Fantasy Caravan Day 34 - Free Day in Anchorage

Thursday was a free day in Anchorage (no specifically scheduled activities planned by Fantasy). They did let us know that we could go to the Alaska Native Heritage Center and our Fantasy id badge would get us in for free -- so we planned to do that.

First, a few pictures that I took on Wednesday evening when Mike and Tammy were taking us around Anchorage... 

We were at Cook Inlet, so we saw the Captain Cook monument.

I thought his history was interesting -- a farm hand's son who became a Captain in the Royal Navy!

What we could have seen across the inlet had it not been pouring rain!

On Thursday, we had some shopping to do -- we wanted to get some Halibut and Salmon while in Alaska, so we went to Costco to get an idea of what the prices were there. While there, Carl encountered another stuffed bear! (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/08/fantasy-caravan-day-26-fairbanks-part-2.html)

Carl had been craving Chinese Buffet, so he asked at the campground and they seemed to agree on this one... so we went there for lunch. It was good!

While there, I noticed a few signs in Chinese characters -- we have used Google Lens to do translation of languages with Latin characters (French, Spanish) -- I decided to try translating one of their signs. This is a screen capture of the results; it recognized the language as Chinese and translated it. You may not be able to see the translation also on the picture -- according to Google, it says, "Congratulations on the opening of China Lights."

We then headed to the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

There was a group performing, sharing music and dance.

Video of the dance with the music:

In another area of the center, they had examples of material made/used by different peoples and information displayed about the people group:

I think that these people groups resided in the southeast (coastal) part of Alaska.

These were examples of greetings in the different languages. The last one is obviously related to Texan cuz they say "you all"!

These people groups were in the Aleutian islands. The text indicates the Russian influence in their culture.

Greetings in these languages.

Northern Alaska dwellers

Central Alaska dwellers

A lot of different languages represented in this area

Mike and Tammy had recommended that we check with 10th and Seafoods on getting Halibut and Salmon, so we went there and were able to get just what we wanted -- already vacuum packed and frozen ready to go!

We also got some shopping done at Walmart.

In the evening, we met in the campground pavilion for our travel meeting, followed by dinner of "walking tacos" (a Fantasy tradition of building your taco in a sack of Frito's so you can walk around and eat!). After eating, we had an activity where we were supposed to find someone in our group that satisfied a specific criteria -- like someone who RVs fulltime, or who is on their first Fantasy tour, or are lifetime members with Fantasy, or who has a pet, or who has owned more than 3 RVs. It was an additional way for us to get to know others in our group and we had fun doing it.

Unfortunately, we had a lot of rain while we were in Anchorage, but Tammy told us that meant that we weren't bothered by mosquitos! So, some benefits even in difficulties!