Road Trip...

Back in January, there was an announcement on the public TV station that the Antiques Roadshow, a PBS program, was coming to Anchorage this summer. You had to enter a lottery to get tickets. So I did, not expecting anything, and we won two tickets to the show in July.  If you're not familiar, they have a bunch of appraisers and you bring in stuff and they appraise it. The best ones are filmed and shown on the TV program. So Andy and I drove down to Anchorage and did the stand in the endless lines for hours routine to get a few minutes with an appraiser. I brought a bunch of my dads WWII Army stuff and the ship in the bottle that my grandpa made. 

Surprisingly, the bottle was worth several hundred bucks, while the army stuff not so much. Andy's Roy Rogers lunch box and her mom's Navajo blankets were about the same.

So this is kind of how we felt afterwards. We drove to Palmer to visit Andy's friend Val and we assuaged our disappointment with several cold beers. The next day we drove back via the Palmer Fishook Road, a very narrow, rough road that goes over Hatcher Pass and eventually gets you to Willow on the Parks Hwy. The clouds were down to the ground on the south side of the pass, but lifted just enough to see the hillsides on north side.

Look ma, I'm on top of the world! Well at least 3800 ft in Hatcher pass. So besides seeing the pass, the highlight of the trip was stopping for coffee and ice cream at McKinley Parks glitter gulch. Tasty!