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Moseying on down to Homer for a few days.

We drove out of Williwaw during a pretty good rain and the first thing we came upon once we turned onto the Seward Highway was road construction and lots of dirt and gravel.   The coach is back to incredibly dirty again.

Something I have noticed in Alaska is the highway names will usually change numbers along the way.   From Anchorage down to the turnoff for Seward Highway 1 is the Seward Highway, but at that turnoff, Seward Highway 1’s name changes to the Sterling Highway and the Seward Highway continues on down to Seward on Highway No. 9.   If you go north from Anchorage on Highway 1, it’s called the Glenn Highway.   After talking to some locals about the highways here, it seems they only know the names of the highways and don’t pay attention to the numbers much.

After the Seward Highway turned off and we were on the Sterling Highway, the next town we came to was Cooper Landing.   It was a pretty little town with the Kenai River running along the road.  The water was that pretty color we had been seeing in a lot of Alaska where the glaciers feeding the river was fairly close.  It is the glacier flour that makes it the beautiful turquoise color.

As we passed the town, the road started getting a lot narrower and much more windy.   And something that gave me pause was the Armco (metal guard rail)  moved in right up to the white lines on the roadway.  Even more disturbing was that the Armco had been flattened by many, many vehicles rubbing along it for incredibly long stretches in the tighter curves.   Driving an 8′ 6″ bus thru there was a bit of a white knuckle experience as there were lots of RV’s, cars and trucks coming in the other direction.

The rest of the drive was uneventful all the way down to the Homer Elks Club.  When we got there, the rain was still coming down, so we thought it lucky to be in a motorhome instead of a trailer.  If you are pulling a trailer, you have to go out in the rain to get to your house.   Not so with the motorhome as you are already in there!

Later on we headed into the lodge to pay for the night and have a cocktail and maybe some dinner.   Unfortunately, they only serve dinner on Fridays and we arrived on Saturday ,so we asked for recommendations.  The Homer Elks Club is in the Old Town section of Homer, so there was a lot of places within waking distance.   The barkeep told us about three places close by that he said were really good:   AJ’s, Fat Olives, and Two Sisters Bakery.   We opted for Fat Olives, but ended up driving there as it was raining pretty good when we got back outside.

We would recommend it!    I had a small pizza and Kathy had a seafood plate on a bed of forbidden rice.   I had never seen black rice before.   My pizza was excellent and she raved about her dinner.

The next morning we packed up and headed down to the spit to camp for a couple of nights.

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Whittier Ak

We headed out to get in line for the Whittier Tunnel to make it thru on the half hour when it’s open for the eastbound ride into Whittier.

The lines to go thru are in parallel numbered rows.  Trucks are all the way to the right and they get to go thru first.  Then it’s back to Row 1 and they count up.

The tunnel is a one-lane affair that has you straddling the railroad track that it was built for and it seems a lot longer than its 2.5 miles length.  It is the longest tunnel in North America!

Kathy took a few short videos while I was driving thru.

Whittier is a very secluded town with mountains surrounding it and a large water port for large ships.   It was drizzly and fairly windy the day we were there.  We stopped for lunch at Swiftwater Cafe at the end of the main road near the ferry building.

 

While walking around that little spit of land with shops on it, I noticed a patio on a restaurant that looked a bit precarious to me.   Stacked 2x scrap holding the deck up.

We then drove out a gravel road that went a few miles and ended at a large viewpoint.

On the way back, we stopped at a small park where I saw a bunch of seagulls milling about near a creek.   I went over to see what was going on and I was shocked to see the small creek was chock full of salmon.  So many it was like they were packed in nose to tail!  The creek was almost too shallow for them to move, but it didn’t stop them from trying to get upstream.

I was tempted to just walk over and grab a few for dinner, but decided that was a bad plan.  I later heard it would have been illegal to do it without a rod and lures specifically for that water.  I also don’t have a fishing license.

We snapped a few pics and even a short video and headed back toward the tunnel that goes west on the hour.   We had to cross the railroad tracks at the end of the rail yard, and of course there was a long freight train blocking the only way out.   It was going forward and backing up to add more and more cars; and as it turned out, when we finally got to cross the track, the train was given the right-of-way to enter the tunnel while we waited in line.

I took a video of it, but its probably 5 minutes long, so I will post it on YouTube so it can be watched.

