Soldotna to Homer to Seward to Hope to Wasilla!

July 25 Leaving Pete and Ed's place, grudgingly, this morning, we have put 3855 miles on the camp since we left. The salmon run still didn't seem to be going in full force, but we have plenty of fish.
Yesterday's trip to Homer was fun, but a little bit soggy! Homer is at the end of the Sterling Highway, to get any farther south, like to Seldovia or Kodiak Island, you need to take a ferry or a water taxi across Cook Inlet to the Lake Clark. The spot to be in Homer is The Spit. It's a long piece of landed formed by glacial tailings long ago. We wandered the "spit", spent a bit of time in the Salty Dawg Saloon and had some lunch. There were lots of eagles around. A huge nest was in an old dead tree across the street from the Safeway store!
Our first stop this morning was Ed's Kasilof Fish Processing, where we shipped another 125# of salmon back home.  The drive to Seward was beautiful, as is every drive!  Seward is another port/fishing community located on Resurrection Bay.  It's also home to Kenai Fijords National Park and Exit Glacier.  In Seward we camped at Resurrection Municipal Campgrounds - right on the beach and in the middle of town. Walking distance to the docks, restaurants and the Alaska Sea Life Center.

July 26  We hiked up to the edge of the glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park.  Of course were amazed by the stunning blue color.  In Alaska there is not charge for going to national parks.  So this was a beautiful hike for free!  There were lots of flowers and trees until we got close to the top and then it got really cold.  Fortunately there was very little rain that day and we got some decent pictures.  When we got back the girls needed to at least see the quilt store in Seward and of course we parted with more of our money.  We will have plenty of projects to keep us busy until the end of winter.  On the walk home from downtown it started to mist and then rain and we had to make a decision about going out on the Star of the Northwest cruise ship.  Because we could see light in the distance, we decided to take our chances!  It turned out to be a fun 4 hours.  We got a wonderful salmon and prime rib dinner and opportunity to see lots of wildlife, stellar sea lion, puffins, humpback whales, etc.  The walk home from the harbor was a little wet, but we survived.

July 27  After showers and pastries from the local bakery, we spent some time at the Sea Life Center in Seward.  There we got more photos of the some of the same animals we saw in their natural habitat the night before.  Later we ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant that looked good until the tour bus came in sometime between the salad and entree.  We needed to wait quite a while for the line to disappear.  Then there was not a lot of food left.  Good thing Jean and Jackie had beer to mellow us out while we waited.  Later in the afternoon we packed up the camper and headed to Hope.  This was a suggestion from our neighbors from the campground who were traveling around in a little Scamp trailer.  He is a singer/musician performing around Alaska and Canada.  They told us Hope was a beautiful little spot.
The campground was a little rustic, but they had a bar next door and beautiful view of the water.  Lots of people catching fish and we ran into our new friends from the previous campsite.  For a couple of beers they gave us a CD and invited us to hear a performance at the Trapper Creek festival on Saturday night, so you will probably hear more about that later.

July 28  Woke up to an earthquake at 6:00am, which none of us felt, but other people told us about.  Discovered a bear had been in the garbage overnight and left a deposit by the garbage cans.  Other than that the night was pretty uneventful.  Packed up our camper and headed to Wasilla for the next adventure.  Stay tuned for more exciting tales.  Just finishing the wash - this is a fancy campground, flush toilets, large, clean showers and WiFi - at our camper!!  So this will get posted tonight and maybe we'll even get another one posted before we head up toward Denali.
Just finished the wash - time to grill some salmon!!