People, places, things, and ideas I love in Anchorage, AK
It’s Fur Rondy! Time for all of Anchorage to head downtown for a week+ of wild Alaska-style fun: Running with the Reindeer, Snowshoe Softball, Outhouse Races, and more. This is SO MUCH to do – check out the daily schedule to make sure you don’t miss a thing. I hope you all caught the fireworks last night – they were spectacular. Rondy aside, there’s plenty happening around town this week if you’re looking for a good time.
It was a busy week in Anchortown!
The Northern Lights hotel is finally being demoed, we have a shiny new crop of Top 40 under Forty to celebrate, and two Alaskans were nominated for a James Beard award (known as the culinary world’s Grammys). There’s a new podcast in town for all you dog mushing aficionados – you can listen once a week until the Iditarod, when the schedule switches to once a day.
Five+ years ago my husband and I said “I do.” Our wedding was ridiculously fun and involved a lot of DIY (my maid of honor and her family actually BUILT US A WEDDING WALL complete with photos of our parents and grandparents on their wedding days and my mom made my wedding skirt) and pitching in by family and friends. Of course, plenty of wedding vendors were part of the day as well (favorites were Riza Brown and Josh Martinez, then of Chugach Peaks Photography) and I was lucky to find them (and would choose them 96,797,098,908 times over) during a time when Anchorage event planning felt fairly dated.
Since then, our local wedding scene has exploded with new wedding vendors, offering couples a seemingly endless array of options to create special occasions that effortlessly emphasize their personalities. On February 14, many of them displayed their talents at the Alaska Wedding Collective, an event offering interactive “action stations” to provide a truly special experience for attendees. Although my marrying days are long behind me I enjoyed every moment, probably because the evening felt more like a fun party than a wedding show.
Judging a latte art competition was not on my life list…because I don’t have one. But if I DID, it would have been. And I would have crossed it off as complete last Saturday night after the Alaska Barista Cup, which was one of the most surprising, joyful events I’ve been to in a long time.