Wednesday, August 5 - Day Twenty-two. Although we didn’t have to get up too early, we did have an 8:45 a.m. gathering so we could car pool from the campground over to the Alaska Native Heritage Center. When we got there we found a very nice building on a large plot of ground. The center celebrates the life and cultures of the far Northwest native peoples. The building had an auditorium for lectures, a movie theater where they had several movies on the native cultures playing throughout the day, an exhibit hall, and a gift shop. Outside they had a large lagoon, and around the lagoon they had areas where there were demonstration “villages” for each of the five major native groups in Alaska. It sort of resembled a small, native version of Epcot.
Unfortunately, it was still raining pretty hard (it had rained all night), so we didn’t get to explore the outside exhibits. We did listen to a lecture describing the various native groups and their traditional lands and watched a demonstration of Alaskan native games put on by some young kids. The games were unlike anything I had ever seen and required great strength and skill. Two of the types of games required kicking at a small ball suspended up in the air. The kids had to jump up and kick the ball, which was about eight feet off the ground. We were quite impressed. We also watched a demonstration of native dancing which was pretty informative. After the demonstrations we toured the indoor museum exhibits.
After the museum Jackie and I went out for some lunch and then did some light shopping at Walmart and Fred Meyers. We didn’t really need any food - we haven’t been doing much eating in on this trip - but we did need some household items. We also checked a couple of places for small freezers, but were still not able to find any. After shopping we went back to the coach for a while. About 4:30 we drove to the Elks Lodge in Eagle River, a suburb of Anchorage. There is no lodge in Anchorage. We took Vern and Peggy, one of the other couples on our caravan, with us to the lodge. The lodge was in a large building, but the people there were not friendly at all. The bartender was borderline surly and acted like we were interfering with her day by being there. None of the other half dozen or so people in the bar said a word to us. We did get a lodge pin for our banner though. After a couple drinks at the lodge, the four of us went out to dinner. We first went to a Mexican café that we had seen while were shopping, but when we got close we saw it was more of a fast food type place. There were a couple of people in the parking lot and we asked them where a nice sit down type Mexican restaurant was. They recommended Don Jose’s, about a mile from our RV park. We went to this one and the food was Excellent. Most of the staff were Hispanic - in fact our waitress was originally from San Bernardino. The food tasted just like you would get in a nice Mexican place in California. I would highly recommend Don Jose’s on Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage for good Mexican food. After dinner we went back to the coach and relaxed for the rest of the night. The park had music in the rotunda again, but it was still raining and too cold to go out.
Thursday, August 6 - Day Twenty-three. Finally, a day when we didn’t have to get up for anything. We had a leisurely morning and then headed out to do some quick caching in Anchorage. It was still threatening rain, so we kept our searches to the easy, urban caches. We managed to find eight in about an hour and a half. After caching we went back to the coach for a while. We had a travel meeting at 4:00 and then a bus was going to pick us up for dinner and another show. The travel meeting was for the next day’s travel from Anchorage down to Seward. After the meeting we got on another ragged old bus and headed to South Anchorage for the Wild Berry
