Homer, Seward, Kenai Fjords

Hey everyone...

It's a little after midnight and we just got back to anchorage after a few days in Homer & Seward & Kenai Fjords, AK. We got this post up quick because we're leaving for Vancouver tomorrow (its a minimum 3 day drive), so we thought we'd share with you before we took off. Also, check out our Anchorage post right after this... we got it up yesterday.

Just to fill you in, Homer is south-south west of Anchorage about 200 miles and Seward is south about 115... the drive is beautiful but the destinations are well worth the drives. Though we've been here for about 2 weeks, we felt like we got to experience legit Alaska and we were glad we did....

On the way down. It might be hard to see because of the small pictures, but the colors are pretty incredible up here. The shades of green and blue are very diverse and dynamic.

We got into Homer right around dusk (aka, around midnight). The park where we stayed was having a kite running festival.
Homer Harbor. I was really excited to take a walk through it... In my idealist brain, I think it'd be cool to be a seaman.
Our favorite boat.
We took a few hours and hung out on the spit. I guess that's the beach in Homer. Everyone said it and we assumed they were referring to the beach, but we're still not exactly sure. Just say it with confidence, I guess....

It was a beautiful day in Homer, lots of boats out, the Cook Inlet was calm, and the weather was cool to mild. We heard that the record high in Homer, at least on the spit, was 72 degrees. You could tell that though the sun was shining, the wind off the cold water kept it that way.
Notice the row of seagulls atop the roof. Ps, I became deathly afraid of seagulls while in Anchorage when a flock of them began to dive bomb me in a parking lot, which resulted in me screaming like a little girl and running. Nell took much pleasure in the sight.
Our second night there, we decided to camp on the spit.


After Homer, we took off to Seward and went on a 6 hour day-cruise through Kenai Fjords National Park. This was probably our favorite thing we did while in AK.

Right out of the harbor, we came across this Sea Otter, which spends 75-80 percent of it's life like this, and the rest of it eating. (A little info: this little dude is about 100 lbs and eats about 25 lbs a day. I wish I could lay around and eat as much as this guy can.)

A bald eagle scouting out food.
Puffins. To me they look like a mix of duck, penguin, and toucan.

We also saw three different kinds of whales: the Orca (or Killer Whale), Minke Whale, and pictured above and two below, the Humpback Whale

This is Holgate Glacier in the Holgate Arm of Kenai Fjords. The glacier face above is about a quarter-mile long.
I love this picture of my beautiful wife.
The glacier was really blue and active that day
Some of those chunks of ice in the water are small - maybe the size of a volleyball or basketball, but they can weigh around 200 lbs because the ice is so compact.

Hard to see, but if you look right in the bottom center of the the glacier, the ice is caving. We have it on video we'll try to upload and show you. It was really great experience watching this glacier.

The white parts are seagulls.

The Alaskan version of penguins (though not real penguins, but they can actually fly (a little)).
The killer whale - Nell's favorite. This was actually pretty neat to watch because there was a huge pod of them and they were on the move.

Sea lions.
Another Orca. The other whale Nell saw (I didn't) was a Minke, which is the shyest of whales and was apparently a rare thing to see. Once he saw us, he didn't come back up, thus why I didn't get to see him.
Seward Harbor

Marathon Mountain. The picture doesn't begin to show how steep it is, but there is an actual race that takes place where people run to the top and back down. Word has it, it started with a bet in a bar... which makes me wonder how much stuff in AK started with a bet in a bar.

On our way out of Seward, we took a hike to Exit Glacier.

Well folks, this is it for us in Alaska. We had a great time and now we're on to Vancouver. Pray for us, that we keep safe on our journey south. It might be a while till our next post, but check back in 4 or 5 days and see what we're up to.

Anchorage, AK

So, we were heading out of Denali NP down to Anchorage (slightly disappointed that we didn't see Mt. McKinley) when Dustin looked back to see nothing less than...Denali. We were 150 miles away and it was still incredible. The picture is pretty lame, but at least we got to see it. It looked way cooler than this picture portrays. (If you're having trouble seeing it, the snow covered top of the mountain is what looks like clouds.)

When we got to Anchorage, we decided to have a 'splurge night'. We got a hotel room (after a pretty long stint sleeping in the car) and went out to a really nice dinner. We had the best margaritas, best salmon, and best cheesecake we had ever had before. The salmon was caught that same day and cut up about 2 hours before it was on our plate. We were told by our waiter that they keep the good salmon in AK and then ship everyone else the leftovers. Nice of them. But, we appreciated this time. We weren't sorry for deciding to splurge.
Look at this huge cabbage!
We're pretty happy about actually sleeping in a bed instead of a car seat...

Since we weren't going to see a polar bear, we decided to go to the Hilton and visit a used to be real one.
Anchorage has the largest hub for float planes taking off and landing. It was pretty cool to watch.
This is a boring picture, but a cool story...This is gravity hill. When you go to the bottom of the hill and put your car in neutral, your car goes up the hill. Crazy! We have video proof for any of your skeptics out there.

At the last minute, Dustin decided to run the Anchorage 1/2 marathon even though he hadn't really trained since his last one in April. Since he was doing that, I decided to do a 5.6 miler. Due to lack of showers, we haven't been able to run as much as we would like, so we were proud to finish well. Dustin finished with about the same time as his last 1/2 and I ran the whole 5.6 miles without stopping. My motivation for running was the fact that if I did stop I would be completely eaten up by mosquitos.



We got to watch the summer solstice sunset, which was absolutely incredible. We found that summer solstice is actually a big deal in AK. For one thing, it actually means something here. After the longest day of the year, it's all downhill from there...shorter days mean closer and closer to winter. They have all kinds of summer solstice festivals, softball games that go all through the night and lots of other things going on. We actually heard a lady (obviously a tourist) while on the phone say, "Yeah, it's summer solstice up here in Anchorage". As if that doesn't exist in the rest of the world.

It was a beautiful drive out of Anchorage along the Cook Inlet to our next destinations of Homer and Seward, AK (posts of that to come)!