Alaska! Day Two

Day Two, Thursday:
Frank and I stayed in a hotel in downtown anchorage, which is about 20 minutes from where Branden and Amber live.

The view from our room. Taken at about 9 a.m.

In the mornings, we would sleep in (because, why not? It's so dark!), then eat breakfast 

and then we usually went for a drive to see the sights.

The girls tend to sleep fairly late, so there was no rush to go over to their house.

We could see a beautiful partially frozen inlet from our hotel so we drove around to get closer to it.

I stayed in the car, while Frank got some good pictures. Brrrr.

We found a nature walk and went for a short hike.

The entire area was pure ice but as we exited the car, a guy on a mountain bike rode past.

I was impressed.

It was really cold down by the water that morning...there was a breeze and my hands and face were so cold!

But we skated and gingerly walked along.

It was very pretty.

As we were walking along on the frozen pathway, a runner came by!

She had spikes on her shoes and was running along on the ice like it was no big deal.

Alaskans.

The family decided to come over to our place to swim in the hotel pool.

We were pretty excited to have a pool at the hotel and imagined fun times splashing and playing with the kids...

but it turned out that the pool wasn't a "play with the kids and frolic" kind of a pool

it was a lap swimming pool as part of the workout room.

There were a few problems with this:

a lap pool is kept quite a bit cooler than a frolic pool

a lap pool is small

a lap pool just might have people who want to swim laps

We still gave it our best efforts and had fun

but the girls were cold pretty quickly.

and I think the guy who was attempting to swim laps left sooner than he might have originally planned.

After our little swimming party, we decided to go to lunch.

But the idea of getting everyone to the car and driving to a restaurant seemed like so much work

so we took the recommendation of the valet parking guys and dashed across the street to a sandwich place.

We had no coats, wet hair, and the girls were barefoot.

Afterwards, we went back to Branden and Amber's place in the hopes that the girls would nap.

I think having us there messed up their sleeping because there were very few naps the whole week.

We rented some movies from the local Blockbuster.

Yes, Blockbuster.

and just had a relaxing evening together.