July 3:  Today we drove from Anchorage down the Kenai peninsula to Homer.  We had great weather and good highways all the way.  We were last in this area in 1989 when Dave was working out of Kenai, but the whole area has built up tremendously since then.  The town of Homer is located on the peninsula, but we are staying in an RV park on the Homer Spit.  As you can see in the photos below, our coaches are all parked facing the water (Kachemak Bay), so we have a gorgeous view of both water and mountains out our big front windows.  On the way here, we had lunch in the coach in a pull-off beside the highway.  After arriving at the RV park and getting hooked up and settled, we both enjoyed a brief rest and then had dinner at Fat Olives, a nearby pizza parlor and restaurant.  The pizza was quite good, and their specialty is a huge 28″ pizza, but for take-out only!  We settled for a smaller one…  🙂

July 4:  Today most of our group went fishing for halibut (’tis the season!), but not being fishermen ourselves, we opted to clean the coach, both inside and out, and catch up on some laundry.  The fishing contingent were a little late getting back because in order to keep your quota of two halibut, at least one of them HAD to be LESS than 29″ long.  Unfortunately, one of the guys had a problem catching one small enough (had already caught a big one), and ended up reeling in 14 fish before he finally got the small one he needed in order to keep the big one (go figure !).  This poor guy was worn out from reeling in all these big fish!  A group of us joined up for dinner at a place called the Chart Room restaurant.  It is at the end of the Spit and our table afforded a great view of the bay. The food was delicious and the company, delightful–a perfect ending for the day!

July 5:  We began our day today with a bus ride to a nearby wharf, where we boarded a tour boat that took us out and around a number of nearby points of interest.  In all the sailing around, we saw bald eagles, some flying and some perched in trees onshore.  There were  thousands of sea gulls on–you guessed it!–Gull Island (man, was that noisy!), and sea otters cavorting in the waters of the bay.  At one point several of us happened to see a small whale surface (come up for air).  One of the guides saw it, too, and identified it as most likely being a minke whale, a variety of small whales that are occasionally seen in this area.  However, they are very shy and seldom surface when anyone is around to see it.  At Rookery Rock we saw more gulls as well as cormorants, a few puffins, and more otters.

After we finished the water tour and returned to shore, we boarded a bus to see a few sights of interest in the city of Homer and to tour the Norman Lowell Gallery.  Lowell is a local artist whose lifetime work is displayed in a lovely facility on his property just outside of town. He is in his early 90’s, but is still alert and active.  Sadly, he has lost about 90% of his vision, rendering him legally blind, but he still manages (with the help of intense light sources) to work on new paintings.  This collection of his life’s work was beautiful and most impressive!

http://www.normanlowellgallery.net/normlowellgallery.php

Later, we had dinner at Captain Pattie’s with 11 of our friends.  They’re such a fun group and we’ve had lots of scrumptious fish, but I fear that I may soon sprout fins!  🙂

We spotted this beauty on the boardwalk on the Homer Spit. It has wheels, but I don’t know if it is roadworthy. It is NOT in our traveling group.

July 6:  This morning began with a pancake breakfast and a short worship service in the RV park meeting room.  A little later in the morning, Dave and I arrived at the Homer Airport for our helicopter ride to a nearby glacier.  The weather for doing this couldn’t have been lovelier:  sunny with a light breeze.  Our pilots and guides were all very good and the experience was an amazing one!  We tromped around on the ice  and learned a lot about glaciers while doing so.  Just before we left, we were served “champagne on ice” from bottles that had been chilling in one of the nearby puddles of glacial melt, and the guides happily took photos of us with our cameras (see below).  It was truly an amazing experience and by far my favorite at this stop.

After a nap this afternoon (it’s exhausting, tromping around on those glaciers, you know!), we had a pot-luck dinner with fried fish provided courtesy of our Motorcade fishermen and cooks.  All of the food, especially the fish, was delicious, and the drivers’ meeting afterward was a hoot, as they usually are!  Now it’s about time to call it a day and rest up for another travel day tomorrow.  Kenai, here we come!

