Visiting an American colony, a great museum in Wasilla and Talkeetna
Saturday morning we quickly packed up, had breakfast and managed to leave the site by 9:15am but we still had to get water, propane, margarine and everything else I had missed while grocery shopping before. With some careful searching we did find margarine! It was well hidden though. We fuelled up and finally left anchorage to go to Palmer but on the way there something on the road took a chunk out of the trailer fender. You can see it in this video, I never saw it before I ran it over and it flew up, hit the plastic trailer fender and took a chunk out of it.
We got to palmer and went to the info centre first which had a lot of history in it, then we went to the museum which was an original colony house. Shawn was quite fascinated by the one lady's knitting. The place was pretty cool.
During the depression the USA government resettled a bunch of people but trying to colonize Alaska was the most famous one. They took over 200 families and sent them to Palmer Alaska during the depression. Shipping over 1000 people up there in the spring and expecting a town to be built and enough ready by winter turned out to high expectations. The people had to live in the train that brought them there until they set up a tent city, then wait for others to build them a town that they weren't allowed to build themselves. The houses were all built from green logs the first summer and all had to be rebuilt the next summer. There was a shortage of supplies and doctors and so on. These photos explain the troubles fairly well.
One of the big reasons they colonized this area was because they figured the land would be highly productive. That may seem odd because its Alaska but in the summer the sun doesn't go down near the summer solstice and even in June they have over 20hrs a day of sun. The glacier soil was also very rich and world record size vegetables have come from here. The size of them is unreal. I had no size reference for these photos but those are normal sized bricks if that helps.
As we left there was a huge line of traffic on the highway the way we had come in all going to see the highland games which were in Palmer that day. We were really glad we had gotten there when we did and didn't have to wait through miles of traffic for it. It was quite an incredible line so here is a very sped up video of it:
We drove to Wasilla while eating lunch and this was one of the very first times we got the car gps to find where we were going so we used it. It led us off the main freeway down a slow frontage road for quite a ways before putting us back on the freeway for no apparent reason. We quit trying to use it and just stuck to the phone gps after that.
We got to museum of Alaska transportation and industry in Wasilla and it was really awesome. There was a massive amount of stuff there and the kids got to sit on all different types of equipment and had lots of fun. There was loads of cool stuff both indoors and outdoors, we could have spent a lot longer there but we only had one day, its a lot to take in just during one visit, the mosquitos weren't nice and the kids were getting crazy. I tried to pick only the more interesting photos but this place was amazing, I took over 300 photos this day. Indoors there was a display about the first guys to hang glide off the top of mt. McKinley:
An 18yr old that rode his motorbike 24k miles through 14 countries from the southernmost city in the world to the northernmost road accessible city in north America for a fundraiser in 2012/13. 
A Ford model A modified into a dump truck:
Info about the USa purchasing Alaska from Russia
Lots of information about the trains and they had a decent amount of trains outside as well. This loop was cool:
Outside the kids could climb through most of the stuff.
Then we drove to Talkeetna and went through the museum there but we arrived a little later than we planned because of construction. Lots of history of the Denali mountain/mt McKinley-north Americas tallest mountain-there. This is the town that most people go to just before climbing the mountain, flight tours of it take off from here as well. This info about the first ascent to the peak by dogsled I found interesting:
This was an interesting guy, made a lot of firsts including first to solo climb the mountain and first to solo climb in winter but he died on his winter decent of the mountain:
I hadn't thought of how much garbage there would be on the mountain or how many people climb it every year
We wandered around the tourist town, I was looking forward to meeting the mayor but he died the year before. The mayor had been a cat for 16 years or so. This was a lookout point for the mountain but its covered in clouds:
We left and had a campground planned but we found a sign that said campsite on the side of the road so we followed it. The road was incredibly rough, I'm not sure how i never bottomed out but I couldn't turn around so i had to keep going. We got to the end and it was just a turnaround with 4 spots wide enough to park a trailer. We didn't feel like driving back so we set up camp. It was a quiet spot but a fair bit of broken glass, we picked the site with the least glass which was more sheltered from the wind so there were more mosquitos...
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