The Silent "I"

5 Fun Things to Do with Kids In & Around Anchorage

Planning a family vacation to Alaska? Be sure to stop in Anchorage, where fun activities for the whole family abound.  We spent a week in Anchorage in June, and these were some of the highlights of our trip.

1. Tour the Solar System. Downtown Anchorage offers you a unique opportunity to tour our entire solar system through the Lightspeed Planet Walking Tour.  Find the sun at the corner of 5th and G streets, where a map guides you through town to the various planets in the solar system.  The walking tour is designed to take you from the sun to each planet at a leisurely pace, approximating the speed of light. If you make it to Pluto, the entire trip would take over five hours.  Good thing Pluto is no longer a planet.

2. Visit the Native Heritage Center. The Native Heritage Center is a great place to learn about the history and culture of Alaska's indigenous people.  It boasts a well-curated museum of artifacts and a living-history tour of different styles of dwellings and lodges used by the five cultural groups represented in Alaska.  Kids can roam around and touch whale bones, totems, and tools used by Alaska natives in daily life.  Knowledgeable guides are on-hand to give you a feel for the story-telling traditions and village life.  Open in summer months only.

3. Explore the Anchorage Museum Imaginarium. We loved visiting the Anchorage Museum, particularly the Imaginarium's hands-on exhibits science and technology.  The Imaginarium contains several rooms of hands-on science exhibits for tots to teens to explore and learn.

4. Take a goofy photo at the Captain Cook Statue. Located at the end of 3rd Avenue in downtown Anchorage, Resolution Park boasts a statue of famed explorer Captain James Cook, whose travels took him from England to Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, and points around the globe. Captain Cook met with a tragic end in Hawaii, where he ended up on the wrong end of a pointy spear.  He may or may not have ended up the main course at a luau, along with the poi and poke salad.  At any rate, his voyage to Cook Inslet, near Anchorage, was a much less eventful journey.

5. Take a Glacier Cruise.  Drive about an hour outside Anchorage, and hop on a day cruise of the famous glaciers of Chugach National Park.  We liked the 26 Glaciers Cruise, which included a comfortable, roomy catamaran, lunch, and prime viewing spots for wildlife, glaciers, and gorgeous scenery.  It was an unforgettable tour for the entire family.

If you happen to be in Alaska from August 26-September 6, 2010, be sure to drive to Palmer to check out the Alaska State Fair.  We visited the State Fair in 1996, before our son was born, but it still holds a special place in my heart.  There, you can feast on fair food, hear live concerts, and check out some of the worlds largest vegetables.  Alaska's growing season may be short, but with nearly 24-hour daylight in mid-summer, cabbages can grow to the size of a Volkswagen.  Who among us can resist a ginormous squash?

Evolution of a BlogHer: 2010 Edition

Last week, 2400 bloggers (including myself) swarmed the BlogHer 2010 Conference at the Hilton New York in New York City.  This was my fourth BlogHer Conference in five years, and each year BlogHer helps me grow, discover something about myself, and move forward to a new chapter of my life online.  Each conference has been empowering to me in a way that has been hard for me to quantify.  For me, BlogHer has been, and continues to be, nothing short of a revelation, an unfolding of a new area of myself to explore and nurture over the coming years.  So, my BlogHer recap this year is not about the parties, the sessions or the friends I hugged (there were many; they were fabulous), but a recap of what BlogHer has meant to me over the years.

BlogHer '06, The Writer: I was a fly-on-the-wall at BlogHer '06.  I had not been blogging long, and really didn't know where I was going with this newfangled blog thing.  I didn't know any of the bloggers outside my little Silicon Valley momsphere. The bloggers I read but didn't know personally, I was way too intimidated to just introduce myself to.  I didn't think of myself as a writer, but a lawyer with a blogging hobby.  At the closing keynote speech, I heard my personal blog-heroine Grace Davis say, "If you have a blog, you are a writer."  That was my revelatory moment.  I realized that having a blog helped me to realize the joy that I get out of writing, and reading the work of other women who love writing as much as I do. I decided to keep blogging and exploring what the inner-writer in me had to say.

BlogHer '07, The Activist: In 2007, I realized the power of community and the power that words have to spur people to action. At BlogHer 2007, I heard Elizabeth Edwards in conversation with Lisa Stone about her husband's campaign and the issues she cared most deeply about--healthcare, poverty, and the environment.  I had the chance to speak with her personally, and felt a kinship to her and her ideas.  Soon after that, Stefania, Beth and I met in a coffee shop in Palo Alto and gave birth to our own form of on-line activism: MOMocrats, a collective of like-minded, highly-spirited, outspoken moms. Although the Edwards campaign (and Edwards himself) faltered, the MOMocrats flourished. Within a  year of launch, we had interviewed Barack Obama, gotten Michelle Obama to guest-post, and were invited to be part of the media covering the 2008 Democratic National Convention.  I met women through MOMocrats that I consider to be part of my tribe and my lifelong friends.

 

 

 

Feeding Time at Steinhart Aquarium

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