Day 25 Thursday, July 24, 2014



Day 25  Thursday, July 24, 2014

The Bev and I awoke fresh and daisies, had the in house breakfast offered by the Valdez Best Western and set out for the ride back to our final destination in Alaska, Anchorage.

Remembering some wonderful photos of bears showed to me by a fellow tourist at the Gulch Fish Hatchery just outside of Valdez, we detoured off of the Richardson Highway (Route 4) to check thing out.  We dead-ended at the highly controlled and secured Valdez Marine Terminal, end point of the Alyeska Oil Pipeline before doubling back to explore the nearby Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery.  We did not come across any opportunistic bears at the hatchery, but we did marvel at the ancestral and irreversible battle waged by the swarming, densely-packed hordes of surging salmon as they tirelessly threw themselves against the current of the rushing water flowing into the Prince Williams Sound as well as the adjacent waters of the fish ladder.

Continuing back on the virtually empty Richardson Highway en route to Anchorage, we were awestruck by some of the most magnificent mountain/glacial scenery of the entire trip in the Chugash National Forest and the Wrangel-Saiant Elias National Park and Preserve.  Thoughts of romance filled the air near Glennallen as we turned westbound onto Alaska Route 1 for the final run into back into Anchorage.

We detoured into Wasilla at Beverly’s request for a photo of the “Welcome to Wasilla” sign, however we ran afoul of the law while momentarily occupying the center turn lane of a major four-lane roadway to take a picture of the sign.  The burly Wassila policeman who harvested my driver’s license, insurance, and rental car paperwork was unamused by our photographic endeavors, and after allowing me to uncomfortably stew at the prospect of receiving my second violation of the trip for far longer than I had taken to shoot the stupid photo, he asked if we were tourists, and let us go.  This enabled us to leave Wassila and not think even worse of Sarah Palin than we already do.   Good job, officer!

After a series of directional mis-steps, we arrived at our goal for the afternoon’s destination- the Alaska Jewish Museum at  35^th Avenue.  We received a personal tour of the $4 million Museum by curator Leslie Fried and their impressive featured exhibit explaining “Operation Maginc Carpet” the story of how Alaska Airline pilot flew 420 flights to bring 49,000 members of the persecuted and impoverished Jewish Yemenite Community to Israel.  Not a single casualty resulted during the Operation, but “six babies were board on board the flights!”  We also were treated to a personal audience with the Chabad Rabbi of Anchorage’s “Chosen Frozen”, Yosef Greenberg, who offered Beverly a job at the Anchorage Chabad on the spot when he learned that she was lovely and the office manager of the Chabad of the Main Line in Merion.  Sorry, Yosef.

After a lovely dinner at a Mediterranean-style restaurant suggested by Johnny Pappas via the internet, we rolled east on Northern Lights Boulevard to attend the Friday night service at Congregation Beth Sholom led by Rabbi Michael Oblath.  We were glad to have the chance to attend the service in such a far-flung Jewish environment, but we found the experience un-inspiring.  After the service, we sought out the famous rough and tumble bar/nightclub “Chillicoot Charlie’s” but the limited bar food offering were not the dinner experience we sought that night and we fled Charlie’s without fulfillment of our hunger.