Friday, June 29, 2012

June 28 – To Homer Spit, Alaska


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We we have reached the end of the road, literally. We have travelled about 7400 kilometers and the road just does not go any farther. Today we went about 1.5 hours south to the end of the Homer Spit.

It was raining when we woke up but as we travelled it eventually let up to just low grey skies.

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Across the inlet it seemed sunny and we saw some of the volcanoes. One of them last erupted in 2009.

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As we drove down the hill into Homer you can see the spit off in the distance.

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It is very narrow and almost 4 miles long The first section is pretty empty.

Out towards the end there are a bunch of serviced campgrounds (that are really just parking lots) but they are very pricey at more than $40 a night according to my book. We selected the city owned campground for $15 a night with no services. It’s pretty basic but the view of the mountains in the background is not bad. We even got the TV dish working and there is city owned WIFI all along the spit for $24 a week. As long as it is sunny enough to keep the batteries charged we are set.

We saw this tour group’s bus last year in Washington. The back of the bus is a set of 24 tubes for sleeping. I think they setup a kitchen under the canopy.

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After getting settled in we walk up to the end. The last mile or so is tourist central.

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In order to find room a lot of the places are on pilings over the rocky beach.

Homer calls itself the halibut fishing capitol of the world. There are a lot of boats here and just about every third store is offering a fishing charter. It was about $100 for a half day trip but you also need a $100 fishing license.

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We saw this one place advertising all you can eat crab legs so we had to investigate.

With those prices we said maybe not today, or ever. We did stop for some halibut fish and chips.

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With people either fishing off the spit or coming back from a trip and cleaning their fish there are a lot of birds around. They just love these bins.

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They say there are a lot of eagles around but so far we have only seen three.

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My brother sent me an email saying that we seemed to be ahead of schedule. It is true we have been moving kind of fast in the last while. The problem is the July 4th holiday. It get really busy everywhere but I wanted to be as far away from Anchorage and all its people for that time. With the holiday being on a Wednesday I am not sure which will be the busy weekend. We will stay here at least a week and see how it goes. Since we have to go back the way we came, at least until Anchorage, we will go slower and stop at the places we skipped.

The weather forecast for the next week is not bad. Mostly sunny with some showers. There should be enough to do here. Some days off aren’t terrible either.

The weather off to the west looks nice tonight.

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