It was a chilly one last night! So cold that Lynda just told me there was a thin crust of ice on the top of her bowl of water in the bathroom! (Just kidding-its not quite that cold). But it is definitely the coolest night we’ve had to date. Lynda has a massive comforter and a fleece up on her bed above the cab with her. I just have a little fleece and in truth I thought about getting up to find my comforter in the middle of the night but decided against it when I stuck my leg out and discovered just how cold it was out there! Certainly we could have turned on the heater and all that good stuff but honestly....it’s not cold enough to do that and we are camping after all. :-). But the really funny bit of this story came to light this morning when Lynda discovered that when she added her fleece jacket to her wardrobe in the night time she actually put it on inside out up there in her bed. She couldn’t figure out why the pull on her zipper was so difficult to do. It was this morning that she realized the reason was that the whole jacket was on inside out and that included the zipper. No wonder she’d had to struggle to get her arms into the holes! She is getting to be quite the contortionist in this trip though....for example this morning while she was giving me privacy in the main part of the camper by staying up in her bed a few minutes longer she managed to take off her pyjama bottoms and don both her underwear and jeans! This may not sound like a big deal to you but when you think about the fact that she cannot even come close to sitting up up in her bed....it gets a whole bunch more impressive doesn’t it?!
We’ve got the kettle working away on the stove and I think scrambled eggs, fried tomatoes, and a piece of bread with peanut butter are on the menu this morning. It has to be bread as we can’t use the toaster when we’re not plugged in but that’s okay....we are camping....remember. :-)
Soon we’ll be headed for Anchorage (only about 1/2 hour away) where we’ll spend some time today before heading further south into the Kenai Pensinsula.
I had planned to put this away till much later in the day but have just kicked off my day with Baileys in my coffee and a little p.b. and honey on bread as an appetizer to the main that will follow. That honey was amazing! It is Alaskan raw wildflower honey and interestingly it has a distinct cinnamon flavour to it. Not because there is anything added...just due to the type of flowers that grow wild here.
Something else that I just noticed is that the picnic table right behind our RV has one side of it chewed off much like a horse would do to the top of a fence but there are no horses here which tells me that moose must like to chew wooden things too. At first I thought he must have done it last night but Lynda assures me that it was already that way when we arrived. However, she says, the grizzly that came round in the night might have knocked over the tree beside it....hahaha....made me look! :-).
Speaking of trees I’m looking out the window in front of me at a cluster of white birch. Too bad they already have their leaves or we could have made our own syrup today. :-).
OMG! I just looked out the back window again and there is a little squirrel on our picnic table licking the top of it. What he might be licking off there is beyond me although it is possible that there might be some dew still on it from the night and he might be thirsty...clever fellow!
Lynda just commented, “You’d think we’d been doing this for years!” And she is right. We’re quickly becoming a well oiled machine. We have a system to catch our grey water in a bucket to dump outside (as our grey tank fills more quickly that our water is depleted), I can put up and take down the table/bed pretty efficiently if I do say so myself, we each have our own sink to use, the meals we’re making are delicious, we get extra natural light by leaving the bathroom door open (there is a huge skylight in there), we’ve discovered little places for everything to sit so it’s still handy but not in the way, and we can batton down the hatches very quickly when it is time to hit the road again. Yep....we’re pretty much professional RV’ers already. :-)
And now it really is time for breakfast....so till later.....
We’ve just parked for the night....it is getting very near 10 p.m. This never ending daylight business is GREAT! No worries about what time we finish driving for the day.....we really just get to go as long as we want and pull in when we want. I’ve said more than once in the past several days.....”I could get used to all this daylight!”