There is a decrepit building at the extreme west end of town that looks like a Soviet era barracks, and it turned out to be an old army building.  Very creepy looking with all the windows missing.   Hopefully it’s not considered an historical landmark so they can tear it down someday.

Here is the link to the video:  Whittier Train heading into the Tunnel.

 

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2006 Allegro Bus Brochure

 

Allegro-Bus-Brochure-2006

 

Here is the brochure to our Bus.   Ours is the exact model shown with the exceptions that we removed the front TV and modified that cabinet to make the bottom of it go straight across and we replaced the couch on the right with a couple of euro recliners.   They will soon be replaced with flexsteels theater seating as the current recliners look good but are extremely uncomfortable.  And something very funny that I just noticed, we even have the dog bed where they show one.   I never noticed that till this morning.

 

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Portage Glacier trip.

We drove over to check out the tour boat that takes you to the portage glacier.   Turns out there were tix available for the 3pm tour and we purchased them.   We headed back to Williwaw to leave Dusty in the RV while we went out on  it.

We got there and waited a bit till they allowed us on. It was a really beautiful day, so we took seats on the top deck.   So far the Kenai has been all sun for us!

They get to within a couple hundred feet of the glacier wall and unfortunately we didn’t get to see it calve off.   We did hear what sounded like a gunshot, which we were told was the ice moving, but never saw any movement.

The tour was a little over an hour and we were sure glad we had gone right away as that evening it started raining and it continued to rain the next two days we were there.

 

 

 

Off to Whittier in the morning.

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Heading to Williwaw

We had stayed in Anchorage for a couple nights to empty the tanks from the convergence and fill the fresh water as we were going to drycamp at Williwaw Campground at the Portage Glacier.   We left early as we didn’t have reservations there and we knew it had a lot of first-come first-served sites.

The drive down was spectacular.  Kind of what I thought Alaska would look like prior to getting to the great white north.  The mountains with tops covered in clouds, the road carved between the mountain slope and the water of the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet.    We were told it was called the Turnagain because Capt. Cook was looking for a shortcut from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean and the waterway was another bust and he had to turn again…

It was low tide as we drove and some of the areas have a long muck beach to the edge of the water.  Kathy heard that if you walked out in it, you would likely get yourself stuck and it was deep and difficult to pull yourself out of.

We arrived at Williwaw before noon and there were a lot of open sites, many of which could fit the largest vehicles.  We chose a double spot that was probably 60′ deep and 25′ wide.  It cost us $28 for two nights!  50% off due to the National Park Senior Pass.  I think that thing has saved us about $500 dollars since we paid the $10 for it at Montezuma’s Castle National Monument back in May 2017.   I just calculated that was a 4,900% return on that $10 investment.  Wow… I wish the stock market would give me a return like that.   I could retire!   LOL.

The campground was beautiful.  There was a waterfall coming down from what looked like a glacier right above us.  The sound from the falling water could be heard inside our coach.  It was a terrific background sound.   And the campground wasn’t full on Thursday or Friday night.   Kind of amazing for the end of July.  There are no hookups here, just a hand water pump and large dumpsters.   There were also pit toilets.  I didn’t bother to look in them.

This is an awesome campground to see the local area and I bet to fish as there is a lot of water all around.

 

 

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Xscapers Convergence on Isabel Pass in the Alaska Range.

We left early and drove up the Stewart Highway from Glennallen so we would get to the mountain pass around noon.   It was a beautiful sunny day and probably a cool 72 degrees as we very slowly dodged the many and large potholes on the gravel road we had to take to the campsite below the Gulkana Glacier.   For the whole drive up to the site, the glacier was just gleaming in the sunlight.

There were already about 8-10 rigs lined up pointing various ways when we got there.  We looked around and found a good spot, mostly east facing so our solar panels could get the most sun while parked.    We met the hosts, Stacy and Gary and their two dogs, Spirit and Sofie .

I was amazed when I saw all the panels mounted on their RV roof.   Turns out it was 2,400 watts for the house and 100 watts for the chassis batteries.   And the icing on the cake was their 500 amps of lithium batteries (@24v)  That’s 1,000 amps to us mere mortals using 12v systems, or 800 amp-hours usable.

That evening we got to meet about 50 or so other Xscapers.   There were more than 20 RV’s by then and a few more came in the next day or so.  To everyone’s surprise, at least 75% of them were first-timers.. as were we.   It seems everyone also had the fake fire rings to bring to the social hour, and blueberry margaritas!  Sweet,  literally and figuratively.

