We had a great day in Anchorage. We started out at the Alaskan Native Heritage Center which is a short bus ride out of downtown. As we were driving in we stopped and saw two moose munching on the side of the road. The center itself was only mildly interesting. Lots of native people selling crafts and a few interesting exhibits. It was a free day otherwise it would have been very expensive. Anyway they put on a dance demonstration which was very good. The dance movements seemed Hawaiian. Very elegant. At the end there was the customary audience participation, and Ginny participated. She likes to do stuff like that. So today's photo is of Ginny strutting her stuff with the natives. The gloves were loaned to her by one of the dancers.

We returned to the downtown and spent the rest of the day at the Anchorage Museum which turned out to be really excellent, once you got past the art and environmental activist crap. They had a very interesting display on the modern history of Alaska, from the Russians to the modern era. There was a display on the 1964 earthquake which included a real-time seismic map of Alaska. There are little tremors recorded every few minutes. They also had a full size cross section of the Alyeska pipeline. In case you are wondering, Alyeska is the name of a mountain here and it means "great country" and other things in the Aleut language. The neatest part was a huge hands-on exhibit of scientific stuff. There were water rocket launchers, mechanical wave generators, giant soap bubbles, a huge Rube Goldberg machine, a hot wax volcano and on and on. We had a lot of fun there.

At the end of the day we drifted to the local liquor store and got some beer then headed back to our hotel. We opened up a can of salmon spread, a box of Triscuits and some cheddar cheese and enjoyed quite a feast. Tomorrow we are on to Seward. This is starting our last two weeks in Alaska.