We’ll be spending the night in Cooper Landing on the Kenai Peninsula. It is a tiny little place and we’ve tucked into a spot with a bunch of other RV’s at the Kenai River Campground. Reasonable price, water, power, and supposedly a place we can dump before we leave tomorrow. It was so funny when we pulled in! There is a group of three men enjoying a beer at a picnic table just across from the spot we decided looked like a good one for us to pull in to. It is in between two other RV’s and you back into the space. All the guys were watching and you could totally imagine their conversation as they snickered behind their beers looking like they expected me to have to go back and forth several times before I got it backed in there perfectly. Lady Luck was on my side and Lynda’s directions were flawless so we wheeled our baby in there like the pros that we have become. :-). Driving into and around Anchorage this morning and backing into a parking space in the downtown area there pretty much moved us into the expert category in the driving an RV department!
Speaking of Anchorage....another beautiful downtown (as was Fairbanks). Population in Anchorage is almost 300,000 which makes it the largest city and home to almost 1/2 of all Alaskans. There was a huge earthquake here in 1964 (9.2 on the Richter scale I think it was) and that quake pretty much destroyed much of the city. In fact it split the city along 4th avenue and changed the drop to the water dramatically. Where 4th Ave used to be level and run gently into the water....it now has a drop of at least 40 feet to get to the waterfront! One of the activities we did today was to hop onto the tram tour (1 hr long) which took us past many sites. One site was where the undulating ground from that quake was frozen in time as the blue clay soil solidified in the midst of rolling. Some of the solid “waves” are as much as 9 feet high! That was a super interesting thing to be able to see. Another super interesting thing to see was the small plane airport. Did you know that 50% of all of America’s small engine planes call this air field home? There are actually two parts to this site.....one is for land planes and the other for sea. Perhaps even more amazing is that the small planes at this field account for 10% of the small planes in the entire world! I’m struggling to believe that stat but....heh....if the tour guide said it it must be true right?! :-). One thing that I do believe about this airport is that the runway actually crosses the road! This I know because I saw it with my own eyes. We had a stop sign and the runway had a gate across it. When the run way is open the gate closes the road. Other things we learned today is that the blossoms on the flowers in the gardens here are 30% larger than other places due to the additional daylight they’re exposed to. This fact I do believe as we saw the flowers and they’re amazing....really amazing! Traditionally the first people here would build their homes underground to keep them insulated. We got to see one modern home that has followed their lead (just from the road though). Originally it was just a 2 bedroom apartment but now it is a 2800 square foot home that goes down 3 stories. I can only imagine how interesting it would be to see the inside of it. Supposedly it cost about a million $ to build but they estimate that they will save so much on heating (their most expensive month is $65 for heat) that they will recover enough to make the original cost worth while. Their walls are 3’ thick concrete for added insulation and to keep the temperatures constant. Other homes in the city cost about $450K on average and they are more than 3 times as expensive to heat so although it will take a lot of months to make up the difference through heating costs alone....it just makes sense for so many reasons.
In addition to learning so many things today we also saw a couple of really cool things. One was the “whaling wall”. This is a massive mural that has several whales painted on it. Each of the whales on the wall is actually life size! It is incredibly beautiful and impressive. We also attended a movie at the Performing Arts Centre. It was called The Aurora and was a compilation of almost 40 years of work of an Alaskan photographer. It too was beautiful and impressive!
For dinner tonight we hit a very well known place called Humpys where I had some Alaskan King Crab and Lynda opted for Halibut. We’re in seafood heaven now so have committed to “overdo” it on that front. :-). We also hit a very famous little shop called the Kobuk. It is filled with a million gifty things to buy and in the back they sell what is said to be the best donuts in all of Alaska and maybe even the world. So of course we had to buy a couple. We haven’t tried them but perhaps with coffee tonight.
Leaving the city was a tiny bit of a challenge as we ended up on the wrong Avenue heading out of town so we had to loop back up to get on the right one. Once we did that we had to guess which way to turn....and of course we guessed correctly. :-). From there we hit the #1 South and stayed on there surrounded by mountains and inlets from the sea. It was BEAUTIFUL! Other sections had no sign of the sea....just green green green fields and hills. Really pretty country. Much of the time we commented that we could easily be driving along the Hope Princeton or on the Sea to Sky up to Whistler.
Well, coffee is on and donuts are calling so will sign off for now. Night night.....
L & L
No comments:
Post a Comment