Category: Traveling the hiways and byways

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K’esugi Ken & Talkeetna

We camped a couple days at Big Bear to catch up on laundry and supplies.  We did find our favorite taco joint while there.  It had moved so that made it a bit more challenging.  If you’re ever in Wasilla, try out Taco Cancun, you won’t regret it.

We drove up to K’esugi Ken Campground just a bit north of  Talkeetna.   What a nice campground, very wide, paved roads and beautiful campsites, and surprisingly they had 50 amp power.  Nothing else, no water or sewer there and no dump station either.   The campground was built on the side of a large mountain and the views were spectacular.  Our traveling companions had the site behind us and they could see Denali from the back of their campsite.   But it could only be seen the first day.  After that the clouds obscured it completely.  But prior to that happening, we drove back down the Parks Highway and over to a Denali Overlook and snapped a few pictures.   Denali was just as grand as I remembered it!

The next morning we drove over to Talkeetna, which turned out to be quite  a long way.   The road that goes over to Talkeetna was about 30 miles south of us; but what we didn’t realize was that turn-off was still a long way to the town, which looked to be right off the Parks Highway, but there was only one road to get there, which meant you drove way past it and then drove back up to it.  It was a bit deceiving until you really look at the map closely.

We finally got to the town and the train was there letting off passengers and tourists.   We had arrived at lunch time, so we went off to find the Denali Brewpub, which was right on the main road down to the River’s Edge Park.

The food was just Ok.  I would try somewhere else next time.  The patio was very nice, as the day was perfect, around 70 degrees and sunny.   Afterward we walked all around town, with me hanging outside all the gift shops with Dusty while Kathy shopped.

We ventured down to the park, and the river was high and moving very quickly.  There were a lot of signs about staying off the rocks due to the fast moving water scouring the dirt away under the rocks on the edges.  Of course there were a lot of folks that apparently didn’t or couldn’t read them and they were out on the rocks’ edge taking group photos and selfies.   Basically they were trying to warn you that if you fell into that fast moving frigid water, it wouldn’t be a rescue, but would be a body recovery.  Lucky for us (and them), no one fell in while we were there.

After a few hours wandering around the small town, we headed back to the car and drove the long way back to the campground.   Denali was no longer visible.

The following day Larry and Sue were going to try fly fishing in Troublesome Creek just up the road a mile or so, and we headed out to see other campgrounds in the area and visit a war memorial not far from one of them.  Also we did a short trail called the Moose Flats Trail.  And I was fairly happy we never saw a moose.   What we did see were mosquitos by the gross.  I wished I had brought my racket as the Deet seemed to have little effect on these buggers.

We spent four nights there and then headed up the road to Denali National Park for a week of dry camping.   No power/Water/Sewer @ Riley Creek Campground.

 

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Quartz Creek / Kenai Lake / Coopers Landing

Got to Quartz Creek on Sunday afternoon.   Scott and Tami, with whom we planned to meet with there, had arrived a couple hours before us.   Scott texted that our site was already empty.    Turns out they had an issue with getting their large rig into their reserved site and moved to “an emergency site” that was quite a bit closer to our campsite.   We had site number 10,  which turned out to be perfect for us as the lake was right out our door, with a great view from our patio.

That evening all 6 of us went out to dinner at the Cooper Landing Brewery. The beer was pretty good and the burgers were even better.

I checked out the group pavilion and a large fire pit with seating around it when hiking through the campground one morning.  It was right there, but hadn’t seen it while going around the campground on the roadway.  It was maybe 50′ from the road.

Scott & Tami came by our beachfront site in their kayaks the next morning on their way out to explore that very large lake.  It’s Kenai Lake and is a very beautiful color.  It’s also the source of the Kenai River.  And  just a few miles away is the Kenai Princess Lodge.  Lots of fisherman on that river,  all the way, some 50 miles to Kenai City.

We drove over to that Princess Lodge one afternoon to take a look at their campground.  It was pretty ugly.  We were both glad we didn’t choose to stay there.   Quartz Creek Campground looks like the Taj Mahal compared to that ugly campground.

