hour drive south to Anchorage.  We do take a detour to Talkeetna which is actually closer to Denali than the Denali Park Visitor Center.  The airfield here flies climbers to the base of Denali and tourists around the mountain. Our main reason to stop at Talkeetna is the “Flying Squirrel Bakery & Cafe”, which is a mile south of town down a dirt road.  Off by itself, it obviously pulls in a lot of business.  For a good reason. We get a bunch of goodies for the road.

About ½ hour north of Anchorage we drive through Wasilla, home of Sara Palin.  It has not been raining this far south.  Our first stop is Costco for gas. We are here in Anchorage to pick up Linda’s sister, Sabrina at the Airport at 8:00PM. She is traveling with us for a couple days to the towns of Seward and Homer on the Kenai Peninsula. After getting gas we head to Snow City restaurant downtop that has very good reviews.  We must have hit a bad day. We were not very impressed. After lunch we spend a couple hours in a parking lot at Earthquake Park working on our computers. We run into an ex-Vermonter who has been living here for 25 years.

Sabrina’s flight is 30 minutes early and we pick her up shortly after 8:00. We head downtown to “5th Street Station”, bar and restaurant recommended by our Vermont friend.  We get a parking spot right in front. As we get out of the RV, this small car trying to parallel park behind us hits the rear driver side of the RV.  Linda asks him to pull over to exchange insurance information. The passenger says sure and they then turn up a one way alley the wrong way and drives off.  Linda fortunately got a picture of the car and their license plate.  There were a number of witnesses. I check to make sure the rear door operates OK, which it does. The damage was to the two lower plastic body panels.  Unfortunately for our hit and run driver the heavy metal door hinge on the RV creased his rear door and quarter panel pretty badly.  The damage to him was much worse.

The RV

The hit and run care

I call the police to document the incident for our insurance company for what I assume will be an uninsured driver.  Half an hour later a policeman arrives and takes the information to file a report. I guess I should consider the response time very good. The bouncer at the door said there was a shooting two blocks away a couple weeks ago and it took 2 hours for the police to show up.

Dinner, finally, Sabrina, Linda, Nile

After we have dinner we head to Cabelas store parking lot to park for the night.  Cabelas allows RV’s to park overnight. When we get there, there are 25 or so RV’s parked.