In the morning I took the car out to the highway so we could download a few TV shows as we didn’t have any signal at the airstrip we were camping on, 1.8 miles east of the highway.   While I was there in the Monument parking lot, I snapped a few pics showing where we were and the view of the glacier and of course the Stewart monument with the bullet hole in his head.

On Saturday morning most of the attendees left for a jet boat tour from the MacLaren River Lodge.   It was about 40 miles down the Denali Highway.   The first 24 miles were paved, and then it turned into “Alaska Gravel,” a rough, washboard and potholed mess.   It was a beautiful drive according to Kathy.   I was too busy to see that as I was scanning as far down the road as I could in an attempt to miss the holes.

 

 

 

We didn’t get on the list for the boat tour as I wasn’t going into Facebook enough to get onto the list prior to it filling up, so we went anyway to have a lunch with everybody at the lodge.

The river was very nice and appeared to be melt water from a glacier a few miles up river.  The jet boats took you close to the glacier.

 

 

 

After lunch we were on the patio talking to a helicopter pilot who had a crew of geologists up on the side of the mountains using electronic equipment to find minerals.  They weren’t saying what minerals were being looked for though.

Sunday morning started out with a potluck breakfast.  There was all sorts of food, even a couple of griddles cooking blueberry pancakes using the same blueberries picked on the sides of the roadways that were also used in the margaritas.   Later on some groups of folks hiked up to the glacier.   Most of them seemed to come back walking gingerly.   It was a rough hike out there.  Not much of a trail thru the moraine.

We headed up the road to do it, but about three quarters of a mile up the road the gravel became large river rock and I wasn’t sure Kathy’s car could make it thru that; so we turned around probably 1,000 feet from the small parking area near the small suspension bridge:   lots of broken boards with large gaps in between suspended over a swift river by steel cables.

Monday evening there was a potluck dinner, and many hours later we all said farewell as this was a late-waking crowd and we were leaving early (9am).

Tuesday morning we got going at 9am.  Don came by to say goodbye and Kathy went down and said goodbye to Joann and Mike.  (she had met them as they were leaving the campground we were staying at in Fairbanks a couple weeks before)

As we headed down the potholed gravel road (very slowly) I could see Mike and Joann driving out of there detached, presumably to attach their Mini Cooper at the monument a few yards from the entrance to the highway.

We headed south on the Stewart Highway to get to Anchorage and they turned to the North to start heading home so they could get to their daughter’s wedding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Driving over to Tolsona

 

 

 

We left Wasilla and headed out the Glenn Highway toward Glennallen, AK.   Along the way we encountered the Matanuska Glacier just south of the highway.  The pictures don’t really do it justice, it was huge and right next to  the highway, curving its way back up the mountains.  The town, if you could call it that, was aptly named Glacier View.   Apparently it’s the largest glacier in the US that is accessible by car.

In a little while we were at our spot for the night, the Roadhouse Lodge & RV.   Upon first sight it was a bit sparse, but the owner greeted me in the parking lot and took me to our campsite.   That was service I hadn’t experienced before.

After we set up, I went in to pay for the night.   We had 50 amp service, water and sewer.   That was what I wanted so we could be fully ready for a week of drycamping on Isabel Pass.

The owner, Karen, said she would be telling the history of the place around 6pm tonight, so we went back for a bowl of chili and the story that evening.

We met her husband, Andy, that evening, and talk about a workaholic, he never really stopped working the whole time we were there.   I saw him dig a long trench and lay electrical cabling for 5 new sites he was creating over by the creek.    In the morning he was putting siding up on a new addition to the back of the roadhouse for a large kitchen and liquor store.   We heard he had moved the existing building over to the other side of the grounds and would use that for something later.  It sounded like it needed a lot of work so he found it would be quicker to move it and build a new structure.

He mentioned that the kitchen should be open when we come back here on our way to Valdez in a couple of weeks.   That was hard to imagine, but we will know soon enough.

I asked what Andy had done prior to retiring to this full-time job.  He said he was a demolitions contractor and he always worked alone, preferring to buy bigger equipment than hiring and managing workers.   He mentioned he worked on the World Trade Center demo but was fired as the unions said he had to hire workers and he wouldn’t.   Interesting.

There was some new looking 9′ diameter galvanized pipe sections over on the other side of the campground and I asked him what they could be for.  He said he is building an underground walkway inside them from his cabin to the Roadhouse so he doesn’t need to go outside in the negative 70 degree winter weather.   I guess there isn’t permafrost on the site.