The next day we took a drive out a small road on the other side of the lake to see where it went and drove all the way to this sign and decided to turn around there.  The fuel gauge was on empty, just prior to the light coming on by then and we needed to fill up the car before heading back.  The prices were pretty steep in Coopers Landing, so I put in a few gallons so we’d have 100-mile range if needed while towing to Wasilla.   While I was there I noticed this electric car Charging Station.  It seemed to be attached to a diesel generator to power it.   It wasn’t on.  My guess is it started up when you started to charge your car.  Had never seen anything like that anywhere in our travels.   The town seemed to have utility poles, but maybe it was a fast charger and needed a lot more amperage than the utility could provide.

We had happy hour on our patio almost every night except the last evening as Tami cooked an incredible brisket dinner for all 6 of us the night before we left for a campground in Wasilla.  We really needed a grocery run and laundry hookup  (sewer) prior to us heading toward Denali and 11 days of dry camping.

I did some diesel fuel price comparisons for the next leg and Costco was way less than all the other places, actually less than every other fuel station in all of Alaska and Canada, and the best part was it was right on our way to the next campground.    We left a bit early the next morning so we wouldn’t get to the Costco fuel station right at the noon rush.   It is an easy in/out if you look at the Google Maps Satellite View before you get there so you know which entrance to use, and which lane to use for diesel, and how to get out of there easily into a big, mostly empty parking lot so the Costco food run can be completed!   We are 40′ long plus an 18′ car and 6′ towbar making us about 54′ bow to stern.  Easy in and out of fuel stations is a must unless I want to unhook the car. (which I prefer not to do unless we are very close to our destination.)

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Homer Spit

We got to Homer Spit on a glorious summer’s day!  Hasn’t been a whole lot of those on this trip, very different from our last trip to Alaska.  It was really windy when we arrived and got a bit more windy as the day went on, but the views were spectacular!!!  Later, after we set up the campsites, we headed down the spit and had a couple of beers over at the Salty Dawg, a true dive bar on the spit with extremely low clearances inside.   Then we walked over to Captain Paddies for Halibut.  It was one  of the best Halibut dinners I have experienced.  The place is nothing to look at really,  pretty much a tourist trap, almost a strip mall with a nicer facade.  Only “The Bus” had better Halibut in my opinion, and we will stop there on the way home; but Hyder, Alaska, is about 1,600 miles from here, so it will be a while.
It started to rain as we were leaving Captain Paddies and the wind made it a “driving rain”.  Lucky for us, it wasn’t actually raining hard yet, but the wind made it seem like it was raining pretty hard.

The next day was “shopping” day.  The merchants in town were very grateful for the money we left them.   Picked up some sweatshirts and tee shirts, and the much needed refrigerator magnet from the Salty Dawg!   Dusty even got a rain coat and a new jacket to help with the cold weather we have been experiencing.  (Now it will probably warm up, but I am sure he will get a lot of use on the way back home.)

 

We went out for Kathy’s Birthday celebration a couple nights after arriving. She chose Fat Olives up in Homer itself.  She couldn’t believe how good the Kachemak Bay Bowl was.   It was so good she had me take a picture of it so she could post it in the Tiffin Eats group online.  My pizza was over the top good too.   It probably was as good as the little pizza joint in Tribeca I would frequent when back East, but this pizza was a close second.

On Thursday morning we woke up to a ship at the Homer Spit dock, it was the Hanseatic Nature cruise ship.   A smaller, 500′ long cruise liner holding maybe 240 passengers on a 20-day trip from Sapporo, Japan, to Seward, Ak.

 

We drove back up the peninsula a bit to Anchor Bay to watch the crazy boat recoveries I had heard about.  That was so fascinating I had a hard time believing it when I was originally told how it worked.  But it was real, and I hadn’t seen anything like it before.  They made it look normal.  The video below shows how they do it.

When we got back to the coach, Kathy wanted me to get takeout from Fat Olives, pizza this time.   It was just as good as the first time.

 

TSUNAMI ALERT 11 pm Saturday night!!     We had seen articles and even a few pictures about Tsunami alerts for the Homer Spit, and still we were very unprepared when it happened.   When my phone went off just after falling asleep Saturday night, I was in shock.  I told Kathy what the alert and was we both jumped out of bed and started getting clothes on and quickly figuring out what we had to have in case a tsunami actually hit the motorhome.   We needed phones, charger(s), laptop & charger, dog food and medicines, a change of clothes would have been nice, but that was an afterthought.  And we had no information about the Tsunami,  how long before it might hit us, etc.  The only thing I knew was I didn’t feel an earthquake, so we might have a bit of time.

