Homer - Doh!!! OR rain rain go away

Just another day in paradise. Got up this morning with things to do. The first thing was to call Dr. Crow and have him send a prescription to the Wallmart in Wasilla. That will hold me for a month or two. Then they will send a new mail order prescription to my mother to forward to us for mailing. Then at 9, we have an appointment with our new found friends at Valley RV. If you remember, they were the ones who got us straightened out after our accident. They looked over the battery system of the camper and declared the batteries (no wonder Bobby Labonte left the Interstate Battery Team) toast. With new batteries installed, we headed out to Wallmart hopefully to collect my prescription. With expected time to kill, we stopped and had lattes. Giardelli chocolate (dark for me and white for Cheryl). I bought an Anchorage paper and read a nice article about Tom Brady, a less than nice article about Floyd Landis and noticed however briefly that the Red Sox trailed the Yankees by 2 games

We got word that the prescription had been sent so we headed out to visit our new Alaskan friends that we met on our fishing trip (did I tell you about the fish I caught??). They live in Eureka, Alaska. That is on the Glenn Highway about 2/3 of the way from Palmer to Glenallen (about 75 miles from where we were in Wasilla). The road runs through the mountains (what road in Alaska doesn’t?). We arrived about 3:30. Their names are Ray and Nancy McCarty. They moved to Alaska from California 29 years ago. They live the Alaskan life. They hunt, fish and sit in their kitchen and look at the mountains and glacier they can see from their kitchen. Across the Glenn Highway are the Eureka Lodge and a small kettle pond which Ray flies his Piper 2 seater out of. He runs an air taxi business. When we arrived, he told us that caribou hunting season opens on Thursday (this was Tuesday) and he was about to head out to scout the wilderness behind the kettle pond and would I like to come…..WOULD I?? Does the bear defecate in the woods?(oh wait a minute. We learned at Denali, that the bears also like to defecate on the roads!) This was one of the very small float planes that are the workhorses of Alaska. They can land and take off pretty much in a puddle. We skimmed a section of the back land and saw a lot of moose, some swans and finally a dozen and a half caribou. They were way back (12 to 15 miles). The area was laced with 4 wheeler trails and some single track trails that Ray said date back to the gold rush. We headed back and Cheryl got to take a spin into another section. Her results were about the same although she saw fewer moose and more caribou. When he brought Cheryl back, he took a younger person, he knew out to another section to scout. They found only one bull in that sector but while returning, they flew over an area that they hadn’t hit in any of the flights. Ray said there were 3 separate herds of caribou in this one valley and that the total number of caribou in these 3 herds looked to be in the thousands. He and Nancy talked about how they would approach the hunt on Thursday. I could see many small shacks (hunting shacks like the fishing shanties of our winter) along the trails. There were even some vehicles out there already; a couple of trucks and a jeep. We loaded about as much halibut into the freezer as would fit (it cost me my ice cube trays, not Southern Comfort on the rocks until we eat some of the freezer). It was a nice visit. Making new friends is one of the benefits of travel.

We slept in their driveway and headed out at 5 am. We hoped to see some animals with the early start but didn’t see much. Not a caribou to be seen. We did see trailer after trailer of 4 wheelers along the road headed up into caribou country. We assumed that they would set up camps in the backcountry and do some scouting to get ready for Tomorrow’s opening. They have some interesting laws up here. If you are old or disabled, you can get a license and proxy it out to someone to hunt for you. I don’t think we have anything like that but then I am not a hunter.

We headed back to Wasilla and picked up my prescription at Wallmart and headed south towards the Kenai Peninsula. Upon reaching Anchorage, we searched out the Alaska Native Heritage Center. We missed it on the first go-around as we were looking at a cooling tower across the street sending a pillar of water vapor into the atmosphere. We ended up driving all the way through Anchorage, finding the road again and driving back to find the center. We could not understand why we missed it until we got to the top of the off ramp and saw the cooling tower. The center celebrated all of the different Native Alaskan groups and their individual heritages. They had members of each of the groups in houses representative of each of their cultures and they talked about the lives of their groups over the years. It rained of course but was a fascinating place to visit. For lunch in their dining room (outdoors on a covered deck) we had a reindeer hot dog and an elk hamburger. After visiting the gift shop and watching some native dancing and drumming demonstrations, we headed out. We also have tickets to a cultural art museum downtown but we will use them on our way back through. Check this out: admission to the cultural center was 23.50 (discounts were available for Alaskans, natives, armed forces, school groups and some others). The 23.50 was only for out of staters, however, you could get a combination ticket to the cultural center and the art museum for 21.50. go figure!

