Well, I’ve had lots of distractions from writing my blog this week!  First of all, the weather has been gorgeous so I hate to sit in my cabin writing on my laptop…a couple of days I’ve gone for a run to take advantage of the sun, but not much more outdoor activity than that still.  Yesterday, I went into the restaurant to write while getting some food and ended up chatting with a guy who came in for lunch and sat at the next table over!  He was in town from Pennsylvania also for a short-term work contract and he eventually just joined me at my table to pick my brain about the area.  Since last week was very slow mid-week, I assumed I’d be finishing my shifts fairly early the last few nights (by 11pm) and would still have time and energy to do some writing late at night when distractions are fewer, but as it turns out, we’ve been oddly slammed with business.  This is perhaps due in part to the fact that we’re now operating with a skeleton crew so two servers have to carry the entire restaurant, but even so none of us could believe how much traffic we had on Monday and Tuesday!  One night Adam, our cook from North Carolina, who has a great ear for music and has been playing the guitar and harmonica in the commons, suggested that we “jam” in the cabin next door, which has been entirely vacated and has, of all things, a small upright organ/synthesizer instrument.  So after work one night, I took the one piano book that I brought with me “just in case” which is a book of Ragtime (I figured it’d be appropriate for the saloon-style establishments up here) and tried it out.  It was missing a bunch of the lower keys I needed, but I made do and was impressed when Adam picked up the guitar and started improvising along!  I had no idea you could even improvise to Ragtime.  So we had fun playing together and trying out a basic blues rhythm- he’s also very talented at making up hysterical lyrics to random tunes, just improvising vocally.  Then, even though I still feel like I’m just getting into the swing of things here, my work contract is over in less than 3 weeks and I have no idea what I’m going to do after leaving the lodge.  I’ve been doing research on where and how to travel around, both on my own and with friends who are coming to visit, as well as research on what to do in the slightly further future.  I sent my resume to another design firm I found that has an office in Anchorage and does strictly coastal projects, and as with the other company I had inquired into before, they responded the very next day with an interview offer…so I am heading up to Anchorage tomorrow for an afternoon interview at RIM Design and Friday morning will meet with ECI-Hyer, whom I had spoken to before!  In the meantime, I have been looking into the possibility of continuing some kind of seasonal work elsewhere and specifically have looked into how to acquire a work/travel visa for a country such as New Zealand, where I actually have a few contacts and could spend the winter there as their summer.  So, there have been lots of things to figure out and therefore I only have half of my Homer blog ready for posting.  I hope my faithful readers will forgive me my delay- maybe I’ll find a nice coffee shop in the city where I can finish up my report. 

Last week, I finally made it to Homer! Homer lies at the most southwestern point of the Kenai Peninsula, at the end of the Sterling Highway. I’d heard many good things about it and was excited to finally experience it for myself- a hippie, artistic community overlooking Kachemak Bay and the volcanic mountains on the other side. Thursday morning I packed a weekend bag along with my sleeping gear into my Voyager for the weekend, not sure exactly where I would be staying or what I would be doing while away, and figuring that I had plenty of space to take some things that I may or may not need. I headed south along the route I’d taken several times before, excited to get past that farthest point of personal reference. When I reached Sterling, I stopped at The Wedding Broker, a small retail wedding/prom/special event dress shop whose owner I had been referred to by a friend in San Diego. I introduced myself to Debbie and we had a nice chat, I asked her about her business, and told her that I had served a customer who was renting a tux for his wedding from her! Oddly enough it was a German man who was marrying an Alaskan woman who lives in that area. I then drove on to Soldotna, where I wanted to stop for lunch, since Homer is 150 miles away from Summit Lake Lodge. I looked for The Riverside House, which was described in my Lonely Planet Guide as serving “upscale cuisine in a gorgeous dining room” overlooking the river. When I pulled into the dirt parking lot well off the main road, it looked more like a large shack (not even log cabin style) but I knew that there was still potential for it to be nice inside… When I entered, I found myself in a wide, dark, low-ceilinged and completely empty space that looked more like a country western dance hall off hours. It did have a lovely view straight down to the Kenai River, but it was completely rustic and there was just one other person in the place besides the bartender. I decided to take a look at the menu and give it one last chance, and sat down at a table thinking that the place had probably changed hands but might still offer good food. The menu was a single folded piece of paper with nothing but hamburgers and fried foods (most of the casual dining menus around here list a slew of hamburgers and various fried fish dishes, neither of which I care to eat regularly), so I decided that was a straight forward strike three and that since I’d followed through on my research I had every right to now leave. I got up and told the waitress that I didn’t mean to be rude but I had been expecting a different menu and then tried to exit the place in a leisurely fashion. I stopped for lunch instead at a kitschy but fun diner where the staff was lively and seemed to be having quite a good time at work kidding around with each other. However, I still saw nothing on the menu but a BLT and some pie that I wanted to eat. Apparently only at dinnertime can you get seared fish dishes and grilled food and healthier salads, etc.

