Ninilchik, Alaska

After spending a second night at Williwaw campground, we headed down the Sterling Highway toward Homer. This is a beautiful drive but it was raining hard enough that we were not able to see much. Along the way, my truck became the victim of an errant rock that resulted in a cracked windshield.

Cracked windshields are very common in Alaska. If you talk to someone who has driven here, there is a good chance you’ll hear a story that ends with a cracked windshield. Usually it takes place on a gravel road and involves a large truck heading in the opposite direction at high speed. In our case it was a little Nissan Sentra changing lanes in front of us on a relatively clean asphalt highway.

It was only as we approached Ninilchik that the skies began to clear. We decided to stop at this little Russian Orthodox church to look around.

Homer, Alaska

It was after 5:00 by the time we arrived at Homer. We drove down to its famous spit to find a camping spot before turning our attention to dinner. We decided it would be a good night to eat out.

The place we chose for dinner was Café Cups, an cute little restaurant with an eclectic menu.

Café Cups was crowded but the food was outstanding. This proved to be one of the best meals of our entire trip. If you’re ever in Homer, do yourself a favor and stop in.

After dropping Mimi and Papa T off at their 5th wheel for the night, I had Darla shuttle me back out to this row of decaying wooden posts. They hadn’t been visible earlier in the day but it was now approaching low tide and they were temporarily exposed.

Getting to them wasn’t particularly easy. It required either a long walk or a scramble down an embankment comprised of large boulders. As a result, Darla and Lewis opted to drop me off and explore the rest of the spit while I did my thing here. This was a good decision; I ended up running down a long stretch of beach just to get here before the sun dropped below the distant hills.

As I worked out our itinerary, one of the things that informed it was Homer’s tide table. Homer is supposed to have some decent tide pools that are accessible when the tide falls below -2. There were only two days when the tide would fall below -2 the entire time we were on the Kenai Peninsula so those were the two days I allotted to Homer.

We’d planned ahead and packed rubber boots especially for this activity – all of us except Darla. She didn’t find any in Bend. Since our guidebook said that they could be picked up anywhere in Alaska we weren’t too worried. We never did find any, which is not to say they weren’t around.

We’d seen better tide pools along the Oregon and Washington coasts but this may be because we were there at lower tides. The prediction for this morning’s low tide was -2.02, just .02 below the bare minimum.

We did find anemones. I’d had a chance to touch them before and knew that they felt pretty cool. Lewis had not, but he knew that Nemo lived in one so he was willing to give it a try.

After touching the anemone, Lewis decided to show Papa T how to do it. Papa T had never touched an anemone and did not find the fact that a cartoon character lived in one a convincing argument to do so.

The lesson ended when The Boy lost the feeling in his hands. The water was very cold.

The Mom’s leather hiking shoes turned out to be a poor substitute for rubber boots. As a result, The Dad and The Boy teased her by choosing routes that involved lots of splashing through water. She was good natured about it, although she expressed skepticism at The Dad’s claim that he would have been just as good natured were the situation reversed.

Mimi had decided to remain in bed this morning. Just as with The Dad, mornings are not always her friend. Since I talked about doing this twice, she’d planned on going out the second morning.

Darla commandeered my camera at this point to capture a shot of our shoes. I’m not sure what she was trying to do. She kept saying something about “wanting proof”…

After returning from our tide pooling adventure, we decided to spend some time exploring the Homer spit. The spit is just a small part of Homer but it is the hub of activity for fishing and other tourist attractions. Displays like this one can be seen up and down the spit near the boat harbor as fishing boats return from their runs.

As we stood on this walkway, we struck up a conversation with someone waiting for her mother to return from a cruise. We were surprised to learn that she lived less than an hour from us. She owned a business that supplied pastries to Central Oregon restaurants but was making plans to move to Homer.

The rugged mountains across Kachemak Bay are part of Kachemak State Park. Visitors can hire a water taxi to ferry them over and back here at the harbor. There are supposed to be some nice walking trails in the park although we didn’t make it over there. Next time…

The Salty Dawg may be Homer’s most famous establishment. This is where the singer Jewel used to perform when she lived in Homer.

After dinner we left the spit and headed to a viewpoint from which moose can often be spotted (or so we were told). There were no moose this evening but I discovered a mass bloom of lupine. Shortly thereafter I discovered a massive swarm of mosquitoes making their home among the lupine.

