Adventures

Day 11 - Puffins, Exit Glacier and more clouds

Even though it had rained hard all night, in the morning it started to clear up and we did even see a bit of blue sky for a while. Since the weather conditions didn't seem stable we decided to go for a indoor-activity today.

Therefore we visited the Alaska SeaLife Center, located right at the coast in Seward. The center is really well done and shows off what Alaskas waters have to offer. We saw majestic King Crabs, lots and lots of different salmon, starfish and jellyfish (this time even alive!). But there weren't only fish there... 

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Day 10 - From Homer to Seward

Day 10 started with a lot of rain at night, which made packing up the tent much harder than hoped for. The rain kept pouring down while we travelled up the Sterling Highway towards Kenai, where we intended to do a short surprise-stop to visit some aquaintances of our hostfamily. Sadly the people we wanted to visit were't at home. Since it was still raining we ended up just driving around the town, going to the Visitors Center and then hitting the road again.

Just before getting to Seward we saw lots of cars parked in a rest area and people with cameras standing on a nearby bridge. It turned out they were watching an adult moose cow on one side, and two young moose on the other side of the bridge. So we also got out of the vehicle, grabbed our cameras and took a bunch of pictures. These moose were a lot closer than the ones we had seen before, so we managed to get a few pretty good pictures, especially of the moose cow.

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Day 9 - Homer

After a nice breakfast with Bagels and Cream Cheese we walked out to the Homer Spit. The view from the top of that short strip of land was incredible, since we basically had a 360° view around Kachemak Bay. The weather was OK, it wasn't very cold and it wasn't raining, but it was pretty foggy out there, so we couldn't see the glaciers that are supposed to be there. Instead we saw the blue-ish silhouettes of the mountains stacked up after each other, everything wrapped in fog and clouds, which gave us to the possibility to take some really nice pictures nevertheless. It almost gave the impression of twilight all day.

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Day 8 - The Kenai Peninsula

The start of our second week in Alaska also marked the beginning of our second road trip. This time we're not going up into interior Alaska, but rather down south to visit the Kenai Peninsula. With a pop-up trailer attached to the huge car we started our way south via the seward highway along Turnagain Arm. During the five hour drive we passed through Copper Landing, Sterling, Soldotna and Anchor Point to finally make it to our destination: Homer. The scenic drive led us along the sea, through the Chugach Mountains, over several rivers and swamp areas.

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Day 6 - Trip back to Eagle River

Our day #6 in Alaska started really early as we wanted to go pick blueberries again before we had to leave Tok. We got up at 5 o'clock to do so, and after about one and a half hours of picking we ended up having a whole bucket of blueberries that we got to take back to Eagle River so we could have some blueberry pancakes in the future.

After that we started our long drive back "home". Even though we really looked hard we didn't see many wild animals, besides a young fox and some swans. The road led us back the same way that we had come, following Tok Cutoff and the Glen Highway, but we did stop at a few different picture locations and took more photos...

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Day 5 - Going nuts with the GoKart and the Muklukland

The second day in Tok did also start quite uneventful. As we already told you, we picked lots of lots of blueberries on our way back home from Shen. If you want to use those tasty little blue things for a cake (Donna made a yummy coffeecake) you’re unfortunately going to have to pull out all remaining stems and clean them first.

After cleaning the blueberries we took out the GoKart for a ride around the house, which was real fun. This is something you’re really not able to do in Germany that way. We also mounted the GoPro on it and got a video of the ride...

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Day 4 - Four Mile Lake, Moose and the ice-cream-drop

Our first day in Tok started off rather uneventful. Later we went to the Tetlin Wildlife Refuge InfoCenter to find out about the bugs that had bothered us the day before. After some back and forth we found out what they were. Wait for it. Firebugs. Some bugs that lay their eggs in burning wood and coals – they will even singe their feet off doing so. There sure are some weird animals out there. Later in the day we drove out to 4-mile-lake. The lake is absolutely gorgeous, and even more so because we had a really beautiful day with a lot of sun and a perfect sky...

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Day 3 - Trip to Tok

On our third day, we did our first "road trip", which lead us to the famous city Tok. Since the roads in Alaska aren’t as crowded as the german ones we’re used to, we had to prepare for every circumstance which could occur. So we packed all our stuff, loaded the Excursion and got on Glenn Highway. We were heading into the direction of the next big city of Alaska, Fairbanks. Driving through Alaska is pretty scenic. The road led us through a variety of countrysides and we could experience the diversity of what Alaska can provide. The landscape is so beautiful and we had some really amazing views...

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Day 2 - Mile Hi

As the weather was absolutely beautiful we took the opportunity to do a real hike today. We were told that the walk up to "Mile Hi" was only a short hike of about thirty minutes, but it ended up being a real steep mountain trail and we did also take a lot longer than those thirty minutes. There were quite a view very good photo opportunities along the way and we stopped several times just to take in the scenery with our hearts and minds and especially our cameras...

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The Journey Begins

Yesterday we started our trip to Alaska from Frankfurt Airport. We went through check-in and all security procedures without any trouble or delays and then waited at the probably farthest away gate to finally board our plane and start the journey. When boarding time came our plane was again located pretty far away from the gate, so we had to take a bus to board it. You can imagine our surprise as we came closer and realized the plane we would be traveling in was covered in "Janosch"-Characters...

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