Alaska -- Day 76

A taste of home after a busy day. We read the Anchorage newspaper yesterday and saw an ad from Fred Meyers announcing they have Olathe sweet corn. We had to get some. It is absolutely the best corn you can buy and it is grown in western Colorado. After our drive from Seward to Anchorage today, we shopped for groceries at both Walmart and Fred Meyers. We had the corn tonight and it was delicious.

Our drive of about 125 miles was uneventful (that's the way we like it) and beautiful. Everything is so green in Alaska this year.



We drove by Portage Glacier.



These dead trees are called a ghost forest. In 1964, the largest earthquake ever to strike the United States caused land in this area to drop about 14 feet (I think). Then the salt water in Cook Inlet flooded this forest area, killing the trees.



Cook Inlet has some of the highest tides in the world. If you look closely at this photo, you can see a small wave as the tide rises.



We encountered one construction zone on our drive today. If you have to stop for construction, this is about the best view I can imagine.



After we got set up here, we went grocery shopping, then I did the laundry. By the time I cooked dinner, it had been a very full day. Tomorrow, we take the RV in to have the slide checked. It sounded pretty good today as we pulled it in and put it out again. Hopefully, the cleaning John did made a real difference.

Alaska -- Day 75

It has been another cool, cloudy day in Seward, Alaska. The high temp was 54 degrees. Last winter Alaska saw all-time record amounts of snow. July has been the coolest on record. The state is having a summer that they call a "little winter." We love to see sunshine, and we have seen it every day it was really important to our plans. However, we would rather be here in this chilly summer than in the lower 48 with your record-breaking heat and drought.

Today, sunshine didn't matter. We used our Alaska Toursaver book to visit the Alaska SeaLife Center here in Seward. Entrance for two cost one single ticket price of $20. We hadn't really known if we would visit this place or not when we first came here. But the more we heard about it, the more we realized we wanted to go. And are we ever glad we did. These two folks from Colorado saw sea life like we hadn't even imagined existed. But first, we saw more beautiful flowers here in town.







The SeaLife Center has numerous tanks of fish and other sea life, as well as facilities for birds and seals. They have some exhibits where you can touch some sea life, like sea stars and sea anemone. The facility rescues and cares for animals. This week they took in a six-week-old walrus calf, stranded near Barrow. We didn't get to see it, but facilities that care for creatures like that are certainly great.

We did learn a lot about the life-cycle of salmon, the various fish and other sea life that are harvested in the Bearing Sea,



and about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The most startling facts I learned about the spill is it was not even among the 50 biggest oil spills in the world and that every 9 months, more oil goes into US marine waters from run-off from roads and parking lots and incidental land oil spills than came from the Exxon Valdez spill.

We saw numerous birds that were new to us. We had seen puffins on our cruise earlier this week and today, John finally got a really good photo of one. I have wanted to see and photograph puffins for at least 8 years, when we were first in Alaska. Finally!  It is a tufted puffin.




This is a parakeet auklet.



I'm pretty sure this is a king eider.



I know there were red-legged kittiwakes.  I don't know what this one is.



The bird on the left is a long-tailed duck and the bird on the right is a pigeon guillemot.



This is a black scoter.


We were able to watch stellar sea lions from above the water and also below. They moved too fast underwater to be able to photograph them.



The invertebrates are as beautiful as the flowers we had seen earlier.

Sea anemone.



A sea urchin.



Sea star.



I don't know what this is.



We were both fascinated by all we saw and learned so much. We know we will visit other aquariums in the future. It was a great experience.

Alaska -- Day 71

The last few days, I have gotten out of bed and looked in the mirror and asked myself, "When did my mother get such a good tan?" Oops, that's not my mother, it's me. So, how did I get so old? With a morning like I had today, it is easy. Even though we had the RV to the shop twice in Anchorage because of the noises the slide was making, it still isn't sounding good.

Today, we decided to call Lippert, the company that makes the slides. Once I was on hold for customer service for 5 minutes. Later, I was on hold for 25 minutes. They offer to call you back, I pushed 1 for yes. They did call back. But we have both been having trouble answering our phones. Mine has a touch screen and keeps locking. In trying to unlock, I disconnect. With John's phone, a flip phone, when I open it to answer, somehow I disconnect. The only reason I sat on hold for 25 minutes was that I had twice disconnected the call-back. So, it wasn't Lippert's fault. It was my stupidity or clumsiness. My frustration was with me. That is the frustration that adds the most age and wrinkles.

Thankfuly, that experience didn't mean the whole day was bad. I packed our lunch and we drove to the south end of Seward to hike at Caine's Head State Park. As we drove there, we saw a fog bank on Resurrection Bay.



We passed a couple of small waterfalls.



We hiked through an incredibly beautiful rain forest. Many tree branches were covered with soft green moss and the leaves on some of the plants in the understory were huge.





Our hike took us from Lowell Point to Tonsina Point and crossed the Tonsina River. We could see fish in the crystal clear water, probably salmon going upstream to spawn. Fishing for salmon is not allowed here. In the second photo, you can see a whole line of salmon swimming.





We heard screaming overhead. When we looked up, we saw two bald eagles talking to each other. I got a good picture of one of them.



Within 20 minutes, we stopped and talked to two different couples with ties to Colorado. One couple used to live in Fort Collins and Bouder and the man was one of three generations of his family to graduate from the University of Colorado. I am, too. My mother, I and our son, Eric, all have degrees from CU. A little further on, we encountered a couple who live in Colorado Springs. What a small world.

This was our view while we sat on a log to eat lunch.



It is very difficult to be frustrated or depressed in such incredible beauty. We had a great afternoon. It's all a matter of what your perspective is.

Alaska–Day 70

Our drive today to Seward was beautiful.  But first, if you catch or harvest a whole lot of salmon, what do you do with it?  Freeze it, of course.  But you can also can it.  I saw these two pressure canners in a camp site this morning.

Our 100-mile drive took us through mountains and along rivers and lakes.  This is Tern Lake.

When you are inching your way through a construction zone, it isn’t comforting to see a tractor above you, like this.

This is what the tractor was moving, either up or down.  Glad none of it hit us.

We like this sign on the main street in downtown Seward.

We arranged an all-day cruise through Kenai Fjords National Park for Friday, using our buy one-get one free Toursaver book.  The park has glaciers, wildlife and mountains.  It should be fun.

Tonight, I prepared some of the salmon we were given as we left Scenic View.  I used a recipe in a book of salmon recipes that I bought the last time we were in Alaska.  The meal, while good, helped us decide we didn’t want to spend $200 to $300 for a fishing charter.  We are here to enjoy Alaska and Canada, see wildlife and scenery.  We don’t enjoy fish enough to go fishing and have all that fish to eat.