Park. We went into the dining hall for another family style dinner, this one with ribs, halibut and chicken. They also had fried potatoes and cole slaw. The food at this place was not so hot. The ribs were tough, the chicken greasy and the halibut way over-cooked. I wouldn’t recommend the dinner here. After the dinner we went across the street to the gift shop, and then to a movie theater where we saw about a 30 minute documentary on Alaska. This was a very nice film, one of the better we have seen. After the film we went to yet another location at the park to see a one man show put on by Dusty Sourdough. I guess he was supposed to be a well known character and part time entertainer for Disney - Jackie and I had never heard of him. He sang a couple of songs and told a couple of stories about the gold rush. One neat thing is that he gave away prizes. If you got to the show early, you got a drawing ticket. We didn’t get a ticket, but he also had a question and answer session with the answers coming from one of the stories he told. I answered correctly and won a nice pocket knife with a polar bear inlay. All tolled, three of our group won prizes. After the show we bussed back to the campground and settled in for the rest of the
night. When we got back to the campground we noticed that a very unique tour bus had parked very near our rig. We had first seen the bus in Fairbanks, but we didn’t get a photo. The company that runs these buses caters to European tourists and provides motorcoach tours all over North America. The buses are large 45 footers with only the front half dedicated to seating. The rear half is set up with a series of small sleeping booths. The photo shows windows on the side of the coach towards the back. Each of these is a sleeping compartment. On the other side of the bus they set up a staircase for access to the sleeping compartments. Everything else they do is outside. They always stop at campgrounds that have showers so that the tourists can clean up. This group was German. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Friday, August 7 - Day Twenty-four. This day marked the halfway point for the caravan. Doesn’t seem to have been that long. We left the park in Anchorage about 8:30 a.m. and headed South on the Seward Highway towards the seacoast town of Seward, Alaska. Shortly after leaving the city limits of Anchorage the highway started running along the shoreline of Turnagain Arm, a large inlet from the Gulf of Alaska. The scenery was magnificent as we drove along with mountains on one side and the bay on the other. Turnagain Arm has the reputation of having one of the largest, most aggressive bore tides in the world. A bore tide occurs when the tide starts to rise in a constricted area. It can create waves up to 10 feet high which move up into the bay from the Gulf of Alaska. The tide was already in while we were driving along the bay, so we didn’t get to see anything other than the beautiful water.
After about 70 miles we started heading inland across the Kenai Peninsula and found ourselves driving through a deep, winding canyon. Again the vistas were wonderful with many of the mountains topped with small glaciers. There are dozens of glaciers on the Kenai Peninsula. After driving about 130 miles we arrived at our RV park, Stoney Creek. Although Seward is a seaside community, our park is about 8 miles North and not on the ocean. We were in a valley, surrounded by ice topped mountains. The park was pretty nice, although it had no grass. The sites had full hookups and we even got one with 50 amp! They also had good WiFi and cable TV. We got settled in after the drive and had lunch, but we didn’t get to stay too long. About 3:30 p.m. everyone gathered and we car-pooled down to Seward to visit the Sea Life Center. The Center is the only public aquarium in Alaska. Although it wasn’t very large, they did have a number of very interesting exhibits and tanks. Not surprising, the emphasis was on salmon and arctic mammals like whales, sea lions and otters. We spent about 90 minutes in the Center then went out and walked a little around the downtown area. The Sea Life Center was located at the end of the main street, on the waterfront.
Seward is an interesting town. It is located on the West shore of Resurrection Bay and, although the town dates back to the late 1800's, many of the buildings within a couple blocks of the shore appear fairly new. That is because much of the town was wiped out in 1964 when the Good Friday Earthquake struck. The earthquake, a M9.2, was the largest quake ever to strike North America. The epicenter was in Prince William Sound, about 100 miles to the East of Seward. While the shaking, which lasted nearly 5 minutes, was bad, it was the Tsunamis caused by the quakes that wiped out Seward and many of the other South coastal Alaskan towns. The entire industrial section of Seward along the waterfront, canneries, docks, fishing boats and a railroad line, was totally destroyed. The Sea Life Center is built on the former location of the coal loading docks.