Larry came over to make sure we had heard it and within a few minutes of that they were gone.   Within 5 minutes of them, we were packed and in the car.   It was pouring rain and the road out (the only road) was full of cars moving very slowly.  That’s when I started hoping the Tsunami was coming from Japan or somewhere that could take a really long time to get here.  Within 5 to 6 more  minutes, the cars starting moving faster and we got off the spit and followed the Tsunami Evacuation signs I had seen when we were driving around the area.

We came to a T intersection and there the signs ended.   I sort of knew what was in each direction from the prior visit to Homer 4 years ago, so I turned to the right, drove past the airport and continued driving till we were at 300 feet of elevation.   I decided to stop when I could see a road sign indicating a significant downgrade.  We found a large driveway and pulled into that and turned the car around to face out to the road.  Cars and motorhomes streamed by for about a half hour.

We started looking at anything we could find on our phones.  Lucky for us there was a bit of cell service way out there and we could read what was going on.  We found a news site that said the alert on Homer Spit was a mistake.  I called the Homer PD and they acknowledged it was safe to go back.  The alert was really for the Cook Inlet on the other side of the peninsula.

I am going to make a go bag and figure out a place to keep it so if something happened we could get out faster.

 

 

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Soldatna & Kenai City

We got to our campground early in the afternoon and set up camp.  It wasn’t long before it started to rain and the camp roads became a muddy mess very quickly.   That evening we noticed the water in our Brita pitcher had a brown tint and the water in the toilet looked the same,  It was even more noticeable in the toilet since the porcelain is so bright white.   Turns out it’s a known thing and was “safe” to drink.  Hopefully…

I went out and bought 10 gallons of drinking water and made sure I didn’t fill the fresh tank with that stuff.   We noticed that a Fantasy Tour group that had pulled in one evening didn’t even connect to the water.  They were warned not to by the tour company.  It was a fairly expensive campground and they didn’t even tell us about the problem.  You can fill up for free at the Fred Meyers in Soldatna with clean City Water.  Next time I will know.

We were there the July 4th week, so we drove over to the 4th of July Parade in Kenai City with our chairs.   It was a pretty long parade that had lots of things not seen in other 4th parades in my past, specifically, tow trucks and race cars and even small children in go carts.   The one thing we missed was marching bands. There was not even one.  I guess that’s what happens when music class is cut from school curriculum’s.  At least the Shriner’s were there in their odd little cars.   Hard to imagine a 4th of July Parade without the Fez’s.

One afternoon we decided to take a drive to the beach, it was almost sunny and a bit cold but we braved it anyway.  Figured it might take an act of god to get us out of the car.   We headed south on Kalifornsky Beach road.  We went past Kalifornsky Beach and all the way down to Kasilof Beach Dipnetting fish camp.   It was a couple days before Dipnetting season but there were hundreds of cars, tents and trailers lining the road down to the beach.   We drove all the way down, to a spot that I figured was far enough as after that it looked like loose beach sand.  Got turned around and headed back toward Kenai City.   Along the route Kathy spotted 3 moose along the tree line near the road and I was able to slow down and she got a few pictures.  I was one cow moose and two baby moose.   Then about 10 minutes further up the road there was a very large bull moose just a foot off the road, by the time I saw him i was concerned he might jump in front of us.   He didn’t, but I looked back and he was meandering across the highway behind us.  Yikes.  He had to be 9-10 feet tall.  Having that coming thru your car windshield could ruin a lot more that just your day.

It’s been so cold and rainy, Kathy had to go to the sporting goods store and buy long underwear, socks, and a better jacket!  Now the sun should come out after spending the money!  We hope 🙂

The last evening in town we checked out St. Elias Brewery and had some wonderful pizzas!  And of course the beer was fantastic too.

Here are some of the 4th parade pics..

 

 

 

 

 

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Williwaw Campground in the Portage Valley

This campground is very nice, very secluded with no hookups and just a smidge of ATT cell service.  Our Starlink had no service at all due to the tall mountains ringing this campground.  It was pretty full every night we were there, if you go, make sure you get reservations for the bigger sites.