I meandered along until I reached Ninilchik, whose center is a tiny old village set in a muddy depression in the hills across a small stream from the Cook Inlet, an enormous bay that stretches up the western coast of the peninsula. I didn’t bother walking to the beach at this point since the weather was pretty overcast and threatening rain, but went up a tiny footpath to an historic Russian church on the hill. I was expecting to see onion domes the likes of the cathedral in Red Square, Moscow (not that I’ve ever seen it), set atop an imposingly grand cathedral. Instead, I found a quaint, white clapboard building looking more like a small converted New England style home with modestly sized pear-shaped golden finials. To my dismay, it did not appear to be open, or at least open to the public, which surprised me from what I had read about it. There was a sweet, overgrown private cemetery within the white picket fence, and a hand-carved veterans memorial “wall” made of wood planks nailed closely together. I took a photo of one particular gravesite that someone had adorned with a number of personal trinkets and miscellany in a haphazard way. There wasn’t much else to see in the area (maybe due to bad weather?), so I headed on and was getting close to my final destination when I noticed a beach access sign and veered off the highway instinctively. The funny think is that the entire way down I had been reading snippets of my guidebook in order to learn about the places I was passing and decide where to stop along the way, and this particular place off of Whiskey Gulch Road was definitely not mentioned. In fact, I don’t remember reading about any beaches except for those at Clam Gulch where you can dig for clams, and yet the beaches that I encountered over the next two days, running all along the inlet, were stunning in their shape and texture. This first beach seemed like a hidden gem to me. There was no one else around as far as I could see, and I came upon only one private residence on my walk down the coast. Tall grass-like plants grew out of the deep crunchy rock surface and it seemed that you could walk for miles in either direction. The house I spied was perched up on stilts with a great open deck and semi-circular roof carving out their view of the water. Looking at the photo now, I wonder if the water ever rises high enough to make their deck serve as a boat dock! Kachemak Bay, like many inlets around here, is infamous for its extreme tides- there is no shortage of warnings about getting trapped while walking or kayaking along at low tide. Reaching this unexpected taste of the ocean brought me a refreshing and familiar sensation, and I realized that I never thought of Alaska as having recreational beaches with sand and waves in addition to the many utilitarian coastal developments.

I thought that would be it for my encounters with the sea aside from those related to the fishing industry, but I was thrilled to discover more incredibly scenic beaches further south. By the time I arrived in Homer (five hours after starting off), it was pouring rain and I drove very slowly down the long hill into town, since I didn’t know what it would take to spin out the wheels of my minivan. As I descended, I could see a significant number of buildings lining several major-looking streets as well as the Homer Spit curving way out into the bay in the distance, and suddenly the rain didn’t dampen my excitement to be there but only added to the mystique of uncovering this far-flung town. I had read about the two sections of town- the main downtown drag spreading out along Pioneer Street and the Spit, which consists of a sandy finger of land connected to the rest of Homer by a nearly 5 mile long sandbar road. I drove down Pioneer first, making note of the hostel, and then pulled into its parking lot to decide whether to inquire about a bunk for the night or not. After much deliberation and reading about the campsite options, I decided instead that this would be the perfect night to try sleeping in my van. So I headed up the hill above town to check out one of the closer campgrounds, which had descriptions of nice views and quiet seclusion, and drove around the lushly forested dirt loop to see what was available. A few spots where you could actually see out between the trees did indeed have amazing views down to the water, and there were plenty of nice unreserved sites left, so I decided to check out the camping situation on the Spit before committing to that one. The Lonely Planet Guide made it sound like town was where the locals spent their time, while the Spit drew all of the tourists to its boat harbor, gift shops, fish restaurants and one particularly popular bar called The Salty Dawg. I drove the connecting road to the Spit to see for myself and found the state campgrounds off to the side of the road, right on the beach and exposed in all directions, then a clump of eateries and coffee shops mounted a full story above the water on wooden stilts (reminding me of a smaller-scale, less polished Fisherman’s Warf) and on the other side of the road a string of gift shops and tackle stores followed by an RV park and some industrial fishing lots. Everything was just sitting on sand and dirt, the water’s edge not far from the road on either side. From the outside, The Salty Dawg looked like something out of a Lord of the Rings hobbit village, but I was curious to see the inside and what kind of characters it attracted, since it had been recommended to me personally. I made a mental plan to revisit it later and drove back to the mainland, not even getting out of the car to stretch my legs.

