Steve and Judy's Travels!

Who needs a marina and a boat ramp?  Want to get your boat into the ocean and there is no boat ramp?  Go with the tractor launch.

I didn’t get to see a boat launch, but I was there for a boat retrieval.  The tractor gets the call and heads down the bluff.

The boat approaches.

The tractor picks up the boat trailer

and backs into the water.

The boat gets closer.

…and locks in.

The boat gets dragged out of the water, through the sand, and back up to the top of the bluff!

Amazing but true!

Soldotna.

Kenai Peninsula

After weeks of weather in the 60s on the coast, we move inland a little and now it’s 80 degrees.  Back to one-shirt weather!  This feels pretty warm.

Nice little campground.  We’ll stay here a couple days.  It’s time for an oil change on the Jeep.  It’s certainly time for a new air filter judging by what the outside of the car has been looking like!  Soldotna is a big enough town it has a Jeep dealer *and* a car wash.

Before we left Homer, I photographed a bunch of boat tops not currently in use.

I thought maybe these were winter gear for working boats and they take them off during the summer while the weather is nice, like putting the top down on a convertible, and put them back on in the winter for shelter.  I asked someone who seemed to know though, and he said they were ways to outfit the boats for different kinds of fishing.  When they’re long-lining for halibut these tops have the right kind of drums and other gear inside.  When they’re handling nets, they need a clearer deck and this equipment comes off.

There is a spot here on the spit called the Fishing Hole.  A lot of people fish it.  We were told the Dept of Fish and Game stocked it.  We took one look and concluded this made no sense!  The Fishing Hole fills and empties twice a day with the tides.  What sense would it make to stock it if all the fish just flushed right out?

Then a thought (a few days later).  Salmon.  Did Fish and Game stock the fishing pond every year with salmon minnows, or better yet fertilized eggs from the hatchery?  Did those eggs hatch and/or those minnows go grow in the ocean for years, then return home to spawn in a fishing hole?  Deceived salmon with no hope of spawning.  Every day, fishermen lining the edges of the channel leading in and out of the Fishing Hole catching them.

The aurora borealis was here.  Special conditions made it visible this far south.  But only while it’s dark.  There’s the first challenge.  It doesn’t get kind of dark until midnight.  It was to be a two-day event.  We heard about it after the first night.  We saw pictures of the northern lights the night before taken from Homer.  So up we stayed the next night.  I made it until 12:30.  Judy made it until 2:00.  Nothing.  I even got an aurora finder app for the phone so we’d know all we could about when it would be where.  Turns out the days are not listed by local location, they’re listed by Greenwich Mean Time.  When we think it’s going to show up on Tuesday, that was Tuesday Greenwich Mean Time, and that Tuesday is already gone.  It’s Tuesday here, but it’s Wednesday there, which is the day after the aurora borealis was visible here.

We play homing pigeon.  Judy drops me off a few miles from the house and I find my way home.  Next thing she’ll probably want me to wear a blindfold until she releases me.

We gave up this million-dollar view,

For this…

Million-dollar view.

We’re back down to the water on the spit.

Kenai Peninsula

Love fresh ingredients.

Judy hard at work in her outdoor kitchen.

And back to the view.

Maybe Alaska is exactly like Hawaii, except in Hawaii there is no snow and cold to chase a person south.

There is something about Alaska that is troubling me though.  Alaska honors Daylight Savings Time.  All summer long, we’re going to bed while the sun is still up and waking up the next morning with the sun high on the horizon.  What’s the point?  What is there to save when it’s daylight all the time anyway!?  You’d think they would reverse the concept and save some of that summer daylight for the winter months when they really need it.

Our Colorado granddaughter, Taylor, is off on an adventure.  She flew to London and spent her birthday touring museums.  Then she got on a train to Aberdeen, Scotland,

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Aberdeen,+UK/@59.5960567,-79.6605341,3.16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x4884054c1fd77549:0xe8bb05da5cf4c472!8m2!3d57.149717!4d-2.094278

… where she met up with the professor leading the dig Taylor is going to be working on for the next two weeks.  They’re excavating a bronze-age village.

And another anniversary.  Fourteen years ago today, we bought the 2005 Beaver Monterey Motorhome that is still serving us so well.

A drive in the Jeep on the beach during low tide at Anchor Point.

The Anchor River flowing to the sea.

And all us this will be under ocean after the 20-foot tide claims it.

Meanwhile, Henry is a happy boy.

(The volcano in the background, on the other side of the Cook Inlet, is the one Judy and I flew around just a few weeks back.)