The drive to Williwaw was a bit White Knuckled.  The wind was howling and there were wind warnings.  We thought it was bad on the first leg from Palmer to Anchorage, but then we got on the section that runs along the northern Turnagain Arm.  That was worse than anything I had ever experienced.  Each time we came around a rock outcropping, the wind wanted to blow the bus off the road and into the water. After that first small “point”, I went a lot slower around all the rest.

The first mosquito I swatted with my new zapper, it sparked and lit on fire  for a second.  Wow!  Since then it’s been zapping them with its 2750 volts. Black Flag Zapper Racket

We drove over to Portage Lake on a blustery day, checked out the visitor center, and afterward we had to go check out the gift shop.  We checked out the glacier boat tour, but the boat was down for repairs, waiting for a part to come in from England.

After lunch we took a hike up the Trail of Blue Ice for a couple miles or so, swatting a zillion mosquitos while walking along.   About half way along the trail, a couple teenage girls came up to us and said they had stumbled upon a bear just ahead and wanted to know if they could walk with us. I noticed they didn’t have any bear spray with them.  Larry said sure, and proceeded to head toward the bear sighting.   And we kept going too.  I thought we should of course go the other way!   Luckily we didn’t see the bear and walked for another half hour, then turned around. The girls thanked us and kept going on toward the visitor center, which was probably another half mile away.  Then I noticed they were running up the trail.

We headed back and kept swatting the mosquitoes the whole way.  I wished I had brought the new zapper with me on that trek!

We hit a real rainy spell here in Williwaw, 3 straight days of rain without it ever stopping!  (Felt like 40 days and 40 nights).  I used the time to catch up on the blog and finishing the Perry Mason series.  We looked at driving over to Whittier for lunch but found out the only decent restaurant was closed.  We drove over anyway on one of the few sunny days.

While there we read a bit about that tunnel that was completed in 1943 as the main “highway” to move goods into Alaska for the war effort.   And a week later at the July 4th parade in Kenai, the woman sitting next to me told me when she was young, you could only get to Whittier via train or boat.  It opened to vehicle traffic on June 7, 2000 after a very extensive conversion from a World War II railroad tunnel.  It’s an odd experience as you straddle the rails when driving thru it as it’s only one car wide, meaning on the half hour you can go to Whittier from Portage and on the hour you can leave the city.   Good timing can save a lot of waiting!

With that in mind, we walked around a bit and then scrambled to get out of town on the hour;  and of coarse there was a train as we drove over,  and they were going to get thru the tunnel while it was outbound too.  We had to wait until after the train  cleared the other side of that very long tunnel.   It did and we proceeded to head back to Portage.

Once on that side of the mountain, we decided to drive over to Moose Flats to see if there were any moose to see.  There weren’t, so we headed back to Williwaw for the afternoon.

WhittierTrain

That evening we all drove over to the Double Musky for dinner.  It was a Cajun place out here in the middle of nowhere in Girdwood.   I tried the Gumbo and it wasn’t that good.  I think they burned the Roux.  I had the Jambalaya, which was good, probably a 6 of 10 on my Jambalaya scale.

Our Starlink did not work at all while at our site in the Williwaw campground.  I believe the problem was the tall mountains ringing that area only allowed us to connect when a satellite was directly overhead, and there aren’t many sats in the north latitudes yet.   We were able to extend our 4×4 MIMO Cellular antenna up off the roof on the batwing and get some AT&T signal.  It averaged -120dbm or worse.   I tried to use B14 but couldn’t get any signal with that, so I had to settle for B12 and a few other high-frequency bands aggregated together.   So surfing the web was not a fast thing, but we could check the weather and do emails and other internet things.

 

 

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Palmer Alaska

The Glenn Highway was a lot rougher than I remembered it being.  Along the way a guy in a pickup passed us like we where chained to a tree.   Later on, maybe 45 minutes, we came upon a big accident scene.  As we passed, we noticed it was that same pickup at the bottom of a ravine.  There were so many police cars I knew someone hadn’t survived.

