Day 9 - Nikiski, Alaska!

Ending the trip with a grand total of 4,513.5 miles!

As you know, we spent the night in Glennallen at the Caribou Hotel. Definitely my favorite stay of the trip. This really cool moose is outside the hotel.

Tate has her first game meat - a leftover piece of reindeer sausage from my breakfast. She's feeling pretty Alaskan now!
The hotel was comfortable and attached to a nice restaurant and gift shop. The lady in the gift shop told us that the smoke from wildfires was causing a lot of people with respiratory problems to leave the state. And parts of our trip were pretty smoky. There are a lot of fires going on in Alaska right now, I'm sorry to say. We also learned that Anchorage hit a new official high temperature - 80 degrees!!!! HAHAHA! Oh, Alaska, you have no idea what "heat" really is. And so we left Glennallen and headed for home at last.

This is Gunsight Mountain in the Chugach Mountain Range. See all the smoke around it? Off and on throughout the day, the mountains would be obscured by the smoke.

Matanuska Glacier, in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Not the best picture, but hey. The Mat-Su was smoky for a good bit of our trip through it. Which is a shame, because I could tell it would have been a pretty area on a clearer day.

We decided against stopping in Anchorage to drop off either of the vehicles. We're going to do that on Saturday instead. So, we drove right on through to our own stomping grounds. It was disconcerting to not be able to see out across Turnagain Arm like we normally can. We did see eagles on the shore, though.

We stopped in Kenai so the guys could wash the cars while I went into the Safeway for groceries. I've got to get over the sticker shock on some of the fresh foods, I realize that, but I'm not going to pay $8 for a watermelon. I know they go on sale and I'll wait. Next year I'm planning to have a garden and grow a few things myself, if I can keep the wild animals from eating them. I doubt Tate will be much help in scaring them off!

Once we got the trailer and both vehicles unloaded into the house, we had to think about unpacking all the stuff. Our freighted belongings are in Montana, we found out today, and we went over the weight estimate by almost 25%. Egads. Cha-ching. And I'm not sure where we're going to put stuff when it does arrive. It was kind of funny, though, trying to make a list of things we need to replace when the last couple days in Texas were such a blur we can't remember what we actually packed and what we gave away! I guess we'll find out soon enough, huh?

Anyway, we're here now. We're home. And we're waiting for you to come visit us! The guest room is waiting.