Alaska Trip – Page 5 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Day 22 July 27 Homer

Waking up in the fog in the parking lot of Fred Meyer wasn’t near as bad as it sounds. We had a beautiful dog potty zone right out our door and it was quiet. I had about 50 yards to go to find fresh morning pastries and do our little bit of required shopping. Amazingly, we are still eating food from home, although the freezer is getting a bit empty. All I need to add now and then is milk and salad veggies. With all the RV folks in the parking lot, Freddy’s stocks a good supply of RV goods, but a man in front of me walked away with the last two packages of RV toilet paper. Not to worry, they have a large stock out at the gas pumps with the sodas, cigarettes, and little bags of firewood for ten dollars. You think this store caters to the RV folks?! They even have a free dump station in the parking lot.

We didn’t need to make use of the dump, and decided that we didn’t need gasoline either since our travels yesterday were so short, and we could make it round trip to Homer and back with no problem. Homer is just a short 70 miles from Soldotna, and for reasons completely lost on me, Google Maps says the trip takes an hour. Hmmm. I think the speed limit along most of the way is 55 mph. Paved highway or not, I probably wouldn’t drive 70.

After tea and a pastry breakfast we ambled on down the foggy road toward the south and the end of the Sterling Highway. Along the way are gorgeous views of Cook Inlet and the volcanoes, including Redoubt, the one most recently active, and St. Augustine, the one most likely to have another big blowup. I know because I took a photo of the sign and saw the pictures in the slick magazine we got at the Visitor Center yesterday.

As we approached Homer, we stopped at a beautiful wayside with lovely gardens and a gorgeous view of Cook Inlet, Homer Spit, Kachemak Bay, and the mountains beyond the end of the road across the bay. It was gorgeous, at least that is what the sign said.

I have to say that even though I knew we would have weather, fog, rain, and clouds while visiting this part of Alaska in the rainiest month of the year, it was still hard for me to stay upbeat about not seeing all the beauty around me. I worked hard at appreciating the mist, the gentle softness of the rain, all that. I kept quiet about it, but I didn’t succeed very well. I was seriously bummed. I wanted to see Homer in a different light.

We drove through town and followed the signs out to the spit. This time it was Mo’s turn to get a bit grouchy. In the fog and clouds, the beauty of the spit was invisible, and the only thing in sight for the entire distance were a bazillion cars, RV’s, and pickups hauling boats. Homer is about fishing, all about fishing, and more fishing. It’s a lifetime dream trip for people wanting to take charters to the sea and catch halibut and big salmon. Visiting this part of the Kenai Peninsula felt a lot to us like trying to go to the Oregon Coast in summer and walking around the Newport Old Town area. It’s always foggy and full of people and traffic. I know I probably refer to it too much, but again Mo couldn’t help remembering her visit here, camping all alone on an empty beach with one restaurant at the end of the spit, no services to speak of, no cute little shops, no huge line of RV’s waiting to try to squeeze into a tiny slot on the gravel overlooking the invisible water.

We knew that the city parks had dry camping in several places, but the shop was closed with a sign that said basically, “figure it out”, so I attempted to do just that. At the beginning of the spit is Mariner’s Park, one place that didn’t seem quite as jammed as the rest of the spit, so we drove back there and settled in to a spot on the edge of the gravel making sure to avoid the soft sand warning signs.

Once we set up, as level as we could manage and looked out our front windows, I decided that this was better than I expected. It reminded me of the day I stood on a Destin Florida beach surrounded by high rise condos and looked out over the gulf. When you look toward the water, you can’t see all the people around you, and it’s gorgeous. It was gorgeous here, with a 180 degree view of water and clouds, but the fog was lifting and the beauty of the place was beginning to sift into my consciousness.

With the rain becoming more sporadic, we thought it might be nice to go check out the town, maybe find the historic section and see the visitor’s center. The Alaska Islands Ocean and Visitor Center provided a window to the seabird refuge world surrounding us, but it was filled with many children, so instead we decided to take advantage of the increasing sunlight and walk the Beluga Trail to the slough below. There was a nice path, and some strange plastic spongy boardwalk that kept the slough safe.