We arrived at Mt. View RV after a few long hours on the road. It looked like a big grass field with a few dirt roads between the rows, and it was. They don’t even mow the weeds. They were about a foot tall. And the weeds were hiding very out-of-level sites to boot.  I started thinking about why we didn’t go the few extra miles to Big Bear RV Park.  It is a much nicer place than this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kathy took a trip to the Musk Ox farm and also a short excursion to the Reindeer farm.  I went over to Wasilla Home Depot and got a new bug killer racket from Black Flag,  and what a bug killer.   It turned out to be one of the most powerful devices I have ever used!!  Bug Zapper Racket  While I was looking for bug killers, an Alaska State Trooper walked up and apparently was looking for similar equipment.  I had to ask him about the accident the day before on the Glenn Highway.  He said it was a single-car fatality.  I mentioned I had that truck on my dashcam footage where he passed me going at least 80 mph on a bad section of road.  He asked for my cell number and said he would pass it on to the investigating officer, that they may want to add that to the file for some perspective on the case.   It’s been a couple weeks and no call, so I am guessing they didn’t need it to close the case.

 

We topped off our fuel again at Palmer,  because at that moment they had the cheapest fuel in Alaska.  Not sure why. But I even got to use my Chevron Rewards app to save an extra $25 off the price.  After we filled up, we headed for Williwaw Campground a couple hours away.

 

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Ranch House Lodge near Glenallen Alaska

The drive down the Tok Cutoff to Glenallen was pretty good. Beautiful scenery the whole way.  We did come upon an older trailer on its top and all smashed in on the side of the road.   May have happened the day before was my guess.  Slow down, people!

We arrived at the lodge early in the afternoon and Andy lead us out to a section of the park that wasn’t there the last time we stayed here.   It was right on the creek that was more like a fast moving river at the moment. Turns out this spring (2023) this place was flooded by an early thaw. We were only here for the night and we went to the lodge for pizza, which turned out to be very good, surprising us all.  We were noticing that a lot of Andy’s projects looked half finished, but he has made a lot of improvements to the park.   The next morning the mosquitoes were ravenous. Kind of glad we were heading out.

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Tok Alaska

We arrived late in the day after what was a grueling drive from Discovery Lodge, only about 150 miles away. We had thought the previous drive was bad, but today’s section was over the top Bad.  It was starting to seem like the Yukon and Alaska Road departments were having a competition for who could make the worst road conditions.   In my opinion Alaska was orders of magnitude better at making awful roads.

AlaskaRoadWork

We were here for 3 nights and that is definitely too long. There is not much to do in Tok. The RV wash is good and Fast Eddies was great. This was also a good spot to buy fuel as it was a buck more expensive in the western Yukon Canada. There is a grocery in town that  was way better than expected for such a podunk place, so we got to stock up a bit.

It had rained a bit on the road getting here, so the mud was pretty extreme and very difficult to get off even with the power washer they provide at the $25 RV wash.   I was working the brush pretty hard to clean what the power washer couldn’t get off.

We walked over to Fast Eddies the second night and the food was better than I remembered.   The next evening we were sitting outside for happy hour when the campground owner’s wife came by on what resembled an old style Good Humor Trike that used to come around our neighborhood when I was a kid.  But this one looked custom made and as most of us were drinking, beer we did not partake of the ice cream.

We were glad we paid a bit extra here to get the better sites. Last time we were here, they stuck us in the back and it was so tight we could barely get our slides deployed due to all the poorly placed trees.  Even getting into the site and out were difficult as you could easily hit the trees they planted right at the end of the sites on both sides.  What were they folks thinking?….

 

 

 

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Beaver Creek/Discovery Yukon

On the way up the ALCAN, we saw some wild horses on the side of the road.  We had not seen that up here last time.   That was usually a Wyoming and Montana thing.

The road was rough in the extreme, much worse than last time.   We eventually pulled into the campground and were led to our site.  It was right on the highway, and I went back into the office to ask for a spot facing the grass airstrip like we had last time.   They led me to a different site but not on the strip.  We stayed here for 3 nights,  which is WAY to long.  This is a one-night place.  Nothing to do here.

