MONDAY |
ALASKAN STOP #26MARINER PARK CAMPGROUNDON THE HOMER SPIT, AK |
Our plan this morning was to wake up early, eat breakfast and then drive the 19-miles down the road to the next campground we'd like to camp in. It's a city owned and operated First-Come-First-Serve campground right on the shores of Kachemak Bay.
Kachemak Bay may sound familiar to you if you've ever watched the Discovery Channel series Alaska: The Final Frontier, starring the Kilcher family. The show will start airing it's 12th (and possibly final) season sometime in late October if you're a fan. Their 600 acre homestead is located 11-miles outside of the town of Homer, where we will be camped for the next week.
We had some weird skies driving into Homer this morning.
Dark grey dense clouds above and bright blue with puffy clouds below?
Oh look! There's a Peony Celebration while we're in town. We'll have to check that out!
The last few miles into Homer are literally all downhill.
But you're here to hear our story, so let me get back to that. We drove the 19-miles this morning and found only a couple of the 34 campsites unoccupied at 8:30AM so we picked the best available site and paid for a weeks worth of camping at the self-pay kiosk.
We then hung our receipt on the post, set out a few items on the site, like a folding camp chair and an orange safety cone, to make the site appear occupied. We then checked in with the camp host to tell him we'd be back in less than an hour to properly occupy the site and drove 19-miles back up the road to hitch up to THE POD.
We felt this was our best plan to get a good site without risking giving up the site we already had in Anchor Point. It worked out better than we hoped when we returned an hour later with THE POD and found the best site, in our opinion, was now vacant. We quickly moved our stuff over one site to Site #34, which is on the end of the line of waterfront campsites and set up camp.
The space between THE POD and the signs on the right is also part of our site.
The signs point out that everything to the right is for day use parking only, NO CAMPING!
Everything between the yellow post and THE POD is part of our front yard.
After we unhitch we'll move ROVER over there to fill that space.
We also moved the picnic table to help fill the space when we're out and about with ROVER.
Sure will be a lot nicer once the sun comes back out and dries up all this excess rain water!
By the time we were all done and had a little snack of cheese and crackers it was 10:30AM. We have a couple pieces of business to take care of so off we went. First to the Post Office here in Homer, because 17-days ago I requested our mail from Florida be forwarded here using General Delivery as our address. When doing this you'll want to use a small town Post Office, the kind of place where there is only one office location in the entire town.
Only once have we had trouble receiving our General Delivery mail and it was in the capitol city of Springfield, IL where they couldn't locate our mail, even after they verified it was within in their facility. Two months later it was found and returned to sender, our mail forwarding company, in Florida with two of Tricia's paychecks still inside. This was after I called ahead to make sure, like I always do, that their office accepts General Delivery mail.
We haven't had our mail forwarded to us since May 2nd so there was quite a bit more to sort through than normal. The two envelopes we were looking for were both in there, new credit cards to replace the ones that expired last month in June.
Next we went in search of the Chevron Gas Station on the highway that leads into town. Rumor has it that they operate a FREE dump station and fresh water fill in the big parking lot behind the station. We easily found it and I went inside to verify the price. I find it funny that directly across the highway is the city operated facility where they charge $15.00 for the same service. There were two RVs waiting in line there to pay and dump their tanks, when right across the street it's FREE and no waiting? Guess it pays to do a little research and guess which facility we'll be using when our week here in Homer is finished!
Now that those two chores are finished we felt we had time to do just a minimum amount of sightseeing. One thing on our Alaska Bucket List is to drive every mile of the Sterling Highway which terminates at the end of the Homer Spit.
Our only reward for doing this was to take a photo of ROVER with the End of the Road Sign found there. See those two silver vans on the right hand side of the photo? Those are both Airstream Interstates who drove up here together from California to enjoy the summer.
I visited the Salty Dawg Saloon back in 2006 and stapled a $1 bill to the wall,
along with probably 10,000+ other $1 bills that can be found there.
Later this week I'll try to find it. If not, I'll just add another one!
UPDATE: I couldn't find my dollar bill from 2006 where I left it, come to think of it I couldn't find any bills older than 2015. I then did some research and found out that each year the bar staff removes some $3,000-$4,000 worth of the older bills and donates them to local charities. So this year I added another $1 bill to the wall in the billiard room, I'll just have to get back here sooner if I expect to find it still thumb-tacked to the wall where I left it.
At 9:00AM we checked out the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center. Their facility is very well done, but it leans very much towards education and awareness and less about the natural history of the refuge. It was good, just not what we were expecting to see.
Next we drove up to the viewpoint on the ridge high above the Homer Spit. From this vantage point the 4.5-mile long spit looks so tiny as we watched airplanes taking off from the airport runway below and the floatplanes launching from the lake at the top of the spit.
Next we did a scenic drive up to the head of Kachemak Bay. We drove past Kilcher Road (where the TV series was filmed) and continued until the pavement ended some 20+ miles east of Homer, that's where we turned around to head home.
Katherine prepared the salmon with some kind of delicious honey glaze and completed the meal with some diced potatoes and fresh salad. What a scrumptious feast it was and you just can't get much fresher!
Thanks Katherine & John for sharing your fishing bounty with us.
Tomorrow, our seventh and final day in Homer, we're hoping for one more sunny day because half of us (Tricia-Katherine-John-Sara) have scheduled a 3/4-day Halibut Fishing Charter than runs five miles out into the Cook Inlet.
This is tomorrow morning's forecast for the big fishing trip.
Fingers crossed it's actually turns out accurate!
Our cozy little compound on the Homer Spit.
Notice the orange pylon we place on the ground to reserve the space when the van is not there.
Check out the fog behind ROVER that's blanketing the residential areas of Homer, AK.
I snapped the previous two photos in between the bouts of rain this morning. To make the best use of a dreary day Tricia and I went in search of somewhere to take showers and at the same time take care of our laundry needs. Fortunately less than a mile away is the Washboard, a laundromat with showers. It was kind of expensive, $12.50 for a big triple washer and 10-cent a minute for the dryers, in addition to the $9.00 each for a 30-minute shower, but everything was clean and in perfect working order.
So we're adding laundry and showers to our list which already includes gas and groceries.
Tricia of course planned and packed everything the night before and then left without her sunglasses. Since she rode into town with the others, that meant I needed to drive into town just to drop off her sunglasses. Not a big deal, it's only 2-miles away and I was awake anyway.
Tricia's one-day nonresident $15 fishing license entitled her to catch one halibut less than 28 inches long and one more any size. After that she was done fishing for the day. Let me just say not everyone on the boat caught their two fish limit.
HOMER AND HALIBUT FISHING
OUR ALASKAN CHALLENGE: |
| COMPLETED | PROGRESS BAR |
STILL TO GO |
| 64 | 36 |
|---|
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