Right in front of me in the slough, walked a sandhill crane and her little one, eating nonchalantly and ignoring the screaming children that were running along the boardwalk behind us. The sun was out and beautiful, and then suddenly it was pouring rain. UhOh. I am hauling Deanna’s big telephoto lens with me and it’s raining! Off came the rain jacket to cover the camera, and we hauled it back to the car and gave up on the rest of the walk. I know, I know. In Alaska, wear rain gear all the time and be ready to walk in the rain if you want to walk, right?

We drove around a bit searching for the historic homes, but didn’t have a decent map and decided that the Farmer’s Market was a better bet. It had just opened up for the afternoon, but with the rain there were many vendors not in residence. The best one there was a salsa maker with perfect fresh salsa and we bought a pint and I wish I had bought more. I also got a huge bunch of gorgeous easter egg radishes which served as a great munchie snack. I had just purchased fresh organic salad greens back at Soldotna Freddys, so couldn’t take advantage of the big bunches of fresh lettuce we found, but they were beautiful to look at.

We drove back to the Spit to take advantage of the lightening afternoon and look at the exciting shops all ready to catch tourist money. Many of the cute little buildings were dedicated to charters of all kinds. There are many things to do in Homer if you do something special. I am sure that the ferry to Soldovia would be wonderful, and there were row after row of charter boat and plane trips advertising bear viewing and trips to the state park across the bay where the road doesn’t go. If we were here for a longer bit of time, I might have liked to spend a day over there, I might have liked to fly in to see some bears. Mo and I decided instead that we will come back to Alaska, using our air miles, fly to Anchorage, and then plan a special trip to Kodiak where we can focus on bears and the beautiful island.

I did leave a goodly chunk of money behind on the spit, however, since I found the perfect small carving of a loon, signed and numbered by the Inuit artist who created it. Ever since our encounter with the loon early in the trip at Fraser Lake I had been keeping that purchase in the back of my mind. Some I found in Anchorage were too big, too expensive, to stupid looking and cheap. On the tacky shores of Homer Spit, I found the perfect little loon to commemorate this journey.

For this trip, however, we aren’t into spending big bucks on charters and fancy trips. The trip is already big bucks enough and our goal is to travel the roads and see the sights in the rig. I said once it was an epic journey, and that it was about the road trip more than anything else. At supper by our campfire, we met the neighbors who have traveled to Alaska repeatedly for the last 40 years. They were full-timers for 16 years before finally building a small home near Houston two years ago. We loved talking with them and hearing about their son who loved their trips so much that he relocated to Nome to teach there for several years before retiring with his wife to Ketchikan. I can’t believe I forgot their names, but the man was commiserating with Mo about how tame the whole highway was now, and he grumbled that he missed the gravel and the silence of the old highway.

We are all like that I guess, we want to come here and see it and want to slam the door behind us. The affluence that provides simple people like Mo and I with a fancy rig, and the prosperity that allows folks to travel the highway, has contributed to the loss of the wildness once found on this journey. Maybe a bit like finding McDonald’s and Starbucks in every big city in the world. It is all a bit dummied down so that the masses can enjoy it. I am here enjoying it, so I shouldn’t complain, but I would have liked to have been on that 1974 trip with Mo. Instead, I was raising kids and trying to figure out how to get some kind of job other than waitressing!

We didn’t eat the famous halibut, and instead brought out the Weber, cooked some superb pork chops and made a fresh salad for supper while watching the water and sitting by Mo’s campfire. After supper, it seemed that the clouds were lifting and we decided to go for a walk along the water. Looking up to a brilliant 8pm clear sky, we looked at each other and at the same time said, “I think it’s time to try to see Skyline Drive!” The slick Homer magazine from the Chamber talks about Skyline drive, and the instructions say something like, “Take East Hill Road to the top to Skyline Drive”. Well, where in the heck is East Hill Road. Google maps doesn’t work here, the Alaska Gazetteer just shows a tiny red line but we have no clue where we are in relation to the tiny red line called Skyline Drive.