We had a chance to visit a couple of stores and then most of the group went to Christo’s Pizza, located right next door to the Sea Life Center, for dinner. Larry,
our wagonmaster, had told us that they had the best pizza in Alaska. I have to admit it was pretty good. We took about half of it home for lunch the next day. After dinner we headed back to the coach for the night.Saturday, August 8 - Day Twenty-five. Our itinerary once again had us up and out of the coach at 8:30 a.m. and loading a bus. The first part of the tour was a brief driving tour of downtown. Our driver, Whitey, has lived in the area since the mid-60's and was very knowledgeable about the history of the Seward area. After driving around town for a while we headed into the Kenai Fiords National Park to visit Exit
Glacier. Kenai Fiords is a fairly new park, established in 1980, and covers a large portion of the lower Kenai Peninsula. The road to the Exit Glacier area only goes about 10 miles into the park, and is the only road in the park. Most of the park is accessible only from the sea. After we arrived at the visitor’s center we got off the bus and hiked about three-quarters of a mile to a point where we were only about 50 feet from the edge of the glacier. It was very dramatic and we got some really cool pictures.After hiking back down we got on the bus and went to a small lodge where Whitey and his wife served us coffee and cookies and told us some stories of their Alaska life. In 1967 they were young and living in Oakland, California and decided that
they could go to Alaska and make their fortune on the fishing boats. They didn’t have much money, so they hitchhiked all the way to British Columbia. There they met up with two other young hippie couples and together they bought a van and headed up the Alaska Highway. Whitey and his wife ended up living in an old trappers cabin high in the mountains above Seward. They told a couple of very interesting and entertaining stories about their pioneer life, including one that had them walking out in December, through the snow while his wife was in labor with their first child. Neither Jackie nor I could imagine living the way that they did, but they seemed to think it was the most wonderful time of their lives.After the bus dropped us off at the coaches, we had lunch and then headed back into town to do some geocaching. Ernie and Linda, one of the other couples on our caravan, had expressed an interest in geocaching, so we invited them along. We found a total of six caches and they really seemed to enjoy the process. In fact, in two instances one of them spotted the cache before either Jackie or I. After caching we went back to the coach and got ready for the afternoon’s pot luck. Jackie fixed her enchilada casserole and it, along with all the other food, was great. We had a good time chatting and eating with the entire group. We also had our travel meeting for the next leg of our trip. We weren’t leaving until Monday, but many of the group were going to be gone all day Sunday on an optional fishing trip so they didn’t want to wait until Sunday for the travel brief. We elected to wait until we got to Homer, Alaska for our fishing trip. After the pot luck we rested the remainder of the night.
Sunday, August 9 - Day Twenty-six. Finally, we had a morning when we didn’t have to be anywhere! Today was one of our rare free days. We spent the morning relaxing and taking care of some chores. After lunch we headed into town to just walk around, shop, and do a little sightseeing. While downtown we stopped at Ray’s Restaurant for a drink and to check their menu. Ray’s had been recommended by several people as a great place to eat and we were planning to come down for dinner with some other couples. However, we found that they were already fully booked with reservations for the evening. The hostess said the bar was open seating, but didn’t know what would be a good time to come. When we later talked to some of the other folks about dinner we all decided to skip Ray’s.
About 4:30 we went down to the marina to wait for the fishing boat on which several of our party had gone fishing. They had left at 6:00 a.m. to go out and do some
salmon and halibut fishing. Most of the rest of the caravan was waiting on the dock for the “fishing heros” to come in, and they finally did about 5:00 p.m. We were surprised at the number of fish they had caught. There were only six people fishing and they had caught about three dozen Silver Salmon (Coho’s) and maybe a dozen halibut, including a whopper that Gary reeled in. The boat’s captain estimated that Gary’s halibut was about 120 pounds. Needless to say, Gary was quite happy.After greeting the returning fisherpersons everyone wandered off for their own dinner activities. Jackie and I went back to Christo’s where we had gotten the pizza a couple of days prior. The pizza had been so good we thought that the rest of the food would also be great. Not so much. After looking at the menu we both decided we wanted a seafood combo that included scallops - Jackie’s over rice, mine in pasta. The waiter told us they were out of scallops. The waiter told Jackie that the cook would “add extra shrimp and fish” to make up for the missing scallops, so she went ahead and ordered what she had been planning. I decided to go with a simple chimichanga. When Jackie’s dish came it had two shrimp and two little pieces of fish. Jackie said it was tasty, but was disappointed with the content. My food was also just OK, although I hadn’t really expected great Mexican food from a Greek/Italian restaurant. The waiter did take 15% off our check, but I still would only recommend Christo’s for the pizza. After dinner it was back to the coach to rest for our next day’s travel to Homer, Alaska.