One hears any number of mosquito horror stories from folks who have spent time in Alaska. The mosquito is jokingly referred to as the Alaska state bird. A friend of mine who spent eight weeks in Alaska one summer corroborated the many tales of misery. The worst part, she explained, was not how big they were or how many there were but the fact that they seemed to be completely unaffected by DEET and other insect repellents.

To this point we hadn’t had many problems with mosquitoes. No doubt the torrential rains and unseasonably cold temperatures had something to do with this. But we also had a different strategy to deal with the little pests – one that didn’t involve DEET. I’ve written elsewhere on this site about my excellent experience with Ex Officio’s Buzz Off line of insect repelling clothing. This was our alternative to repellents and it worked with 100% effectiveness.

To elaborate on this a little, Buzz Off (now called Insect Guard) works by embedding permethrins, an organic compound toxic to insects, within fabric. Insects do occasionally dare to land on Buzz Off clothing but they don’t sit there for long. Permethrin treatments are also available at stores like REI or Cabelas, allowing one to give any article of clothing insect repelling properties. We treated everything from our socks to our gloves to our head nets to our coats and backpacks. Why treat coats and backpacks? Because insects often hitch a ride into your car or camper on your coat or pack.

I spent the last hour of daylight in the same spot as the day before. I arrived earlier this time, but there was more cloud cover than the previous day so the sun disappeared earlier too. The Boy considered coming along this time but ultimately decided to stay with The Mom. I was glad I decided to return; of my three shots of these posts, this one is my favorite.

We decided against another trip to the tide pools on this, our second morning in Homer. We opted instead to drive up to this viewpoint of Kachemak Bay and the Homer spit. The spit looks deceptively large because it is within half an hour of low tide. At high tide the spit becomes a skinny little finger of land jutting out into the bay.

After lunch Darla and Mom decided to get some laundry done. This freed me up to explore what looked to be a salvage yard not far from our campground on the spit. I’ve always been struck by how much junk there is sitting around in the average sea town. This junk looked particularly interesting. I ended up spending two hours wandering around with my tilt-shift lens and a tripod.

When I got to this old bus I was shocked to discover that people were living in it. No one was there at the time but there was a campfire surrounded by empty beer bottles, clothes on a clothes line, a tent, and several sleeping bags. I doubt that anyone was supposed to be living here but I couldn’t imagine that they were doing so undetected either. I speculated that maybe some college-aged kids with summer jobs had decided to save money by “camping”.

The City of Homer operates a number of different campgrounds on the spit. We stayed at the one next to the fishing pond, a small area reserved for tourists who want to spend some time fishing without chartering a boat to take them out into the bay. This sounded like a nice idea although someone who had been fishing at the pond described it to us as a rather pointless endeavor. According to him, there was a seal who had taken up residence in the pond and ate the fish as they were reeled in.

The fishing pond had a station where folks could bring fish that had been caught at the pond or elsewhere for cleaning. This made the area popular with sea gulls, who hung around waiting for the next batch of carcasses to be tossed into this trailer.

Seven hours after our initial visit we headed back up to the viewpoint where Mom took this shot of the spit at high tide.

We had our final meal in Homer at another favorite, Boardwalk Fish & Chips, “where the fish comes on a stick.” While we were sitting there, either Mom or Darla spotted a seal bobbing around in the water.

Our last stop in Homer was at the very end of the spit. This was some kind of storage yard (to state the obvious). I was attracted to it because everything seemed larger than life.

The Boy liked it because he could climb the giant piles of giant chains.

The Mom didn’t like it because The Boy was climbing the giant piles of giant chains in his freshly laundered clothes.

The Boy decided to practice his driving skills while The Dad fueled up the truck.

Soldotna, Alaska

Our itinerary had us spending one more night in Homer but we elected to head down the road to shorten the next day’s drive. We spent the night in the parking lot of the Soldotna Fred Meyer. It was dry when we went to bed but by morning our run of good weather had come to an end.

The Russian River

This is the famous Russian River. In most years, this would be the scene of combat fishing – an unending line of fisherman jammed shoulder to shoulder as they competed for salmon while trying not to tangle their line with those of their twenty closest neighbors. This year there were hardly any salmon at all and, consequently, very few fishermen.

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