We wandered around a bit, traveling back up the big hill to at last find Diamond Ridge with the supposed view of the volcanoes. Of course, once on top everything was fogged in again until we eventually reached Skyline Drive and the most gorgeous view I have seen in a very long time. Spread out below us was the spit, stretching out between Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay, with the Harding Ice Fields across the bay, and the forests and mountains beyond all accessibility visible in the evening light.

Looking down, we could just barely make out the MoHo in her slot at Mariner’s Park overlooking Cook Inlet to the west. Yes, that is the MoHo, in between all the white rigs on the spit

The clouds were very nearly gone as we returned to the MoHo to settle in and watch the water and the sky across the Inlet. I can’t believe how much better I felt about Homer in that 10PM sunlight.

Miles traveled today: 75, not counting a few in the Tracker to see the sights

Road conditions: irrelevant. We are certainly not in wild Alaska any more

The rest of the photos for this day are linked here

Day 21 July 26 A Different Alaska, Anchorage to Soldotna

Our first business of the day was to take care of MoHo business. We were slide in, jacks up by 7 and decided to drive separately across Anchorage to the Johnson Tire Service shop south of town. We had called last night to double check if they serviced motorhomes but wanted to be first in line when they opened at 8. The sun was actually shining this morning, and it wasn’t raining, so we were encouraged.

This outfit is a well run, efficient store, and we were done in no time, with a full inspection, and complete oil change on our Ford 450 V-10 in less than half an hour and around 60 bucks. It costs that much at home! On the road again, we traveled south through morning city traffic on Alaska 1, merging from the “almost” freeway to the Sterling Highway.

The beautiful sunshine was fading and by the time we reached Turnagain Arm, it was completely gone, shrouded in deep, dark clouds. Again, we couldn’t see the mountains around us to their summits, but the cloud cover was at least high enough that we could get an idea of their grandeur. Even in the misty cloud cover, Turnagain Arm was a magical, beautiful place and we stopped at every pullover provided to take photos and search for beluga whales. I can’t imagine how you can see anything in that silty, silky gray water, fresh from glacial melt, but there were telescopes at strategic locations to help out if you spotted one, which we didn’t.

Someone recently asked about wildlife. We haven’t seen much at all on this trip. Two moose, which I photographed, three bear which I couldn’t, 1 fox near Dawson, and that is it. No moose wandering through our campgrounds, or on the city streets of Anchorage, and as we passed a place called Potter’s Marsh, south of Anchorage, we chorused in unison, “Here you can see moose, bear, caribou, dall sheep, and fox”. We have read this phrase so many times on this trip and still have yet to see the great number of wild animals proclaimed. It may be the time of year, it may just be the fact that Alaska is full of people right now, lots of people and lots of cars. It may be that we drive at the wrong time of day, although you would think our 530 am drive in Denali would have been early enough. But I digress…

Turnagain Arm is so named because Captain Cook had to turn around AGAIN when he was trying to find a route for the inland passage. Turnagain is an arm of the Cook Inlet. Another surprise for me was when I suddenly realized that Cook Inlet is really just somewhere in the middle of Alaska, not the western part as I imagined. Studying a map of Alaska yields surprises, especially if you have traveled up the southwest coast and the towns of Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan. They are east of here but very much on the western coast of Alaska.

The drive to Portage wasn’t long, and we decided that we should take the time to travel east to the Portage Glacier and then on to Whittier, port town on Prince William Sound. These places all are names I have heard, but I had never really paid attention to just how they related to each other in the landscape. At the visitor center at Portage Glacier, the large 3 dimensional map of Prince William Sound put it all into better perspective.

Portage Lake was lovely, even in the clouds, with a couple of little icebergs floating by to add to the ambience. The glacier itself has receded greatly since Mo saw it last, and there is no easy way to approach it. The Byron Glacier is closer, with a short mile and a half trail to it’s viewpoint, but the pouring rain made it less than an exciting prospect, so we decided to forego the hike. The visitor center was beautiful, though it’s movies cost an extra five bucks. I can only watch so many movies about bear, caribou, moose, dall sheep, and fox, so we didn’t do that one either. The glacier movie wasn’t scheduled until five, and it was something like ten in the morning.

