Day 72: Sadness in Anchorage

June 25, 2014

It rained all night and was still raining this morning when we got up. The forecast was for rain all day and unfortunately this time the forecast was correct. We remain at the Williwaw NFS Campground in Girdwood. Today we had planned to do some hiking and then take Barry and Donna back into Anchorage to fly back to Alabama. They didn't want to have to pack a bunch of wet clothes so we deleted the hiking.

Mid-morning we headed on into Anchorage to see if we could do a few things inside. We first visited some souvenir shops that had coupons in our TourSaver book – free Alaska magnets. Of course while we were downtown Donna spotted an ice cream shop so we had to have some ice cream for “lunch.” We had some good peach ice cream but it reminded us that we are missing peach season at home and those wonderful peach shakes from Chick-Fil-A.

After the ice cream we then decided to check out the factory tour of the Ulu Knife factory. This tour is advertised in all the tourist books. What a let down. To us it appeared to be just another souvenir shop. The factory tour consisted of windows you could look through to see what various workers were doing – about 6 windows. There was no tour – no one to explain what was occurring at each station. We love the ulu knives but felt the ads were misleading.

When we were going through Anchorage on our way to the Kenai we spotted a restaurant named “The Lucky Wishbone.” The parking lot was packed. Donna looked it up on TripAdviser and it got great reviews so we decided we would go there before we took them to the airport. The restaurant is known for its fried chicken and yes, we had fried chicken today. It was great! Barry and Donna got chicken and a halibut sandwich that they shared and they said both were very good. And the prices were better than we have been finding in most places recently.

We have had a blast with our dear friends for these past three weeks. We are so sorry the time has come for them to return home and will miss them terribly. Safe travels, dear friends, and we look forward to hiking with you again soon.