Alaska - Day Four

Seward is a touristy town. A town where more than half of it goes out of business for the winter. We were most disappointed that the road we needed to drive on to go see a glacier was already closed for the season. Bummer :(

We were staying at the Holiday Inn. It had a pool and sauna, but NO fitness center. We wanted to have Friday as our "off" day, so that meant that we were actually going to have to run outside. Yep. It was upper twenties, drizzling rain, and DARK, but we still got our butts out there and ran. Below is what I was wearing. With some pink compression socks. And a warm hat/gloves. Don't worry, at least the shirt is long sleeved. The run wasn't too bad. I'm not used to running without being REALLY hot. Another 5-10 degrees and it would have been pretty ideal running weather for me. With that said. Alaska is FREAKING COLD. Rougly 4.25 miles later and we felt pretty awesome for being the only people insane enough to be outside.

Marina behind our hotel

Our planned adventure for the day? Meeting the Iditarod sled dogs! They actually do tours year round since there are always dogs in training. The Iditarod is a 1100 mile race from just north of Anchorage, all the way to Nome! The winner in the past has taken about 9 days to complete this. Crazy!! The dogs in training now are hoping to be in the race in 2013.

25 or so dogs are all that are on site in the winter - closer to 80 during the summer

In the "carriage"

Dogs are ready to run!

-15 degrees is the ideal temp for them. They had to be "cooled down" a few times

With "Adam" - the cute one

Those are real moose antlers!

The girls were disappointed to leave the dogs, but we still had a long drive back to Anchorage! Beautiful scenery along the way, and STILL nice weather.

Mt McKinley (Denali National Park) - the iceberg looking thing in the sky

Earthquake Park

Denali

We had from 4-7 to pick up our packets in downtown Anchorage. The city is sort of confusing and there isn't a lot of public parking. What parking is available is metered. It took a few minutes of driving around for us to find somewhere. Packet pick-up was just inside the local running store. Very crowded. And once again... no small shirts. Why??

Poster advertising the race!

My bib number... I think these were in order by when you registered. LOL

Dinner was... hectic. Driving around because my dad was certain he'd seen a pizza buffet. By the time we found it, we were of course starving. Ate too much. The kids hadn't napped so we had lights out extra early. Of course being full and it being dark, the adults fell asleep too. Earliest night yet - before 8:00 pm.