By this time, I am starting to feel that we are still in DisneySka, with all the beautiful media attractions and visitor centers with their lovely displays and huge rv parking lots full of people and traffic. Still, we unhooked the rig for the short drive to Whittier, only to discover that we were in the staging line for the tunnel to Whittier that is 2.5 miles long and costs 12 bucks round trip. This brought back lots of memories to Mo, since she traveled through this tunnel with her car on the train. It was the only way to get to Whittier and the ferry back then. Although the 13,200 foot tunnel was built in 1942-43. it was only retrofitted to accommodate both trains and cars in 2000 (or 2002) I can’t remember which.

Driving through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel is a real treat, especially since we were in the baby car without having to pay the big fees for the MoHo! Once on the other side of the tunnel in Whittier, the rain opened up in earnest and the small port town of Whittier looked a bit tattered. Whittier was developed by the Army during WWII as a debarkation point for cargo and troops for the Alaska Command. Looking for a hiking trail to the waterfalls, we saw one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen, the Bucknell Building. Once the largest building in Alaska, it was built in the early 50’s as rental units for civilian employees and soldiers who were stationed at the strategically located Port of Whittier.

Even in the clouds and mist, I could see the dozens of waterfalls crashing down steep canyons all round the bay from the glaciers above. It was a moody, misty place, without much around. The trip back through the tunnel revealed more clouds and rain on the other side and we traveled the few miles back west to the highway junction and continued south toward Soldotna and Kenai.

Right after leaving Portage, the highway climbs the dramatic and beautiful Turnagain Pass, and the clouds began to thin enough that we could see a bit higher. The landscape is dominated by huge moraines from the last ice age below high glaciated mountain peaks. The tree line here is only 1,500 feet above sea level, and the variations in habitat are clearly visible on the mountain slopes around the pass. The sun came out again, with just enough billowing clouds to make things look really beautiful, and we stopped for an Abby swim at a small lake before turning west on the highway toward Cooper’s Landing.

Cooper’s Landing is renown for salmon fishing along the Kenai River and the sockeye red salmon run is now in full swing. The traffic was heavy and the river was lined with people fishing from the bank and rafts going downriver. They call it “combat fishing”, and if you are interesting in the whole fishing thing on the Kenai Peninsula, Judy at Cool RV’rs on the Road, has done a fabulous job describing this unique culture.

Judy also was the one who mentioned the Fred Meyer boondock site in Soldotna. Mo and I originally planned to use our CampClub USA card here, since there are two parks that honor that 50 percent discount, but when we saw the digs at Freddy’s we decided it was perfect. They even have a free dump and support the RV’rs who park there with a minimal amount of rules, the typical ones for parking lots, no chairs, no awnings, no bbq’s, and a three day limit.

We settled in, turned on the fan for Jeremy, loaded Abby up with us in the Tracker and continued west to explore the little town of Kenai and the Cook Inlet coastline. It was almost five and the clouds were gone and the early evening sunlight was warm and brilliant. Perfect for a walk through the small historic town following the visitor center brochure. The girl at the center said to be sure to go to the park to watch the “dip net fishing” and that we were lucky to be here to see it. We, of course, had no clue what she was talking about until we passed a couple of old guys hauling a huge dip net down to the beach.

It’s an amazing scene that could have come from thousands of years ago except for the plastic ice chests and cars. But the idea was the same, hundreds of people lined the shore and waded into the incoming tide with nets as large as 5 feet diameter. The salmon, anxious to get home to spawn, swim right into the nets. Big salmon they are, too! Each Alaskan head of household is allowed 25 fish, with 10 more fish for each member of the family. It’s subsistence at it’s finest, and there seems to be enough for everyone, including the fish, because the runs are still strong. It was an amazing thing to see, with old white guys in brand new waders, and native Alaskan families of different tribes all catching fish, cleaning them, throwing the entrails to the tide, and the fish into the ice chests. There were big salmon heads littered everywhere on the beach and Abby thought incredibly interesting.

With that awesome sight in mind, we wandered back through town and after a short drive north along the Inlet to an oil town with views of 13 platform rigs in the inlet, we headed back toward Soldotna for the evening.

