Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Portage Lake, Drive, Homer

This morning we drove 1 mile up the road to Portage Lake which has a very nice visitor center with a great movie about the glaciers and the ice – very well done! After the visitor center we hiked up to Byron Glacier. It was a ¾ mile hike – however we started a the visitor center parking area so it was ¾ mile road walk added in. I didn’t care, the scenery was great and the traffic wasn’t so bad. Mom and Dad weren’t as thrilled. The glacier was really neat. You could see the deep blue color changing as the light changed. It was also quite chilly – the wind coming off the glacier was freezing! Nature’s AC!

After the walk we had lunch in the visitor center parking area, then started the drive to Homer. Homer, AK is on the Kenai Penisula – it’s all the way down! Jeff Corwin says that it’s the Westernmost spot in the US that you can drive to – sounds good to me!

It was about 150 miles and it took a long time – about 4 hours. The road was 2 lanes and windy. At one point the speed limit was 65!!!! I couldn’t even make my MH go 65! When I did get up to speed I hit a “frost heave” – it’s when the road freezes and thaws and it buckles the asphalt – anyway the MH was shaking in about 6 directions at once. It was then that I decided I would go 60 and everyone could deal with it. At the beginning of the drive the scenery was magnificent! It was so hard to watch the road and the mountains! I’m glad we get to go back that way, maybe I’ll be more comfortable with driving then and can enjoy a bit more. By the end the road was a bit less scenic, and I was finally feeling comfortable behind the wheel of this thing!

We arrived in Homer around 6:00. Just before we entered Homer there was an overlook where you could see the Homer spit way out into Katchemack Bay! We stopped there for a while for pictures then came into town. We secured a campsite right on the beach! It’s a really cool beach – rocky, not sandy. The water is frigid so no one swims, and it’s a bay so the water is calm, no big waves. It is a tidal bay though so the water goes in and out with the tides. There are snow capped mountains all around. We have seen at least one bald eagle, apparently there are many more.

One really cool thing about Homer is that you can really see the motion of the sun and why it doesn’t really get dark. When we arrived the sun was straight out from my MH – which given how late in the day it was, I would have assumed that was west. As the evening went on though the sun sank off to the right and finally “set” about 10:30 pm behind the mountain. It’s still not dark (I’m writing this at 11:30pm) and the sky behind the mountains is pink and yellow and orange from the sunset! In the morning, the sun will come up behind me. It’s so open here that you can really trace the movement!

Better get to bed,….the sun will be up in a few hours! Tomorrow Dad and I are going Kayaking in Katechmak Bay for part of the day, then we’ll explore the shops on Homer Spit.

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