Monday, August 10 - Day Twenty-seven. Our travel this day would take us from Seward, on the East side of the Kenai peninsula, to Homer on the West side of the peninsula. It was about 168 miles and we left about 9:00 a.m. so it wasn’t a real early start. Yea! The drive was very nice. The first 100 miles were through some forested river valleys with mountains all around. Very scenic. About 50 miles into the trip we spotted a small grizzly bear walking down the side of the road. All the
traffic slowed and the bear seemed completely unconcerned with all the cars driving slowly by just a couple feet away. We got a good picture of this one. The last 35 miles or so were along the shore of the Cook Inlet, a large bay that goes all the way up from the Bering Sea to Anchorage. We stopped for lunch at a rest area that overlooked the inlet and the mountains on the other side. Across the inlet, about 50 miles or so, were several of the more active volcanos in South Alaska, including Mt. Redoubt which had a minor eruption only about six months ago. Unfortunately, the haze was too bad and we couldn’t see the mountains at all. We have to come back this way when we leave Homer, so I hope the air will be clearer then.We arrived in Homer about 1:30 and settled into our new home, Heritage RV Park. This was, by far, the nicest campground we have been in since starting the caravan. The park is located on the Homer Spit, a sliver of land that extends about five miles out into Kachemak Bay. The spit is only about a quarter mile across and is pretty much all marinas, campgrounds and commercial properties. We didn’t see any houses on the spit. Our park is right in the middle of the spit and you pull into
your slot so you are facing out on the bay. We have full 50 amp hookups, cable and Wifi and a killer view. This is a very nice place. After everyone got in and set up, many of us went to the charter agency to pay for our planned activities while here in Homer. About 10 of us, including Jackie and I, are going fishing on Wednesday. This is an all day boat that goes out quite a ways into Cook Inlet. It is primarily halibut grounds and it is not unusual to pull 200 to 300 pound halibut out of these waters. Homer bills itself as the halibut fishing capital of the world. On Tuesday a bunch of us are going to Seldovia, an old Russian fishing village across the bay which is only accessible by boat or air. We had to pay for these two trips as well as get our Alaska fishing licences for our Wednesday trip. With all the people crowding into the building it took about an hour to get everything done.After taking care of our advance reservations, Jackie and I headed to the Homer Elks Lodge. This was a very nice lodge with a location overlooking the Cook Inlet. The bartender was pretty friendly and we also struck up a conversation with another couple at the bar who were from California, Karen and Dean Kiel. They are also touring Alaska in an RV, but they are on their own rather than with a caravan. Dean was an Elks Past District Deputy and Past California State Elks Vice President, He gave us one of his DD pins. They were a very nice couple. After a couple of drinks
we headed back out on the spit to visit the Salty Dawg Saloon. This is a kind of Homer landmark which we knew we just had to visit. The outside of the building was old wood and there was a lighthouse tower on the roof. When we went inside we found a fairly small bar, very dark with low ceilings and lots of noise. Shades of Oatman, Arizona, the inside of the bar was covered floor to ceiling, and across the ceiling, with signed dollar bills! Of course, we had a drink and hung one of our cards and a signed dollar. I naturally bought one of their tee shirts as well.While we were in the bar Doug and Linda, our caravan’s tail-gunners, came in. They told us that they had gone to the Elks, but missed us and figured we would be at the Salty Dawg. While we were sitting there was also another couple at the table who were from Colorado, which is where Doug and Linda are from. They were tent camping across Alaska! They said that on the spit they were sleeping in their SUV because the wind was too cold. Seems to me all of Alaska is too cold for tents, but to each their own! After finishing at the Salty Dawg the four of us went to the Fresh Catch Café, a restaurant on the spit which had been recommended to us by the bartender at the Elks. I finally got the scallops fettuccine that I wanted a couple days ago and it was wonderful. All of the food was great. If you’re ever in the area, I would highly recommend the Fresh Catch Café on Homer Spit. After dinner we headed back to the coach for the remainder of the evening.