We were pretty worn out, and ready to crash and burn, but instead were routed a very long way around and back into town due to some kind of accident. The traffic still in this area was incredibly heavy and most of the license plates were Alaskan.

I was glad to get back to our boondock site at Freddy’s. The few RV campgrounds we had passed were jammed in slide to slide, front to back, and here we only had neighbors along the curb and everyone was pretty quiet. We even had a grassy forest outside at the edge of the curb, and sitting at the sofa with the view out the door we could have been all alone in the middle of nowhere. I slept like a log.

The rest of the photos for this day are linked here

Miles driven today in the MoHo: about 150

Road Condition: better than many in the Mainland, 2 lane and 4 lane with excellent surface

Day 20 July 25 Talkeetna to Anchorage, The not-so-glamorous side of RV life

Sometimes when writing memories of our travels, there is so much to talk about that I forget that it’s not all sweetness and light out here on the road. Sometimes it’s just about laundry. And rain. And a lot of dirt.

When we left Talkeetna yesterday I felt great, in spite of the rain. With several hours spent doing laundry, I also had time to finish writing about the last few days on the road and get everything completely caught up in blogland, reading all the blogs I follow, with even a chance to comment here and there as well. It felt great, and lasted just about as long as a clean house with a houseful of kids. Yeah, I remember those days well. I also remember doing laundry in laundromats with three babies in diapers, my 2 1/2 year old still in night diapers when my third baby was born. When Maryruth read the blog about Talkeetna and laundry, she called and laughed with me about those days of diapers in laundromats. That is the kind of stuff that comes up now and then with 47 year old friendships!

Mo and I didn’t have too far to go, but with each passing mile I felt us slipping into a very different Alaska from the one we have seen so far. The highway was wide and smooth, with lots of traffic. Much of it was really beautiful, with the Chugach mountains rising on the east and the alluvial plains that are the foundation of Anchorage to our south.

It rained almost the entire day, with just a few breaks here and there that let us see as least part of the rugged mountains surrounding the road to Anchorage. On the way, we found a delightful little museum a few miles west at the old townsite of Knik, on Knik Arm and right on the Iditarod Trail. It housed artifacts about the history of the Knik area, but also was called Musher’s Museum with paintings and stories of the famous race. The best part of the museum was the curator, but a woman not like any curator you ever knew. She ambled into the building at 1 on a Sunday afternoon, after seeing us waiting outside in the rain for the place to open. The Milepost says it opens at 12 but that isn’t correct at all.

As we walked around looking at old photos and artifacts, she started talking, and talking, and talking some more. She had a detailed story about every single thing we looked at, and it sounded just like your neighbor was talking across the fence while you hung the wash. It was a perfect stopover.

By the time we finished, we were hungry, and Mo wanted Mexican so I punched Mexican Restaurant on my AroundMe iPhone app and up came a place in Wasilla. yup, that Wasilla. We wandered around Wasilla a bit, trying to get the lay of the land, but it seemed like a fairly strange place and didn’t show itself until we left the main street in town and headed south again through the line of big box stores and traffic that makes up the better part of Wasilla. The Mexican restaurant called La Fiesta was in a small strip mall, not fancy, but certainly adequate for the mood and the dark rainy day.

By the time we reached Anchorage, it was about 3 in the afternoon, and we have found that is a good time to stop if you don’t have reservations and want a place to sleep. Our plan was to stay at Elmendorf AFB Family Camp, but it was a bit confusing because Elmendorf has combined with Fort Richardson Army Base, and there is also a campground there called Spruce. I had read about Spruce, but in the rain I didn’t have a clue where it was, and when we made our way through the Elmendorf gates, the FamilyCamp was right there so that was right where we landed.

It was time to spend two nights, and finish up the rest of the laundry at a buck a load at the campground laundry. It was still raining, but at least we had power and could use our little electric heater to stay cozy. Still, the antenna only brought up a very strange channel and we decided TV wasn’t on the list of todo’s anyway. We planned two days in Anchorage to see a bit of what the city has to offer, but also planned to get the MoHo serviced the next day. I didn’t have internet, but the phone worked great with 3G and five bars to get me around the internet to search out locations and options for our time in the city.

