Anchorage sucks

I'm working on a post about our 8 days in Denali, but first I've got to say that Anchorage is a huge disappointment.  We drove from DNP to Wasilla mainly because we wanted to get into Anchorage early.  Wasilla was quite the experience.  Maybe it was the time of day, but we saw no one looking like any of the Palins.  Instead, it was like a zombie-fest.  Very strange people.  We stayed at the Walmart under bright lights because the people we saw on the Parks highway for at least 30 miles before Wasilla were some of the scariest we ever saw pretty much our entire life.  Then we got to Wasilla with all it's modern stores and thought things would be different.  Not exactly...

So we left at 9:00 am and were in Anchorage by 10:00.  The town seems really run down with lots of shady looking people.  Not as bad as Wasilla, but still pretty bad.  We needed a campground with showers and were hoping to find something like we found in Fairbanks.  After a short time at Costco, and several hours of looking, we finally found a place that was "okay."  But a sign said "no tenters until further notice."  Went into the office and learned that they had had a huge windstorm a week ago and were expecting another one the next day.  They didn't want a tree to fall on us.  Turns out a lot of people here are freaked out by the forecast of another storm.  We pushed a bit because the windstorm wasn't supposed to arrive for 36 hours.  They didn't budge.  So we decided to just stay at Walmart and figure out our next move in relation to the predicted storm.  There are two big Walmarts and neither of them allow overnight parking.  We asked and were told it was a city ordinance.  Imagine that.  Up here where everything is so wild and free, were almost everyone is against government regulation, and they won't even let people take a nap.  Go figure.  So now it was getting close to 5:00 pm and we still had no place to stay.  We went to the Motel 6 and it was $90 per night.  Ended up staying there because there were no other good options and the other motels were almost twice as expensive.  At least it is a really nice Motel 6.  Looks like we'll have to stay two nights because the predictions this morning are still for a major windstorm with lots of rain and possible flooding.  Just kind of ticks me off that there was no place to stay for cheap last night when the weather was good.

We came to Anchorage to resupply.  Would have been better off going back to Fairbanks for that if we had only know.  Oh well ...