Yet another great American tradition experienced. RVing!
Yes, my sister has been calling me Trailer Trash all week.
I was fortunate enough, due to the very generous spirit of one Paul from Minnesota, alias RV Man (see previous post on Seward), who, when I arrived for dinner with my last fresh salmon fillet last Saturday, invited me to stay the week! OH YEAH BABY!!!!
If you remember from the previous blog....imagine huge fully-equipped kitchen, recliner lounge chairs and a 3 seater sofa that turned into a bloody huge blow up sofa bed - I could watch the 37inch LCD tv in bed! Now this was the life.
You can see aforementioned tough living conditions above - and the views I had to put up with - I won't tell you that my fave pastime was to sit outside in a sun lounge looking up at those mountains watching the Bald Eagles play. Sigh. Really tough gig!
But it wasn't all about lying around being waited on hand and foot - oh no no no, I had a hiking buddy!! One of the most annoying drawbacks of travelling alone in Alaska is that hiking on your own is really dangerous due to the bears. I saw that first hand last week at the fishing lodge as three of us watched with our mouths open as a grizzly chased a moose and her two babies into the river in front of us and grabbed one of those gorgeous calves, dragged it onto the river bank opposite us (where I had been walking the day before) and started to eat it - while the mommy moose ran between protecting her other calf and trying to save the one in the bear's mouth. We could hear the crying, it was amazing and awful at the same time. What a truly incredible thing to have seen. But it really made me think twice about my solo walks.
Sooooooooooooo...now I had a hiking buddy. And off hiking we went (for you Aussie readers, hiking is walking!).
Now just as a heads up - there are like a billion pics I have to show you from my week in RV Land in Seward, so I've divided it into Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1 is all about the hikes, and Part 2 is going to show all the amazing pics from the Kenai Fjords Wildlife Cruise. The other heads up is that RV Man is a bit of photography legend, so alot of the pics are his...thanks RV Man! And just one more heads up...I'm actually going to try and post a video I took - this is a first, never done before, don't know how it works, don't know if it'll work...let's just see how it goes.
So, hiking.
We did two hikes.
Lowell Point
The first was down past Seward to Lowell Point. Only about a two mile hike all up - but it was up and down, a bit muddy, with lots of rocks...and it was awesome...we ended up down on the beach on Resurrection Bay, passing through a magic forest to get there. The tide was out, so we could walk all the way out on the gravelly sand...it was magic. You can see the pics above and the video (if it bloody works!). The pics show the river running out to Resurrection Bay, the magic forest, the views from the beach - one looking up the bay towards Seward, and the other down the Bay which eventually flows out to the Gulf of Alaska. If I am super enough to have managed to attach the video, and you are lucky enough to have sorted out how to see it, then the video is a 360 degree of the views that met us down at the beach. I'm hoping you don't get the audio - cause I sound like a total knob!
Exit Glacier - The Hard
The second hike was yesterday (Thursday) - we went back to Exit Glacier and tried the hard hike (we'd both already done the easy one to the Glacier)! You can hike up 4 miles to actually walk on the Glacier, BUT once you hit about 1.5 miles up, you hit snow...hmmmmm. Once we hit the snow we headed back! Call me a wuss, call me whatever you like, I was totally knackered by the time I got to the snow - a perfect marker to turn back if you ask me! You can see the pics there of the mountains (yes, more mountains), the incredibly stunning views on the way up, crossing the waterfall, me making it to the snow, me looking out at the view on the way down, and yet more mountains! Sigh. It was a truly spectacular hike.
Sigh again. Such beautiful mountains. Everywhere.
And then, there's the water...
No comments:
Post a Comment