We left in the morning to drive the 100 miles to Isabel Pass on the Stewart Highway.  Here is a picture of what trees grow on top of the permafrost.  Black Spruce is the type and they look very stunted.  When you see them you know to look out for the frost heaves on the road!

 

 

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Last days in Wasilla

I was really surprised how much there was to see around Wasilla, a place I wasn’t going to stay more than a day or two.  We spent 7 days and checked out lots of places in and surrounding it.   We also had some pretty good tacos at Taco Cancun.   So good in fact, we went back last night for a takeout dinner.

We hiked out to Thunder Falls on a beautiful afternoon the day before we were to head east to Isabella Pass for a long weekend of boondocking with the Escapers.   It’s their Alaska Convergence and we are going to check it out.

The hike out to the falls was a little over a mile and mostly uphill on the way out.  We remembered our bear spray as this is truly out in the woods.   The hike was worth it as the falls were really nice.  There was a platform with benches to just relax on and take it all in.   We snapped a few pix and started to head back after about a half an hour.

 

We drove over to mirror lake, but by then it was a bit cloudy, so we never saw what it was supposed to mirror.  There were mountains right there, so I suppose they were it.   There were a lot of BBQ grills and picnic tables surrounding the lake.

 

 

 

We then drove up to Eklutna Lake,  a very long narrow windy paved road.  When we got out to the park on the lake, we couldn’t see it at all.  Neither of us felt like hiking around to find it, so we drove that windy road back to civilization then on toward the RV.

The next morning I had a mission to find a bakery, maybe pick up a Harley Denali Tee shirt, get the car washed and vacuumed, and last but not least, pick up groceries for the long weekend in the mountains.   I was disheartened as all the Harley shirts had pictures on the back.  I just wanted a plain HD shirt with the Denali location on it as I was at Denali Harley Davidson.   I asked the counter person, but she said they all had pictures on the backs’ so I headed off to find the bakery and then the car wash.

Since we were going to be dry camping for a really long weekend, we stocked up at the Carr’s grocery store in Wasilla that afternoon.  Then in the morning we would head out early to fill the tank at a Tesoro gas station that was the cheapest in the area, and happened to be on the way we were heading!

 

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Day trip to Anchorage

We headed out early for Anchorage on Saturday morning.  I programmed the Nav to find downtown.    We ended up going down a steep hill and found a park right on the inlet.   It was low tide so there was a lot of seabed showing, quite a bit of muck that looked like it might swallow you.   We couldn’t find a way to get over the railroad tracks that kept us from the shore, so we drove off to find what looked like a way I found on Google Satellite.   It ended up being a locked gate, so that was a bust.

We headed further south and found another much larger park with a big lake housing the loudest birds I can remember ever hearing.  We went for a walk to see where the path went.

It was pretty cool.   We saw this station for life jackets you can borrow.  It said, “Kids don’t float” on it.  What a great program!!

Along the path was some sort of bike counting contraption that told you how many bikes went by each month, and then a tunnel under the rail road tracks.  Hey, we finally found a way past the tracks!

Out there was a great viewpoint and something unexpected:  a sewer pumping plant.  Outside the pump-house was a cool sign depicting how it worked, including a drawing.  Kind of fascinating as nowhere else had I ever seen a diagram of a municipal infrastructure building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prior to going thru the tunnel, there was a bridge over a creek and probably due to the low tide a mud flat.   Kathy noticed very large bear footprints in the  mud.  Yikes!   As we were heading into the “city,” we left our bear spray in the RV.   It’s not to be left in a hot car and we figured it wouldn’t be required in town…  Live and learn, folks!

After walking around there for quite a while, we were hungry and I brought out my BringFido app to look for a place to eat.   Tommy’s Burgers was listed without any reviews on that app, so I opened Yelp, checked it out there.  It had good ratings so we drove there.  Not an easy place to get to; but after driving around the block once more, I saw where it was and then tried to figure out how the heck to get there.

It was about 12:15 when we parked and there wasn’t a soul there.  We grabbed a table on the patio and went thru the menu.  I ended up with a Po Boy cheese burger that was really good.  I guess the lunch crowd in Anchorage starts around 12:30 on Saturdays.   It was pretty full when we left.

