Salmon Everywhere!

Jane here.

Yesterday we went into downtown Anchorage again on two specific missions: 1) to see as many of the Wild Salmon on Parade as we could, and 2)to go on a tour of the Anchorage cemetary, which was run by the Cook Inlet Historical Society. We acheived partial success on both counts.

Wild Salmon on Parade is one of those civic art projects where various groups and/or artists decorate statues of an animal that is iconic to the area. The statues are displayed for a while, usually a summer, and then auctioned off. Some examples are the Cow Parade in (I think) Chicago, the Pandas in Washington, DC, and the Miles of Mules in PA's Lehigh Valley. Anyway, as you might have guessed from the name, what is on parade here are salmon statues. They are scattered all over downtown, some are inside buildings and some are outside. There are 21 of them listed on the official flyer, though we saw one in the Visitor's Center that wasn't on the list...maybe it was from a previous year? Anyway, we saw 7 of the 21, so there are a few more to look at. Well, they'll be out for a few months yet, so we hope to get to see all of them. Or else I'll forget about it until it's too late. Only time can tell!

While we were walking around, we picked up a few side missions. One was to see the statue of Captain Cook, which we did. It is a nice statue, and he looks appropriately visionary. It is standing on a very nice observation deck, which has a good view of the Cook Inlet and (on a clear day, which this wasn't) the mountains beyond. But it was neat anyway. The other was to find a reasonably priced place to eat lunch. In this we were only semi-successful. Of course, as soon as we cracked and had a slice of pizza, every place after that looked good and had more-or-less reasonable prices. But the best part of this wandering around is that we are learning a bit more about the city everytime we wander around a bit, which is valuable to know!

The second major mission we also sort of completed. By around mid-afternoon, we had been walking around for a few hours and were starting to get tired. The problem was that at this point we had about 4 hours to wait until the tour even started. Now, you may be wondering, why not just go home and come back in about 3 1/2 hours? Because we could tell that once we were in our apartment for the day, going back out was not going to be an option. So we decided to go and just look around the cemetary ourselves, and if we saw anything really startling that we could not figure out for ourselves, we would work up the gumption to stick around for the tour. Well, it is a pretty good cemetary. If you are interested in that sort of thing, it has a few nifty features. There are a few unique monument types, like propellers for aviation pioneers and whalebones for a couple of people. One unique feature of the cemetary design itself is that a lot of it is laid out in fraternal organizations sectors - like the Elks section, the Masons section, and so forth. Cemetaries and gravestones are a minor hobby of mine, and we have walked around a fair number of them. So it is always interesting when I see something I haven't seen before. We didn't stick around for the tour - just too tired. However, apparently this is an annual event, so maybe we'll make it net year!