New Girl Observation No. 5: In Talkeetna

I'd heard it before but I didn't get a true feel for it until I sat for an hour today at the Mile High Pizza Pie restaurant for about an hour.

It's true; Talkeenta, Alaska and Crested Butte, Colorado--the new girl's most recent hometown--have much in common.

The pizza place bore a strange resemblence to the Brick Oven in Crested Butte--a great outdoor deck, local patrons flitting in and out and bemoaning the traffic on main street because of all the tourists. There was the mandatory group of pretty, twenty-something waitresses delivering slow but well-meaning service. A group of bearded twenty-something men in the kitchen, slinging out pie and yelling for waitresses to do the pick up.

It, of course, brought to mind my own waitressing days at the Brick when a slow summer afternoon would make you slow your steps and pretty soon you were chatting with the cooks about the weather. And that was okay.

Talkeetna and Crested Butte also share a tourism-based economy and, according to word from the pizza place, tourism is down a bit this year, perhaps 10 to 15 percent. Despite the traffic on main street, there are fewer foreign visitors, particularly from Japan, according to one local pizza eater.

One RV Park owner near Talkeenta reported to the AK Journal of Commerce that his pre-bookings were down 75 percent in the first three months of 2009, compared with the previous year. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that tourism companies in Alaska where battling a 30 percent drop in reservations with steep discounts.

Just like Crested Butte, this local said it didn't matter too much that bookings were slightly down. He liked a little bit of a slower pace.