So today was a great day – my first full day in Anchorage.

I didn’t get out of bed until 10am. I woke up somewhat earlier to open the curtains but then got back into bed. So feeling much better after the long previous day of flying. So I didn’t plan to do too much.

I headed out to the shops to get some basic stuff needed for my trip that I didn’t wish to carry over from Australia. I added a few things to the list within about 5 seconds after walking out of the hotel front door.

 

I first went to Big Ray’s camping goods store. The first item was a thermal balaclava (it was damn cold again!), and some thermal socks to put my camera bodies and batteries into when I head up to Fairbanks on the weekend. Apparently they don’t really like it to be too cold and go flat really quickly. I also got some neat disposable toe and hand warmers to test out – the toe warmers when I head out to the glaciers and the hand warmers to trial with the camera batteries inside the thermal socks. They had a few racks of guns, pistols, rifles etc and lots of racks of things to do with them. Of course we don’t get those at Mountain Design.This is only a quarter of what they had in cabinets, with a lot on the back wall too.

I did really like their knives, they had even more of them. I also went to the camera stores (Stewarts’ Photo Shop) and bought a Manfrotto Road Trip tripod for my camera. I had been thinking of buying one online but buying once I got here was more sensible financially.

I then stopped in at a restaurant called Ginger for lunch. It was a great looking restaurant (see below) and was served by a great waitress.

The cuisine was quite interesting, including egg rolls, thai style, burgers, tacos, curries but with a great fusion of flavours and colours.  I decided to take the menu of the day (soup and main) with a creamy wild portobello mushroom soup, and a lamb burger but with a satay and beetroot flavour and lettuce. I washed that down with two glasses of A to Z brand Pinot Gris, which had a butter and lemon flavour and left a satay flavour on the palate. I believe it comes from Oregon. All in all, I really enjoyed the meal, and was well served by Emily, the waitress.

After the lunch I headed across the road to the 5th Avenue Mall to wander around and buy a few other things off my list, including groceries. It was a reasonable sized mall but didn’t have anything I wanted. So I went back to the hotel to drop off my purchases and check out where else to go to purchase what I needed. Looking up the local calendar, I found out that there was a Walmart on 31st Avenue (my hotel is on 8th Avenue)  and there is a bus service just around the corner from the hotel. So I caught the bus down to Walmart. the trip cost $2, which is good. On the bus was a sign stating that there would be no bus service on Thanksgiving Day, which just happens to be this Thursday. Unfortunately I had planned to visit a number of museums and galleries on Thursday, so now I’m not sure they’ll even be open – will have to ring them all I guess. Herewith a photo of the Walmart store with the Chugach Mountains in the background. They look spectacular.

So Walmart was huge – with a lot of the things I need and even much more that I didn’t. I spent about an hour and a half wandering around the store looking at everything and picking up what I wanted and just seeing everything else. I was even able to get my groceries. The only things I had a problem with were trying to buy Up N Go (the three staff in that area had never heard of breakfast cereal in a drink), so I gave up on that but didn’t buy any others because, like many of ours, they had too much sugar content. At least Up N Go only has 4g per serve. The lowest other I could find at Walmart was 10g. I also had a problem finding a set of bathroom scales. The first server either didn’t understand what I was saying or didn’t know what they were, then I got directed to different parts of the store, and they weren’t with homewares or pharmacy (the normal places), and in the end they were in Hardware. I still haven’t worked that one out. The last item I could not find was gym shorts. They had no shorts at all. I guess I could understand that in winter if the gym was outdoors, but given gyms are inside, I was mildly surprised. So I bought some tracksuit pants.

Anyway, I then went out and only had to wait in the dark cold air for about 5 minutes for a bus to take me back to the hotel. I dropped everything off in my room, unpacked, and then put on the tracksuit pants and tshirt and headed to the hotel gym. I got 15 minutes on the cross trainer and 10 minutes on the recumbent bicycle, so that felt really good. Then I went back to the room and had a couple of slices of last night’s pizza and took out my dessert. Which was my second round of USA foods 🙂

Then I watched TV, updated my blog for yesterday and then today, whilst learning how to use iCloud to transfer my photos between iPhone, iPad and Surface Pro. And now at 12.43am I am going to bed.