Catch up on the trip

Sunday, July 6
We haven't had internet service for several days so we'll play a little catch-up here. Actually we have no service tonight, either, but maybe tomorrow. Here it is Sunday, one week after we entered Alaska, and we're poised to leave the state already tomorrow. It doesn't seem right that we're leaving already when this was our main goal. But we've made the complete loop and now there's nowhere else to go but back toward home.
On Friday Denise and I drove from Portage to Seward - another spectacular, eye-popping highway - in the rain most of the way. We boarded the Star of the Northwest for our half-day glacier cruise of the Kenai Fjords National Park. We'd decided to take the half-day cruise as opposed to the all-day, eight hour cruise, because of the long day we'd had in Denali on Wednesday, and because of the all-day cruise we'd already taken from Skagway to Juneau. This tour was five-hours long and took in the full length of Resurrection Bay, down the east side to Resurrection Point, across the mouth and up the west side past the impressive Bear Glacier. The Star was a larger boat than we'd been on in Skagway and there were easily twice as many people on board. But the captain was a "mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure" and he maneuvered that boat into some mighty tight places between towering walls of rugged rock, so close at times that the meltwater from the heights above cascaded right down on the boat's deck. Yikes! We saw a great many sea lions along the rocks, and out at the point was a bird rookery just teeming with Kittiwakes, various gulls and murres and cormorants, and two species of puffins - the horned and the tufted, which were easily identifiable once we'd gotten in close enough to be able to see them on their nests, tucked into the crevices of the rocks. What a sight that was for a jaded old birder like me.
In contrast to the Skaway-Juneau trip, on which we lost count of the whales we saw, on this cruise we saw only one. But he (or she?) was a friendly sort, and he teased us by showing his back every few minutes just a short way off the ship, and finally, when we were getting ready to pull away, dove for the bottom, showing us his huge tail fins. You should have heard the oohs and aahs and the cameras clicking (but of course I missed the shot because I was sitting on the bench trying to recover from a short bout of nausea). As the five-hour cruise was coming to an end and we were about to dock, we spotted a sea otter in the harbor, clowning around right in the midst of all the hundreds of boats there. The otter was the one critter we hadn't had a good look at yet, so this guy was right on cue to make our day complete. When we got back to Portage that evening Connie and Leo were there waiting for us, having driven over from Anchorage. They'd gone out to Whittier and back that day.
Saturday morning we left Portage in the rain and drove the fifty miles back to Anchorage where I met up with my old high school chum Steve Spranger and his wife Ruth who live there in Anchorage. We had coffee together at a Fred Meyer while the Krupps went and found a laundromat to do some washing. Steve and Ruth decided to follow us out of town and camp with us that night, and that's what we all did. We found a nice little rustic campground on a rocky creek about sixty miles out of Anchorage. As our luck would have it, it started raining as we got to the campground and it kept it up off and on all evening. But we still had a great time, making a picnic of hot dogs and hamburgers and macaroni salad and Connie's bodacious garlic mashed potatoes. Steve and I hadn't seen each other in over thirty years (and man, does HE look old!) and we had a great time looking through our high school yearbook and remembering all the stupid things we did way back when we were stupid teenagers. His wife Ruth is a native Alaskan, and told us some interesting things about the state and about growing up as a Native in a small village in the Nome area. Her father is still living there and is 100 years old! We all wished we could meet him and listen to some of the stories he'd be able to tell. Ruth spoke only the Yooptik (not sure of the spelling) language as a child, but when she went to school she and the other children were forbidden from speaking it - they were only allowed to speak English. Nowadays, she says, very few of the Native children can speak Yooptik naturally, but are being taught the basics of it in their schools. We kept a campfire going as late as we could despite the drizzly rain and no one really wanted to go to bed, but sometime near midnight (still very light outside!) we all retired.
This morning we said our goodbyes to Steve and Ruth as they set off westward back to Anchorage, and we set out sights to the east. We had entertained notions of making a side trip down to Valdez to see the earthquake museum and the terminal of the oil pipeline, but as we'd gotten a late start this morning we decided to skip it and head for Tok and the Alaska Highway. Tonight (raining again!) we're at another of those little freebie campgrounds, just ten miles down the road from the one we stayed in last Sunday night at Deadman Lake. No campfire tonight (who wants to sit out in the drizzle again?)
It's now Monday (I think). We are 350 miles down the road. Laundry is done, dinner is cooked and showers are taken. Not much happened today other than driving. The pics I posted are from our trip out of Seward. We saw several eagles that day, but this was the best picture we got. It's a little blurry, but they sure are pretty magnificent birds. This one's for you Kenny. The last picture is a glacier we saw on the boat trip. The blue color of the ice just doesn't come through in the picture. The glaciers we've seen really are beautiful. We'll have to bore you with thepictures when you come to our house. Enjoy. Talk to you all again from down the road.