After realizing that the rain wasn’t going to let up, we decided to take a drive downtown and check out the lay of the land. With it being Sunday night we thought it would be quiet enough that we could do that fairly easily. Anchorage isn’t nearly as big as it sounds. The listed population of more than 265,000 people must include an awful lot of the rural area and the city limits actually encompass an area bigger than some states. We drove around downtown, noticing all the souvenir shops before we found Earthquake Park.

Once again, Mo was to be a bit disappointed with what was left of this park. Now there are a few signs, a memorial, but the park is thick with vegetation and great trails, but not a lot of information about the actual quake, and nowhere can you view any of the rifts or slides that were part of that great disaster. We ambled through the rain back home and went to bed early to read and hope for a bit less rain tomorrow, although the weather forecast wasn’t very encouraging.

Waking again to very dark skies and pouring rain, I looked around the MoHo and was glad for a day to try to get out some of the grime. RVing can get awfully dirty, especially with a dog and a cat and mud and rain. We couldn’t see any of the beautiful mountains that supposedly surrounded Anchorage, but I sure was dragging in a lot of local dirt. I washed all the rugs, the bedding, and shook and washed and polished and scrubbed, and wiped until I had some semblance of a decent place to live, before I finally managed to get to the last of the dirt out of the house. Once I finally finished that project, I was in a better space to deal with the awful dreary skies, but RVing on this rainy dirty morning felt anything but glamorous, believe me! I wondered out loud how the Alaskan homesteaders managed to live in those tiny cabins with kids and wood heat and probably dogs as well. It must have been a really dirty life.

The FamCamp was also an adequate place to stay, with sites well spaced under trees, with electric and water. It was very relaxed compared to the last camp we enjoyed in Tucson, with very little enforcement of rules and regs. Laundry was cheap, and the onsite rv dump was basically a pipe in the ground without any water. We got to shop for groceries at the commissary, and it was very convenient to downtown Anchorage and just outside the gate was a megamall. If we had managed time to shop, we could have gone to target, Lowe’s, PetSmart, and a bunch of others, or we could have even gone to see one of 16 movie screens at the theatre. Instead, I was too tired from cleaning dirt to do anything but crash into bed when we got home from town. It was quiet and dark at night, and probably the only thing I didn’t like was the muddy, dirty sites. Have I mentioned dirty?

Around mid day, we drove again downtown to walk around in the rain and look at “stuff”. Stuff it was, awful stuff actually, and the main part of Anchorage around the Chamber Visitor Center felt a lot like a cruise terminal in a third world country. Store after store, proclaiming authentic Alaskan “art” filled with Ulu knives and cheap tee shirts welcomed us to this bustling city of the north.

One bright spot of the afternoon was a visit to the National Public Lands Visitor Center, with great displays, maps, videos, and movie presentations of all the national parks in the different regions of Alaska. Thank you, Erin, for bringing this to my attention, I might have missed it. The second bright spot was from another recommendation from a friend, Jeanne, who sent us to Humpy’s Ale House for brew and halibut. The halibut was the freshest I have ever eaten, and the ambience was upbeat Alaskan locals mixed with folks from the nearby federal building and tourists.

Our unglamorous forecast for the next day was for more rain. The plan was to get the MoHo serviced on our way out of town tomorrow and then head south to the Kenai Peninsula.

Miles driven today: 113

Road condition: irrelevant, we aren’t in wild Alaska any more

There are more photos for this post linked here and here

Day 19 July 24 Rainy Day in Talkeetna

We are getting close to our half way point of the trip, and this is the first morning that looks like what I had prepared myself to see in Alaska. It rained all night and there was only one train roaring by at 5 this morning and I slept well, and actually didn’t wake up until five. Guess it is getting a bit darker as the days begin to get shorter, as we get farther south, and just maybe I am getting used to it.

When we left our camp yesterday, it was cloudy but not raining. The road south toward the Talkeetna turnoff has two formal viewing sites for Denali that are part of the Denali State Park, and many other places where the mountain is visible on clear days. With the next few days of predicted heavy rain, I am more and more grateful for that brilliant morning leaving Fairbanks with Denali in full view.