The drive south was a different kind of spectacular. The road wound along a huge bay with just enough room between the mountains and the water for the road and the railroad. It was cold, rainy and windy so we stopped a lot but didn’t get out of the truck much. We ended up at a National Forest Campground. It is a nice place but has no wifi (we did stop at a private campground that advertised wifi but they said it didn’t work and the phone company couldn’t seem to find the time to come out and fix it. Well, sorry about that. I had to shut everything down quickly as our carbon monoxide alarm went off. We had the generator going and the stove so who knows just what it was. I shut off the generator and went out and looked over everything. Nothing seemed to be awry but we are in a place where there is no moving air so that may have caused the problem. We put on the vent over the stove and vented that outdoors and the problem went away. That will bear watching though.

I made chili out of one of the packages of moose hamburg that Ray and Nancy gave us. It was good although I didn’t have my normal spice rack to work out of so it was not nearly as hot as it usually is (Cheryl is smiling while she eats). I did cut down and brought a mixture of oregano and basil (I use them together anyway) parsley and chili powder. We miss some of the others (cayenne, cumin and rosemary specifically) but if we only had to bring a few, we brought the ones we use the most.

We baked off the last of the toll house cookies last night. Those refrigerator rolls by Nestles are almost as good as the real thing. We cooked half of them last week (in a weak moment) and finished them off last night. The first time, we made them the size the package called for (8 cookies from a half package) and they were a little small and suffered in the tiny oven (too dark). This time, I made 6 instead of 8 and cooked them at 350 rather than the 400 it called for. It took a little longer but they came out perfect. Hot cookies and milk in the woods of the Kenai Peninsula.

We are still not sure where to go. There is a fishing derby starting up in Seward and we have been warned several times that there will not be any places to stay there as it draws a huge crowd. We have a days grace but people will get there early so we may head down to Homer first and then see. If we have had enough water and fishing people we may just bypass Seward entirely (it is 50 miles off down a side road so if there is no where to stay it is another 50 miles back to the main road. We are wandering so we will just wait and make up our minds when the decision point arrives.

We started another dominoes game last night. We haven’t played for a couple of days but Cheryl is hot and catching up fast. We played until I fell asleep in the middle of placing a domino on the table. I went to bed and Cheryl read for a while. This morning, we finished the game and we are now tied in the overall score. I am really surprised we have enjoyed playing the game as much as we have. Well, time to break camp and see where the road takes us. I hope it is to a place where we can send out the rest of the Denali section. See ya!

As we got further south, the weather closed in and we ran into shower after shower. There wasn’t much to see as tops of everything was in the clouds (even tall trees). Eventually, we came to the Kenai River, a hotbed of salmon fishing. With the recent arrival of the silver salmon, the industry has picked up significantly. Many of the campgrounds and lodges along the way are filled and every stream and river you see has people in them fishing. The Kenai River is a fairly large fast flowing green colored river. There were boats everywhere with people fishing. We did not see anyone catch anything but I am sure they were. We didn’t find much of interest along the way. We stopped at the Russian ferry and watched the people fish. We stopped at a restaurant to eat mainly because they advertised wifi available in the restaurant. It was 3 in the afternoon but there were 5 tables of people eating, 3 of them with computers. The next 3 groups that came in all had computers. Mine of course did not work. It kept telling me that the wireless communication switch was off and needed to be turned on. I didn’t have the manual with me so I could not get it to work so you don’t have your Denali Part 2 still. (I did find the switch this morning so all I need is to go over to the office and send it out.

We continued on right into Homer. This is pretty much the end of the road. The road runs out onto a sand spit (the Homer Spit) and several miles out, there is a little community of shops, fishing charters, bars and campgrounds. Included in all of that is the Heritage RV Park, the most expensive campground I have ever experienced…..nice but not that nice. The only place in town that’s decent syndrome. We are here for 3 nights. They pretty much have everything here including satellite TV, a large putting green, a café and many beachfront sites. We parked kind of cockeyed in our site but it gave us a nice view of the ocean out of every window in the coach except the back bedroom window. We have been far enough away from the office that we haven’t had anyone assigned to either of the spaces around us. We have now been here 2 nights and it has rained pretty much all of the time we have been here. We wandered around the spit yesterday (only took about 3 hours). We checked out all of the shops and charter offices. We decided not to take the boat to Seldovia because of the weather and cancelled plans to go fishing for salmon as our freezer is already so full of halibut that I had to take out the ice cube trays to fit in all of the fish. We are right next to the “fishing hole”, a place that fills with tidal water as the tide comes in and goes out. Fish come in with the tide and people line the outside of this pool and fish. They catch salmon too. We watched for about a half hour and saw many salmon caught. We also watched a sea otter float around the pond. I don’t think they eat salmon but this one was eating something.
We have only the Fairbanks area to go in our travels and we are considering leaving in the next week so we can spend more time seeing more parks. Our original plan was to rush out to Alaska and rush back for the races. We have been thinking that we may leave early and take our time returning. We are considering returning through the Canadian Rockies, Glacier National Park, Devils Tower, Mt. Rushmore, Badlands, Jewel and Wind Caves, Crazy Horse and whatever else gets in our way. Hmmmm. More on that later.

Tomorrow we head back to Anchorage. I hope the weather improves Later!

C2