Anchorage at last!

I haven’t wanted to be typing on the trip down to Anchorage because there is so much to see – the Majestic Valley and Matanuska Valley with the Matanuska Glacier, all snow covered in a beautiful sunny day with the sun making ice-crystal covered trees sparkle!!! So big and so massive you have to turn you head 180 degrees to take it all in! Lots of up and down (like 8% grades) that I didn’t remember from when we traveled it in 1998. You can look way far up and down the mountain passes and see the strip of road and say “that’s where we’re going!”
Yesterday we were in Tok and called Dale Raitto to ask if we could train on his trails (since the dogs haven’t run in a week) so we drove into their yard – beautiful little log cabin in evergreen woods. They have room for over a hundred dogs in their dog yard and I asked him how many of them were his and he told me 7! He trains them for a lot of other people and has a nice trail system right out of the yard. Randy trained 2 teams of 10 and there were 2 other people training for the same race this weekend, the Rondy. When Randy came back from the first run I asked him how it was and he said “that’s the nicest trail I have ever been on!” – for somebody that’s been running dogs for 37 years that says a lot!! After we trained we stopped in the cabin for a minute and were introduced to Elise – beautiful full bear rugs on the walls and all kinds of fur pelts – beautiful!! I needed to get some more work done on the computer and had good coverage in Tok so Randy took me out to dinner at “Fast Eddy’s” where we had our first taste of our favorite Alaskan food, halibut! Randy met some people at another table that train yearling dogs for Terry Streeper and they had heard of but did not know Claude Bellerive – our friend from Quebec that we stay with when we are there. Spent the night 2 hours down the road after we stopped at the Tok grocery store where I paid $6.99 for a 5 pound bag of apples!!
Slept at a turn-out on the highway and awoke to a pink sunrise over the snowy mountains! We are almost to Palmer (going slower that we would like with all these hills –up and down, up and down) and the plan is to get a room tonite at the hotel where the draw for placement going out the first day of the race will be held and wash the truck and wash us! We will see how the plan goes………

In to Anchorage without a problem and had looked up the hotel directions on the computer so we drove right to where the Crowne Plaza Hotel and the driver's meeting tonite is - I asked Randy how much he was wanting to spend on a room thinking that the Crowne Plaza might be a little pricy - lo and behold there was a Motel 6 2 doors down and a perfect place to park the 40 foot rig!!!! So here I am now using DSL and get a shower!!!!