The first morning there was a lot of noise outside and what was happening was pretty odd.  They were using a helicopter as a crane to offload a semi-flatbed full of materials.  As I watched for a bit, that was really odd.  They could easily have gotten most of it off by hand.  Instead it took that thing hovering loudly for hours to do it.   Then after that’s done, it came back a lot to ferry those materials to somewhere else.   All day Sunday and now Monday morning starting at 7am they were doing it.   It would have made a lot more sense to just use the helicopter once to pick it up off the flatbed and ferry it to wherever it needed to be.  But instead they took double the time to unload it fully, then come back to ferry each box to the other place.

A single engine small plane that looked to have been a military spotter plane or similar landed Sunday afternoon.  Kathy went over there to get a picture of it and met with the pilot and his wife.

 

We played a game of Yahtzee inside our bus and it appeared to give me luck as I won the game with a very high score.  I had 5 Yahtzee’s in that game!!!

Fixed the front vent fan lid switch in the kitchen, but the back vent fan only works for inbound air.  Exhaust venting won’t work.  Possibly the rocker switch that controls that has a wire off on the out switch.  But that will require a lot of dismantling, so I am saving that for “some other day”

 

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Electrical Mod while traveling in the cold this summer.

[WARNING Technical  Info Below]   Read at your own risk!

The afternoon before heading out to St. Elias,  I had finally procured all the parts I needed for a modification we really wanted in the coach this cold summer here in Alaska.   When we have 50 amp shore power, I like to run the fireplace and also a second portable electric heater we procured while in Grand Prairie this trip up.   It helps us not to use propane we will need when dry camping, which we are doing quite a bit on this trip, 7 weeks this time up here.

Turns out all the 120v outlets inside our coach are on the inverter, which is great for us.  But there is one drawback.  The inverter is actually on a 30 amp breaker.  So running two 1500 watt heaters (25amps) doesn’t allow much head room, really any headroom, to run a toaster, coffee pot or microwave at the same time as the heaters are on high.   We had to turn one of them off to run any of them, especially the microwave as it draws about 14 amps.

I started thinking about a better way to do this so we didn’t need to remember to turn off one of the heaters first.    50 amp service consists of two 50 amp legs of power.  (L1 & L2) The inverter is on L1 in my bus, so my thought was to tap into L2 for a new outlet in the living room area.  Then I remembered there was a second outlet behind the fridge that wasn’t on the inverter, so I proceeded to make an extension cord to utilize it.

What I built is fairly overkill so as not to have an issue.  I used 10/3 SO cord.  I could have used 14/3, but I figured 12/3 would be better, and I ended up with 10/3 as that was all that was available in Kenai at the time.  First I tested the outlet to see what leg it was on, and of course it wasn’t on L2, but was on L1 also.   But when I thought about it, that was fine due to each leg being 50 amps.  The heater I would plug in would be ~13 amps, so that, plus a maxed-out inverter (in pass-thru mode)  would not be a problem at 43 amps max.  It still had some headroom available for something not considered.

I had purchased a second special outlet that fits into a round hole to use for the new heated toilet seat modification, a different project that was a nice to have; but this modification was needed as soon as possible, so I repurposed that Journeyman-Pro 5279 15 Amp 120-125 Volt, NEMA 5-15 Flanged Outlet   for this.   This is the angled plug I used to make it stay plugged in during all the shaking the motorhome goes thru.  Leviton 5266-CA 15 Amp, 125 Volt, Angle Plug

I pulled off the louvered cover that’s to the right of the fridge that gives you access to all the wires behind the circuit breaker panel.  I checked to make sure nothing was in the way of the new cords so I wouldn’t be drilling thru something critical.    I drilled the hole, made sure my outlet fit it, then went back outside and built the cord and put the male end on it.  I then fished it down and under the fridge close to the opening where I had taken the louvers off.  (Come to think of it, I should probably block off those louvers as they are not really needed now that I have a residential fridge instead of the old Propane/Electric Nevercold that was in there when I bought the bus.)   Then I went back inside and pushed the wire thru the newly drilled hole, and then striped the wires and installed it on the new outlet.

Once that was done, I put the outlet into the hole and screwed it in after a short test of the circuit first.

All done!   Now we can run the second portable heater while on 50 amp shore power and not have to play “checkers” with the on/off switches so we could run other things in the mornings.   And it will let us go longer before having to go thru the hassle of getting the propane refilled!