We will spend the last night of our trip with friends in the City of Kenai. As we drive back up the Cook inlet coast line, we take our time and stop to look at some of the interesting sights along the way.
The first stop is just a few miles out side of Homer. It is the Norman Lowell art gallery. Norman Lowell and his wife homesteaded Alaska in 1958 and he has been a resident artist since then. His art depicts different landscapes of Alaska, particularly right around the area of Homer and Anchor Point. The gallery was large and inviting. It showed not only his art, but other artifacts of Alaska. We enjoyed this very much. Although he was not at the gallery, his wife was, and I enjoyed visiting with her about their life in Alaska.
After visiting the gallery, we walked back to their original homestead. They built a larger, nicer home on the same grounds which they live in now.
After visiting the gallery, we drove the few miles to Anchor Point, Alaska. This is the Western most town in the US that can be reached by the highway system.
Another interesting thing about this area, is the "tractor beach." At lower tides, the fishing boats cannot reach the shore, so tractors with the boat trailers attached, go out into the water, the boats "drive" right on to the trailer and the tractors bring them to shore. Never seen anything like it. I was amazed to see how far the tractors go out into the water and how fast the boats approach the trailer.
On north we drive. We take a cut through road to Kenai which is off the main highway… We are driving along when Don spots a moose on the side of the road. We turn around and go down the road where the cow moose is… She is pretty close to the road. I took pictures from the car since we were so close to her.
We get to our friend's house and visit a while and relax.. They grill us some fresh salmon that they had caught on Monday.. This is Thursday night. It was very good. Better than we had in any restaurant. After dinner we played a card game, then is if on cue… a cow moose and her twins came into to view. They are really big animals. We enjoyed watching her and the twins before going to bed.
After a good breakfast, we were on the road again… headed to Anchorage to get on the plane for our trip home. We were not getting on the plane until 11:25 pm Alaska time.
First stop was in Kenai watching the locals dip net for salmon at the mouth of the Kenai river. (only residents of Alaska can use these dip nets and it seems everyone has one.)
We also drove a little around old Kenai…
After leaving Kenai, we stopped on down the road to see some salmon swim up a stream on the way to where they will lay eggs and spend the rest of their lives.
The sockeye are easy to spot because they are bright red with green heads.
On up towards Anchorage we saw some pink salmon but they are harder to see because they are silver color and blend in the water. I did not get a picture of these.
By this time we realize that although we have had a good time, we are ready to come back to Arkansas.
We get on the plane at 11:25 and fly the 6 hours to Chicago then have a layover there. We finally get home to Bentonville at 1:30 in the afternoon. By this time, we had been up 27 hours straight, only dozing a little on the overnight flight. We got home and started laundry and cleaning up etc… staying up till about 8:00pm before hitting the bed and sleeping about 13 hours straight. We feel much better today and are enjoying reliving our wonderful vacation.
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