Tuesday, August 11 - Day Twenty-eight. We were able to sleep in a little today because we didn’t have to catch our tour boat to Seldovia until just before 11:00 a.m. There were about a dozen of our group who were taking the tour, so we headed down to the dock and boarded a 70+ foot tour boat. Seldovia was a little over an hour across the bay. There are no roads going to the village, which we were told was originally a native village, then a Russian fishing village, and now a semi-native village. There is a tribal government in the town, but there is a mix of
peoples. The weather was perfect, the seas were very slight and the tour boat took about two hours to get to the village because the Captain did a little side trip through some islands to do sightseeing and wildlife viewing. We went by Gull Island which is home to about 30,000 water birds. We also saw a number of otters, including a couple of large ones which let the boat idle right up close to them for photos. We also saw a couple of Bald Eagles.After just about two hours we arrived at the boat harbor in Seldovia, population 282,. The first place we went was a restaurant called the Mad Fish, which was right off the dock. We were there with two other couples from our group, Dave and Connie and Laverne and Dorothy. Jackie and I only had hamburgers, but they were very large and very tasty. We found out later that Peggy and Vern had gone to one of the other restaurants in town and were not as happy, with either the food or the service. After lunch we walked around the town and were a little disappointed. Based on what we had been told about Seldovia, we expected to see some Russian shops and maybe some cultural or historic points of interest. There was nothing remotely Russian about the place and the only points of interest were a small visitor center (which did have some interesting exhibits) and an old abandoned Russian Orthodox Church up on a hill that was not open to visitors. The town was not even touristy, in that there were only a couple of very small gift/souvenir shops.
The most interesting place in town was a small section of the town’s original boardwalk. From the early 1900's much of the town had been built along the rocky shoreline on wooden piers. However, the 1964 earthquake destroyed much of the town, and what was left sunk about four feet which made it subject to flooding. To top it off, the winter following the earthquake brought unusually high tides and severe
storms. Most of the town had to be rebuilt and they didn’t do it the old way on the piers. The one section that remained was on the shore of a small back-bay which protected it from the forces that wrecked the rest of the town. There were some very interesting houses on the boardwalk, including a bed and breakfast that looked on the outside like it was about to fall into the water. The pictures on the sign of the interior, however, made it appear very homey. The town did have a small airport and there were a lot of cars and trucks there, even though the roads are only local and don’t go anywhere “outside”. They do have periodic ferry service which is how all their vehicles, supplies and other goods are delivered. After walking around for a couple hours we got back on the boat for the ride back to Homer, which only took an hour and fifteen minutes because he went straight back.The day was concluded with a pot luck fish fry at the RV park. Our leaders cooked up a bunch of the halibut and sea bass that they had caught in Seward, and some of the rest of the group brought side dishes. Each coach was assigned a number when the caravan started (we were 9) and the even numbered coaches brought stuff today. The odd numbers will bring side dishes to the crab cookout in Sterling, Alaska in a couple of days. The fish was outstanding, and the side dishes were all wonderful as well. One thing about this group, they know how to cook! We also had our travel briefing for our trip from Homer to Sterling. We were not going to be leaving until
Thursday, but about half the group is going fishing on Wednesday (including Jackie and I) and no one was sure what time the fishers would be back. After the dinner we headed back to the coach to get things ready for the next day’s fishing trip. We have to pack food and warm clothes, and we also had to get an early bed time because we had to be at the fishing boat at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday. When the leader told us 6:30 Jackie’s response was “that’s A.M.?”That friends brings the story of week four of our Alaska adventure to an end. We are a little over halfway through the trip and still have many more exciting adventures to come. Stay tuned and stay happy!
