FRIDAY, AUGUST 16

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16:

     Got up early to leave Seward and head north.  Have really good memories of our time here.  Like Valdez, they were hit catastrophically by the 1964 earthquake & subsequent tsunamis.  Wiped out their port, which was their economic base, with its fishing, shipping, etc.  In fact, for years Seward was Alaska’s leading port city.  Took them a long time to recover, and it’s never regained its position as #1 port, but it is a thriving harbor town again.  And the creation of Kenai Fjords as a national park in 1980 helped with the tourist sector.

     Decided to not go over to the other side of the Kenai Peninsula.  Nothing that we especially wanted to see or do there that we either haven’t already seen & done, or that we can’t do elsewhere, and we’re beginning to feel that it’s time to start thinking about heading home.   The big thing on the western side of the Kenai is fishing.  And Bill doesn’t particularly care about going out on a charter boat to try to catch big halibut or similar.  If he has another chance to fish from shore for salmon, he’d be happy.  The weather is starting to be so iffy now . . . it could rain for days down there on the peninsula.

     So we decided to head north to the Anchorage area, and from there to Denali. Since there aren’t any decent RV parks in Anchorage proper, we debated about whether to stay south of the city, or north.  Either way is about 45 minutes from downtown.  We weren’t even sure if we cared about seeing anything in Anchorage itself.  We finally decided to go back to Palmer.  There seemed to be more things up that way that were of interest to us.  Plus, we knew that the RV park there was nice, and we’d be closer up the road to Denali when we head there.

     The day was cooler than yesterday, and overcast.  A nice day to be travelling.  We wanted to leave early because Bill had made arrangements when we were in Palmer a week ago to bring the RV in today to an RV service shop on the north end of Anchorage to fix the rear lights.  Weeks ago, something had damaged the connection between the truck’s electrical system and the RV’s.  And he was concerned now that we’ll be driving so much more.  We got there in late morning.  They found the problem, and fixed it.  Took a couple of hours.  I used the time to upload a couple of entries to the blog. 

     Then we drove clear to the other end of the city to a pet store to get Pappy some other dog food.  That was fun – driving the RV through late afternoon city traffic.  NOT. 

     Then up north again on the Glenn Hwy to Palmer.  We got the same site as we did before.  Got set up and had dinner.  We’ll play it by ear as to what we’ll do here, how long we’ll stay, etc.  Much depends on the weather and when we can get a place at the only decent RV park near Denali that I can find.