Mileophile: Alaska 2020- Day 9

We weren’t in much of a hurry to arise this morning. At the risk of sounding redundant, this is the first trip we’ve taken where I have actually felt like it was vacation. The fact that we DON'T have to repack and unpack and load and unload the car every day is the bees knees! I had to pick up a few grocery items this morning and stumbled upon this majestic market!

I've always felt the Whitlock Kroger was missing something.....

We’d told the children that since this trip had yet to include a presidential library we were going to head to the Alaskan Annex of The William McKinley Presidential Library (not a real thing). We explained that because of his connection to Alaska (Mount McKinley, now Denali), they’d decided to set up additional exhibits in Alaska in addition to his Primary Presidential Library in Ohio. The wee-ones whole-body frowned and whined that they'd thought they were going to make it a whole trip without a presidential library. Bwha-ha-ha! These were all lies. We think it’s fun to tell lies to our children. Although, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult with the Google. However, our real plan kept getting pushed back because of weather, so we had to keep telling more lies. In the meantime, we walked into Talkeetna to meet with the mayor. Well, we tried to meet with the mayor. He wasn’t home. He lives in a store. He is a cat. And, he’s dead. Rest in peace Stubbs the cat who served as mayor of Talkeetna for 15 years! Now, Talkeetna is really just a historic district run by a council, but the idea of a cat-mayor did perk my interest. Unfortunatly, Stubbs the Mayor-Cat passed away from natural causes after a long life of civil service. Stubbs had exhausted at least 2 of his 9 lives prior to expiring having survived an assassination attempt by an unleashed dog and taking a swim in the deep fryer at the restaurant next door!

Cute store, no Mayor-Cat.

I’d heard there was a new cat mayor residing at Nagley’s store but we looked high and low and couldn’t find him or her. Maybe the new cat mayor was out on official town business…..We’ll never know.

I could live anywhere that sells Peonies out of 5 gallon buckets!

I'd planned on going to the little Talkeetna History museum, but, like everything, it was closed. The children bemoaned in unison, "Why, oh Why?!? We really wanted to go to another random hisory museum".

So, I might've taken some artistic license with that last kid quote.

Because Thomas had not yet procured a souvenir, when he spied a sidewalk artist, he decided that he would like a Caricature of himself. And he would prefer that this likeness of himself feature him holding a Corgi in one hand and a samurai sword in the other hand. Ne’re the two shall meet.

I like the way the artist captured adult teeth in a kid head

We wanted to grab an early dinner so that we wouldn’t be late for our evening activity. The kids were super suspicious and it didn’t help when Mr. Bullington had to go back to the RV to get his GoPro. Charlotte, the most wiley of the Bullington children, inquired why it was necessary to have a GoPro at a presidential library….So we lied again and told them that we were going night rafting (also, not a thing)….Then we walked up to the Sheldon Air Hangar. The clouds finally parted and we were ready to go Flightseeing! It’s like sightseeing, but on a flight. See what they did there.

It was so cute the way the color drained from their hopeful little faces when they set their sites on our transport for the evening. It was not a 747, but a 70-year-old puddle jumper! Whee! Our plan was to make our way to Denali and land on Ruth Glacier. At least that was the plan. They say The Big One (Denali), is so big that it creates it’s own weather. By the time we got to the point to land on the glacier, the weather had clouded over and the visability was too poor. I was bummed because I wanted the experience, but we still got to fly really close to mountains and were able to spot lots of animals from the air. So many bears…..