Talkeetna is a popular place it seems. There are lots of cute little rustic Alaska style shops, two visitor centers, with one geared to folks planning to climb Denali. After my four hours doing laundry with one dryer, we drove the short distance to town to check it out. It was raining fairly hard by then, but folks were still walking around the little town, doing the shops and eating in the several restaurants. I didn’t take photos, but if you want to see the town, Dennis and Carol did a great job on their blog when they were in Talkeetna a couple of weeks ago.

The Princess and Holland America buses are here, right behind the RV Camper Park. When the train whizzes by in that same vicinity, you see railroad cars labeled Princess and Holland America since this is a stop off/pick up point for transfers from the train to the buses. If you have a ticket for this 115 mile stretch for the train, you can get on and off at will and the train will stop for you. There are lots of trees and thick vegetation, which seems even thicker in the drippy, dense rain. Last night I was feeling a bit claustrophobic, but if you look at the header photo and then today’s photos, it might be understandable.

This photo is NOT what we saw in Talkeetna, but is a view from the Parks Highway some distance north

We walked to the park on the edge of the Talkeetna River and laughed at all the tents and campfires in an area heavily posted with “No Camping” signs. We caught the aroma of people smoking pot, and saw a lot of youthful activity around, and garbage. Wet sleeping bags draped across tents, boots sitting outside in the rain, that sort of thing.

The river itself looks scary. The current is fast and the water is milky from glacier melt and filled with debris. Not a place I would want to launch my boat, that is for sure! We heard a loud noise going upstream and it wasn’t until I re-read Dennis’s posts about Talkeetna that I realized that it was a jet boat tour, one of the many local tourist activities available. I hear there are some good restaurants with good food and service, but we are saving our eating out bucks for salmon and halibut on the peninsula, so we will skip the local spots in spite of the good reviews.

Today we plan another fairly short drive of less than 100 miles to Anchorage and the Elmendorf AFB Family Camp. Since Mo is retired military, there are no reservations, so we are hoping for a site since the camp is so accessible to Anchorage and it’s time for a MoHo oil change and some city stuff. I won’t have internet at the campground, but if so inclined I am sure I could find many places in town. There is much to do in Anchorage as well, but I’m not really interested in city sight seeing for some reason. Yes, I know, I will probably never drive here again, but this is our big road trip, and the city stuff, even the town stuff just doesn’t trigger my excitement button. I do really want to see the Earthquake Park. I had an old friend that lived through it, and her stories were terrifying.

The rest of the photos from yesterday and this morning are linked here

Day 18 July 23 Catching Up in Talkeetna, Alaska

After a short hundred mile drive south on the Parks Highway from Cantwell 8 miles from our boondock site, we are tucked into the only RV park in Talkeetna this afternoon, after four nights without hookups. Time to catch up on laundry, to upload photos if possible, and catch up on the blog. Who knows when I’ll ever get the chance to check in on the rest of the world, but it may not be right away.

I have been posting blog entries by actual date traveled in addition to the day of our trip (see above title). Since we have been away from the internet, you may have missed a few posts, so you are interested in knowing where we have been, check the archives to the left.

The new header photo is from last night’s beautiful boondock site along Joe Lake on the Denali Highway, just a short eight miles from the main Parks Highway and up 5 miles of gravel. Instead of the beautiful isolation and quiet we enjoyed last night, we are now in Talkeetna Camper Park with electricity and water, lots of neighbors tight around us, 2 washing machines and one working dryer, and intermittent internet. I’m heading for the laundry room right now, hoping I can get enough of a connection to post the last few blogs from my LiveWriter.

Wish me Luck!

It is interesting that I have to take my computer up to the office to get a decent connection while Mo happily surfs away with the Netbook using our WiFi booster purchased last December in Desert Hot Springs. I still haven’t found Windows 7 driver for the gadget, so I guess I am out of luck for the time being.

Miles driven today: 126

Road condition: excellent highway except for the repetitive joints to protect from frost heave. Better than frost heave, though!