Searching Google I found an event happening on Friday called the Strawberry Festival outside of Palmer just a few short miles southeast of us. We drove south on Highway 3 to Old Glenn Highway. What a gorgeous road thru the woods along a wide river.
We came upon a power station in the middle of nowhere out there, but for the life of me I could not figure out how they make power. There weren’t any smoke stacks or dams to be seen or big tanks of natural gas or oil, so that was a mystery to me. Later when we got back home, I looked it up. There was a dam, but it was almost 5 miles away up in the mountains. They pipe the water all the way to that plant near the water making about 50 megawatts. Every other hydroelectric power plant I had seen prior was built as part of the dam itself. Apparently they are not all built that way.
We went a bit further and saw a large truss bridge going across the big river and assumed we would be driving over that. But we actually drove over what looked like a normal steel under-structure bridge and the trestle was to our right. But it was very narrow and appeared to be used as a pedestrian crossing now. We have seen that quite a few times here in Alaska. They don’t tear out the old narrow one-lane bridges, but make them into bike and pedestrian bridges.
I had programmed in the Strawberry Festival as our first stop but somehow Google decided to take us to the reindeer farm first. I didn’t know Kathy liked reindeer so much prior to our arrival.
Dusty went outside and saw the horses and started to bark a lot. I walked him over to a big tree and out from behind a building came two very large white fluffy dogs barking away with their long tails wagging. Dusty was not sure they were friendly so he walked the other way. He went back in the car and we proceeded to join an in-progress reindeer tour.
Kathy got some food for the reindeer and then we went into 
the pen. Talk about getting crowded by a bunch of deer! And their antlers were covered in fur or hair. It was really odd looking.
Then we went over to the bison for a quick pet on the nose. If you touched 
his fro, you would regret it. His head butts were fast and furious.
We then headed over to Rocky’s pen. He was found in a quarry, so that’s why he is not named Bullwinkle. There was a big steel fence 
between us and him, but he seemed very gentle, at least way more than I expected a moose to be. He let anyone pet him for a Willow leaf. But he was very big. Way taller than me and they said he had a lot more time to grow as he was only two years old.
We headed on down the road to find the Strawberry Festival, found it on a farm not far down the road. We walked up to the booth and asked about picking strawberries. The reply from the young girl was, “Oh, it’s too early for strawberries.” So I am not sure why this was the Strawberry Festival.
They were allowing you to walk into the field to pick zucchini and radishes, rhubarb and kale, none of which we needed at the moment. But thankfully, there was a stand in there selling pints of strawberries…
One of the buildings on the farm had a big Latter Day Saints sign on it. I didn’t see anything that looked anything like a church near there, so it seemed a bit out of place there.
We headed back toward Wasilla and came across another river with the old bridge being for pedestrians. The river was very wide but was moving extremely quickly. We drove a bit further and found a farmers market in Palmer just about to end for the day. As usual, hardly any produce, but lots of food vendors and crafts for sale.
