Alaska 2 of 4: The Homer Spit

As promised (3 months later), here is the second installment of my four-part post on my trip to Alaska.

I know it's taken me a long, long time to get to this post, but I think part of the problem was that I didn't have a whole lot to say about Homer. We made a quick trip down for the afternoon without really planning out what we wanted to do, so we were just winging it.

That doesn't mean that there isn't anything to do or see there.  I thought the Homer Spit was a lot of fun, especially if you're in the market for local handmade goods.  So I'll just share how we spent our afternoon.

Since we were coming from Kenai, it was only about a 2 hour drive.  So we all hopped in the car, excited to go do some exploring.

Of course we couldn't go exploring without Diego...oh wait, Dora goes exploring...so scratch that.  We couldn't go take pictures without Diego and his trusty friend Click, the camera.  

One of the first things I noticed driving into Homer was that it was surrounded by a chain of mountains.  

What makes it even more breath taking is that the mountains are snow capped year round.  

Homer is known as the Halibut fishing capital of the world, but we weren't there to fish.  

Signs show up as soon as you drive into town, so we pulled over to take pictures.  The views were beautiful!  

While we did drive around Homer for a little while, we really didn't do much there.  Our objective was to figure out where to catch a ferry that would take us to some remote island/village.  I don't really remember anymore.  It may have been Seldovia. 

So we drove straight down the Homer Spit in search of lunch and ferry info.  

Driving down the spit, you will see adorable little shops lined up along both sides of the street.  

We drove all the way to the end of the spit and wound up having lunch at the very aptly named, "Lands End Restaurant."  The food was good and the restaurant had great views of the water and mountains. 

 We ventured outside to walk to the water's edge.  It was SOOOOO cold out there!

Here's a random little video I took, showing the chain of mountains:

As with all the other beaches I saw in AK, the shore is covered in stones, not sand.

And here's my rather pathetic attempt at taking a panoramic picture:

At the end of the spit you can see the Seafarer's Memorial:

After lunch we found a parking spot and set off walking to explore the shops and get times for the ferry.

We found out that it was too late to catch a ferry so we shopped instead.  I found souvenirs for different family members, a handmade bear sweater for Eva (which you will see her wearing in my other Alaska posts), knit hats, multi-tools, etc...  

I saw this on the window in one of the shops and thought it was cute:

We also went and checked out the harbor, took more pictures, etc...

Since we couldn't go to Seldovia after all, we kinda cut our trip short, but it was nice to go explore Homer, which was a very unique little fishing town.

The most memorable stop we made there was to a place called the Salty Dawg Saloon, which is a hot spot for local fishermen while also being popular with tourists. 

I know what you're thinking.  You took a child to a saloon?!!!  The horror!  Well, this wasn't a regular saloon. It was a popular stop in Homer, filled with families checking out the interesting interior. 

It's interesting because it's a teeny tiny place with really low ceilings and it's completely covered in dollar bills.  

We walked around and read what had been written on some of them.  It was mainly names and dates, but it was fun to read all the countries the tourists were from. 

Of course we couldn't go without adding our own:

Like I said, we didn't do a whole lot in Homer since our plans didn't work out, but we still had a good time.  Eva had a big smile on the way back to the car so it was a nice little day trip.

Next up in my 4 part series is Seward...hands down my favorite part of our vacation since we did a whale watching/iceberg boat excursion so be sure to check back in oh...say another 3 months?  I kid, I kid! (I hope :))

Alaska 1 of 4: Kenai & Soldotna

As many of you know, Eva and I spent a month in Alaska this past summer, visiting my sister.  My sister and her husband moved to the Kenai peninsula in 2010 and since Alaska is one of the many places on my "Bucket List," I took advantage that I finally knew someone who lives there and invited myself up :) Flights to Alaska aren't cheap so I knew I wanted to spend a good amount of time there to get my money's worth. I'm not going to go into full detail about every thing in AK because that would take forever, as it is, I am breaking up my trip into four posts because there's so much to do in Alaska and I can't fit it all in one.

For those of you who are curious about flights, you can get tickets from TX to AK for anywhere from $550-$1400+ depending on when you buy your ticket, how far in advance, how many stops you make, whether you fly economy or first class, and what airline you choose.  I bought mine a few months in advance and got a great deal considering summer is the busiest time to fly there. We flew Delta and only had one stop in Salt Lake City on the way there and one stop in Minneapolis on the way back...not too shabby.