I was glad to have my wheels to take me to the far ends of the Homer area- there’s no way I would have seen all that I did had I hitchhiked in! On my way back to town I detoured south along Kachemak Bay Drive and ended up continuing out the other side on East End Road, a beautifully scenic rolling drive past rural residential property, Bed and Breakfasts, high-end restaurants, and seaside farms. In fact, Seaside Farms was the name of one of the farms, which also offered cabins, a place to camp on the grass, and a small hostel, where I ended up staying on Friday night. For the moment, I got the lay of the land and calculated approximate distances between various places for later recall. I found Fat Olive’s, a restaurant recommended to me by Taija, as well as the Two Sisters Bakery, a Homer institution and the place that provides bread and baked goods to many of the other cafes and restaurants in town. It was situated just up the dirt road from Bishop Beach, which I followed into the parking area, amazed at finding more open ocean access. Huge logs and wispy grasses buffered the sand and round rocks from the tree-lined bluffs. Long lines of terracotta colored seaweed had been left ashore by the retreating tide, and the wind had blown the sand into deep ridges, creating an amazing combination of textures and colors. At first, having read about the volcanoes that are visible across the bay from Homer, I was miffed and hugely disappointed that there seemed to be nothing on the other side of the water, but then, as I was walking along the coast, the sky started to clear and I began to catch glimpses of mountains faintly outlined within the clouds, then eventually coming sharper into view. For as far as you can see to both the north and south there are glaciers and mountains, several of which are apparently active volcanoes. It was a stunning backdrop to the water for someone used to a straight horizontal line of ocean meeting sky. I enjoyed a long walk and indulged in lots of picture taking as the sun started to brighten and heighten all of nature’s intricacies.

Before dinner, I went back to the campground and reserved a site that had a long driveway so I could pull the minivan a good ways off the access road and feel completely nestled in the trees at night. At Fat Olive’s, a pretty trendy pizza place and restaurant/wine bar, I had to wait a few minutes just to sit at the counter, but ended up next to a couple of other female travelers who were fun to talk to. Famished at that point, I ordered a Mediterranean pizza and a glass of Cabernet and did a pretty good job on both. While eating, a guy came in with a beer delivery, and I asked him if he could recommend a place to hear live music, since the only place listed in my guide had closed and I assumed there had to be other bars/music venues in a place like Homer. He suggested The Alibi, which was supposed to have a blues musician and vocalist that night, so I headed there around 10pm and found a pretty neat little place with lots of red mood lighting, a pool table, a porch-like area looking towards the water, a stainless steel wrapped bar, a small stage by the front door, and some bistro tables and chairs scattered throughout. When I first walked by, unsure that I had the right place due to there being no signage that I could find, one of the customers spotted me trying to casually peek inside and ran out to beckon me in. He had an incredibly grovely voice- so much so that I was surprised to be able to understand what he was saying- was obviously intoxicated, and was super talkative/hyper. I went in, followed by him chatting away by my side, and scoped the place out, answering his questions briefly as I walked about. I sat and had some coffee, hoping the music would soon begin. The staff and other customers were friendly, obviously regulars there, and I stayed to listen to some of the acoustic blues guitar and accompanying singing, but it was very mellow and not many other people came in for the next hour or so which kept the mood really tame, so I called it a night, thinking that the place would be more fun on the weekend, or at least on a night with a larger crowd and more energetic music. Plus, I was looking forward to making my bed on my back seat and having a good long day to enjoy on Friday! Between my sleeping pad, sheets, sleeping bag and several layers of warm clothing, I kept toasty warm all night, and although I couldn’t exactly stretch out within the confines of the van, it wasn’t a bad night of sleep overall, and those times that I did wake to a sound or to turn over, I could see out the side window up to a very clear sky full of stars- not bad for $8!

Click here for more photos from Bishop Beach and the Homer area.