June 30: Today we drove from Denali to Anchorage, about 6 hr. 15 min. driving time. The good news is that, in addition to lovely weather, we drove over some of the nicest highways we had yet encountered in Alaska. The scenery was splendid at every turn, and the trip was a very pleasant one. If you’d like to “ride along” with us for about 4 minutes, check out the video below. Along the way we stopped at a lovely, quiet park that is the Alaska Veterans’ Memorial. It was a nice chance to stop, walk around, and ponder for a few moments.

Dave and I were among the first to arrive in Anchorage because we were part of that day’s parking team. My job was to stand on a nearby major street corner (the last important turn in our route to the campground) and wave a fluorescent orange flag to be sure our coach drivers turned the correct direction here. I was wearing a fluorescent green vest. I felt VERY conspicuous, and our coach drivers assured me I was very easy to spot! (No kidding….) I only got a few weird looks, and most passers-by assumed I was probably harmless. I think I did pretty well—in addition to our coaches, I only tried to flag in one off-brand coach and one city bus! 😉 Once the coaches drove into the campground itself, Dave helped direct them to their specific parking spot. They arrived in twos and threes within a fairly narrow time frame, so the parking process was completed much faster than we anticipated. That gave us some time to rest and freshen up a bit before our group dined together at the nearby Sourdough Mining Company, where there were good eats and plenty of it!

July 1: This was a day for catching up on some errands: grocery shopping, getting some photos printed at Walgreen’s, and having lunch at a local Applebee’s. I found the checkout total breathtaking, but Dave pointed out that it was equivalent to only about ¼ tank of diesel fuel.

In the afternoon we took the tandem off the Subaru and went exploring on some of the local hike and bike paths. Anchorage is crisscrossed with them, so it’s very easy to maneuver around town by bike … in the summer, that is. (I assume you probably have to ski these trails in the winter!) Our route took us almost 15 miles, to what we believe was the Knik arm of the Cook Inlet. The scenery along the way was heavily forested with lush green growth, and the paths cross major highways either by dedicated bridges or tunnels. The other nice feature is that the paths easily accommodate two-way bicycle and pedestrian traffic, and although the trails are well used, they weren’t crowded. At a scenic spot that was the turning point of our ride, a very nice Norwegian man took a photo of Dave and me with the bike. He spoke about as much Texan as we do Norwegian, but we still managed to communicate what we needed to and got a fine snapshot for our efforts.

Later in the evening, our group gathered in the outdoor “pavilion” next to the campground office for a hamburger-and-hotdog cookout. There were some good eats to be had, and after our afternoon of biking, Dave and I really enjoyed partaking of them.

July 2: First thing after breakfast this morning, Dave picked up his photo prints from Walgreen’s and then took the Subaru to a car wash. He was disappointed with the results from the car wash, but was able to clean it better after he got back to our campground.

We had not signed up for the all-day bus tour of Girdwood and surrounding areas (ugh!), so around noon we packed a couple of lunches and once again went for a bike ride. We drove the car with the bike on it to Kincaid Park, near the western tip of Anchorage (farther along than we rode yesterday). The western edge of the park offers views of the Cook Inlet and Fire Island. We then took the bike down and rode for 9.25 miles (roundtrip) along the water’s edge. A lot of the time we had to look through heavy birch forest to see the water, but it was definitely nearby! The ride began with a steep, twisting downhill descent from a bluff to levels nearer the water, so Dave got quite a hand and forearm workout in applying the brakes. The ride route was gorgeous, and we (accidentally) picked a lovely spot to sit and have our lunch at about 4¾ miles out. As we ate lunch, the tide was going out and, in the process, exposed quite a shoal that was just barely visible when we stopped. About halfway back to the parking lot we took another turnout and, in addition to yet another great view of the water, mountains, etc., we encountered a friendly British couple. We had a delightful chat with them and they graciously took a couple of snapshots of us. (What would we do without iPhones???) We also found out that the distance from England to Alaska is almost the same as from Texas to Alaska! Who’da thought?? Anyway, this area of the bike trail is near Anchorage Int’l. Airport, so we got to watch several big passenger planes taking off. I hear that one of the stops on the biking trail is right at the end of the runway, and the British couple assured us that it was quite a hoot to have one of those “big ones” fly over you as it’s landing. I’m content to take their word for it! 😉

After we got back to the coach, we both had naps and cleaned up. We ate dinner in the coach and made some final preparations for tomorrow’s drive to Homer, AK.