After finishing lunch, I called the Anchorage Trolley Tour number to see if we could bring Dusty with us.  The guy on the phone said only if he is better behaved than me.  We headed off to find the corner they leave from and look for somewhere to park.   We found the corner then started looking for a place to park.  Within a few minutes, I spotted someone pulling away from the curb and we pulled into that spot.  To our surprise, Saturdays the meters are not in use.  Scored a free parking spot a block away and walked over to the visitor center to find the ticket guy.

It was a one-hour tour of the city on one of those buses made up to look like a trolley.  They seem to have one of them in every large town we have visited the last three years of RV’ing.  There are lots of those trolley vehicles in San Diego, but I had never been on one of them.

The driver/tour guide was a funny young fellow who grew up in Alaska and lives in Anchorage, and he made the ride much more enjoyable than any other guided tour I have been on before.  (I haven’t been on a lot of tours though)  It’s an interesting city.   Some really nice housing areas and some really cruddy ones too.  The 9.0+ earthquake in ’64 really changed the landscape too.

They also have a lot of moose to deal with in town.  Next to some of the larger streets that have the special stunted trees growing, they put up moose fence with moose gates that help keep the moose away from the highways.  Lots of moose get killed by cars and trucks in the city.   The big moose get to be 8′ tall at the shoulder and up to 1,800 lbs.   Can’t imagine one of those coming in thru the windshield!!

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Reindeer Farm and Strawberry festival.

Searching Google I found an event happening on Friday called the Strawberry Festival outside of Palmer just a few short miles southeast of us.    We drove south on Highway 3 to Old  Glenn Highway.   What a gorgeous road thru the woods along a wide river.

We came upon a power station in the middle of nowhere out there, but for the life of me I could not figure out how they make power.  There weren’t any smoke stacks or dams to be seen or big tanks of natural gas or oil, so that was a mystery to me.   Later when we got back home, I looked it up.  There was a dam, but it was almost 5 miles away up in the mountains.   They pipe the water all the way to that plant near the water making about 50 megawatts.   Every other hydroelectric power plant I had seen prior was built as part of the dam itself.  Apparently they are not all built that way.

We went a bit further and saw a large truss bridge going across the big river and assumed we would be driving over that.  But we actually drove over what looked like a normal steel under-structure bridge and the trestle was to our right.  But it was very narrow and appeared to be used as a pedestrian crossing now.    We have seen that quite a few times here in Alaska.  They don’t tear out the old narrow one-lane bridges, but make them into bike and pedestrian bridges.

I had programmed in the Strawberry Festival as our first stop but somehow Google decided to take us to the reindeer farm first.  I didn’t know Kathy liked reindeer so much prior to our arrival.

Dusty went outside and saw the horses and started to bark a lot.  I walked him over to a big tree and out from behind a building came two very large white fluffy dogs barking away with their long tails wagging.  Dusty was not sure they were friendly so he walked the other way.  He went back in the car and we proceeded to join an in-progress reindeer tour.

Kathy got some food for the reindeer and then we went into the pen.  Talk about getting crowded by a bunch of deer!   And their antlers were covered in fur or hair.  It was really odd looking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we went over to the bison for a quick pet on the nose.  If you touched his fro, you would regret it.  His head butts were fast and furious.

 

We then headed over to Rocky’s pen.  He was found in a quarry, so that’s why he is not named Bullwinkle.   There was a big steel fence between us and him, but he seemed very gentle, at least way more than I expected a moose to be.  He let anyone pet him for a Willow leaf.   But he was very big.  Way taller than me and they said he had a lot more time to grow as he was only two years old.

 

 

 

 

We headed on down the road to find the Strawberry Festival, found it on a farm not far down the road.   We walked up to the booth and asked about picking strawberries.   The reply from the young girl was, “Oh,  it’s too early for strawberries.”    So I am not sure why this was the Strawberry Festival.

They were allowing you to walk into the field to pick zucchini and radishes, rhubarb and kale, none of which we needed at the moment.  But thankfully, there was a stand in there selling pints of strawberries…

One of the buildings on the farm had a big Latter Day Saints sign on it.   I didn’t see anything that looked anything like a church near there, so it seemed a bit out of place there.

We headed back toward Wasilla and came across another river with the old bridge being for pedestrians.  The river was very wide but was moving extremely quickly.    We drove a bit further and found a farmers market in Palmer just about to end for the day.   As usual, hardly any produce, but lots of food vendors and crafts for sale.