ALASKA TRIP, PART 10

On Monday, July 16, we left Homer and drove 76 miles to the Fred Meyer in Soldotna. Bill and Gisela ran into some friends who were staying overnight in the parking lot, so we decided to do so, too.

The next day, we drove 104 miles to a pullout along the Exit Glacier Road north of Seward and spent the night. The pullout is along the Resurrection River and has a beautiful view of the mountains. The next day, we took a tour of Exit Glacier. You can walk almost to the glacier -- since a falling piece of glacier could kill a person, you can't actually get close enough to touch it; however, it's an amazing sight, anyway.

Exit Glacier:












Earl & Bill (back row)
Gisela & Linda (front row)











Since the view was so beautiful where we were, we decided to spend another night along the river at the pullout. However, at some time during the evening, our refrigerator stopped working on propane, so we had to get our generator out and plug our refrigerator in to it. Because of the problem with our refrigerator, we moved to an RV park the next day so that we could have electricity.

Thursday was Earl's 62nd birthday. I got him a nice warm shirt and some fuzzy warm slippers. Bill and Gisela gave him a log cabin kit (he'd been talking about log cabins) wrapped in a red bandanna (Earl's red bandannas, which he's been using for years as handkerchiefs, are really frayed). We went out to dinner at the Crab Pot to celebrate. Earl had whole king crab which was delicious (I had a bite or two) and I had a combination seafood plate with shrimp, crab, and scallops -- yum!

The next day, we drove back out to the entry gate at Exit Glacier to purchase Earl's Golden Age Passport.

On Sunday, we took the Kenai Fjords tour. It was an overcast day and we did run into fog when we got out of Resurrection Bay, but for the most part, we had a good day for a boat trip. We saw quite a bit of wildlife -- a brief glimpse of a Humpback Whale, porpoises, sea otters, a bear, a Bald Eagle plus lots of other birds, and lots of Stellar Sea Lions. We also had lunch near Holgate Glacier and got to see it calving. What a sight -- and sound! When a glacier calves, it sounds like loud thunder or a rifle shot.

Bear Glacier:

Black Oystercatcher:















Holgate Glacier:

End of a calving:











Horned Puffin:











Stellar Sea Lions:












On Monday when we were getting ready to leave Seward, we found that the batteries on the truck were dead -- we'd left the mirror heaters on when we'd driven out to Exit Glacier to get Earl's Golden Age card. Earl took the batteries out and took them down to have them recharged; however, they couldn't be recharged so we ended up buying two new batteries.

After we got the new batteries installed, we drove 131 miles to the Anchorage RV Park in Anchorage. Since it was after 5:00 PM when we arrived, we decided to go out to dinner at one of the local Thai restaurants where we had some delicious food.

Tomorrow morning, we take our fifth wheel in to get the refrigerator fixed.