We flew into Anchorage, which is a decently sized city with all the modern amenities you would find anywhere in the lower 48. One thing about visiting Alaska in the summer: they have daylight for like 18 hours each day.  When we flew in, it was light at 1am. As summer time wound down and the solstice approached, they started losing daylight.  In winter it's the opposite.  I won't go into detail about Anchorage until my very last post so that's all I'm going to say for now. I wasn't staying in Anchorage since my sister doesn't live there, so I had to decide if I wanted to take a $100 connecting flight from Anchorage to Kenai or have my sister drive the 3 hours there.  Now I'm normally one to choose flying over driving any day, but Alaska is so beautiful, that I really would recommend driving wherever you go in the state.  I promise, you will not regret it, especially if you're driving to the Kenai Peninsula.  You'll see snow-capped mountains, the ocean, waterfalls galore, rivers, etc...  

Told ya it was beautiful, and you haven't seen anything yet.  

We stayed with my sister the entire month we were there.  She lives in this charming cabin in the woods:

Kenai is a small town, but Soldotna (a slightly larger town) is only 15 minutes away.  Most people go to Kenai to fish but I was going to relax, and relax I did.  On days we didn't go out for activities, I mainly took time to read and read and read some more. It was marvelous.  Kenai has a nice public library that was surprisingly well stocked.

Eva reading in the library's children section:

We also spent a lot of time outside because my sister lives right on the Kenai River and it is beautiful out there.  Even though it was July, we kept bon fires going every night.

Eva's favorite thing about bonfires?  Why making s'mores of course!

Actually, eating the s'mores was her favorite part :)

I mentioned that people went to Kenai to fish. That's sort of an understatement. It's considered the fishing capital of Alaska.  Summer time tourists come out in droves to catch salmon.  

You can see a few of them dip net fishing on the beach, behind Eva.  

People wait and wait for the salmon to come in, then they go nuts.

Here's a picture of some of the ones my brother in law and his father caught in the river.  I think they had 40+ within 2 or 3 hours. 

Another thing you're likely to see a lot of in AK....moose.  They are everywhere and all along the road there are signs asking motorists to "Give moose a brake."

What I wasn't expecting to see in AK were grizzlies out in the wild, but yes, they are there (I mean, I knew they were there, but I didn't think we'd actually see them).One night we were outside the cabin talking and guess who showed up across the river from us?  A momma grizzly and her two cubs.  I'm not gonna lie, I was in awe but also terrified because grizzlies run and swim fast and they could have crossed over to where we were faster than we could probably run inside.  

I don't think visitors to Alaska really understand how dangerous it can be to run into one of these creatures.  A few weeks after we left someone was mauled and killed by a grizzly in Denali.  Most of the locals carry guns when they're out fishing; they know better. If you're going to AK to walk the trails and fish, I recommend doing some research on safety precautions before you go.  You should know about how to store your food and snacks, trash, etc... and what to do in case you do run into a brown or black bear.  Enough about that.

The majority of the activities we did were on trips to Homer, Seward, and Anchorage, but Soldotna was a really cute town.  Two of the restaurants there (Buckets and St Elias Brewing Co) had great food.  There's also a cute park in Soldotna that Eva just loved.  It's probably one of the nicest parks we've ever been to.  

The park is next to the river and has a nice little trail next to it that people like to walk and fish off of.  Here's Eva being a little terror on our walk:

You've probably noticed that we're wearing coats and sweaters in most of the pictures, that's because it was 50 degrees most of the time we were there (yes, 50 degrees in July)...and raining...more of a constant drizzle actually.  It was a welcome break for us Texas girls from the 100+ degrees back home. Eva loved all the rain.  Here is an action shot of her jumping in puddles outside the cabin.  She doesn't have a twin, the action shot just produced two of her :)

We didn't fret over the weather because there were also several sunny days in the 60s.  We REALLY enjoyed those days.

There's so much to do in AK that it can be overwhelming to do it all in one trip.  Just remember to enjoy the beautiful scenery and take time to smell the flowers....

Just don't stick them up your nose!

:)  

Hope you enjoyed reading part one of our AK trip, sorry it's like 7 months late.  I tried to cut down on the number of photos because I took hundreds of pictures and it was hard to choose just a few.  Hope you'll stay tuned for part 2:  the Homer Spit.  "See" ya soon!