Back to Anchorage. Internet civilization.
There is a falcated duck here. I’ve never even heard of a falcated duck, but it is being reported here, so we went to the marsh to look for it. Found gulls, phalaropes, grebes, gadwalls, and wigeons. Nothing falcated.
Here are some musk oxen from the musk ox farm outside of Palmer though.
The Great 2019 Alaska Trip map
The Alaska portion of the trip
4,333 miles to Sandpipers.
I just googled Whittier, Alaska. Only 100 people live there. It gets 154 inches of rain a year. It gets 249 inches of snow! OMG. No wonder only 100 people live there. I wonder if it’s the same 100 people every year or do they have to find new ones after every winter.
The RV Park we’re in is advertised as the “safest RV Park in Anchorage”. We can tell it’s safe because every few minutes, day and night, a security vehicle cruises past with lights flashing. I just went out and locked the outside cabinet doors for the first time in fifteen years.
One more musk ox picture.
There’ll be radio silence all day tomorrow. We’re off on an unplugged adventure.
If you never hear from us again, it’s probably because we went back to Whittier and it never occurred to us to leave. Wow, what a spot.
We’re planning on going to Homer and Valdez this trip; coastal towns. We never heard of Whittier. But when we found out that it is on the coast of Prince William Sound and the only way to get there is through a single-track train tunnel, well who wouldn’t want to go there! Once an hour on the half hour, they let eastbound cars through. Once an hour on the hour, westbound traffic. In-between, trains. It was worth a day-trip over.
Not much in the way of internet connectivity in Hope and Whittier, but that didn’t seem so important at the time.
We’ve left the Mat-Su Valley. We finished off the Parks Highway, continued south on the Glenn Highway, and hung a left for the Seward Highway. We left the Seward Highway after Portage with a right on the Hope Highway. And here we are, settled in for a couple nights on the Kenai Peninsula.
It was a scenic drive.
There would be even more scenery without the forest fire smoke, but the 100,000 acre Swan Lake Fire right in the middle of the Kenai Peninsula is only 14% contained, so we don’t expect a major clear-up anytime soon.
Where the river meets the sea.
It sounds charming, but out on the mud flats the river channel can be a little mucky at low tide.
No phone, no pool, no pets. Well, not exactly. We get good Verizon phone and internet around the big cities. We don’t get any satellite television though. Last time I put up the dish it kept looking down at the ground trying to find the assigned satellites. They seem to be below the horizon here. There might be an Alaska package for Dish Network, but we’re not on it. It’s a quiet television summer for us. That should help us go to bed earlier at night, but so far that’s not happening. We sit up talking until it gets dark, then realizing it’s not going to get dark, we just go inside and go to bed late. The only television thing we miss is we’re not getting any Formula 1 races.
The Jeep isn’t getting Sirius Radio either. Maybe we’d have to get an Alaska Package for that too that had a satellite it could see from here.
The Great 2019 Alaska Trip map
The Alaska portion of the trip
4,420 miles to Sandpipers.
It’s 90 degrees! We didn’t have to drive four thousand miles to get 90 degrees. We could have stayed in The Valley and gotten a hundred!
Salmon in the stream
Turning red. Maybe someone more salmon-savvy can tell us which kind. Sockeye?
We got a little closer today; we visited Talkeetna. It’s a funky little town that is set up in the summertime like a several-block street fair. Lots of arts, crafts, people, brew, and tours.
The highlight for me? A 1948 Whizzer motorbike.
Second owner. Says it runs just fine (which was better than ours did in the 1950s and 60s. He got on it and pedaled really hard and it did start right up, and (almost) purr like a kitten. (A one-cylinder kitten.)
I remember it seeming bigger.
Only later in the day did we discover the vehicles in the mist.
Old abandoned cars, vans, and trucks buried in the forest, never to move again.
And then, serendipity. We passed a sign on the highway for Gigglewood Lakeside Inn. Well, who could just drive by and not go back to look at a lakeside inn named Gigglewood? Not us. I pulled the car over on the shoulder, waited for a break in traffic, and turned around. There, four and a half miles later, we drove up to their door.
A lady (Linda) sitting in the yard spotted us and came over to visit. Pretty soon we were out of the car enjoying her yard, and her life, which it turns out is a lot like ours. She used to live in Boulder. She has a grandson in Louisville and an Uncle in Lafayette. As Judy and I just uprooted and headed out for adventure in our VW Bus in 1968, she and her husband chucked everything and headed to Alaska. Same as us. It just took us a little longer to get to Alaska.
We could have visited for hours, except she had guests arrive, and we had to get home to empty and refill Henry.
And the answer to yesterday’s salmon identification; we have it on good authority that the answer is “Yes”. That’s a Sockeye Salmon. They’re the ones that turn red with a green head when they swim upstream to spawn.
Next question. Why are there so many kinds of Pacific salmon and only one kind of Atlantic salmon? Inquiring minds want to know…
