Alaska 2026: Turnagain, Again
More about what True Love looks like. For fourteen years, I have talked about a blueberry pancake I ate in Homer, and how I wanted to eat there again. I couldn’t find it. AdventureMan didn’t give up, he followed all the clues, and he found it. We packed up and as we were leaving, he suggested we stop at this place, Duncan House, for breakfast.
It was in the right location. It had the right feel. AdventureMan found the exact place, and I was able to order the exact pancake, an order known as Bear 1-1-1 because it has one piece of bacon, one egg and one bear pancake with blueberries or chocolate chips. Again, I chose blueberries.
In the Duncan House lot, a new customer drives up . . .
The four-hour trip to Anchorage was all on roads we’ve traveled before, but it didn’t lessen their impact – Alaska is full of stunning beauty. A new perspective, different weather, we see different things.
We had leftover pizza from last night’s dinner at Fat Olive’s, so we stopped along Turnagain Sound for a small picnic en route to Anchorage.
We arrived a little ahead of schedule, but our room at the Alaska House of Jade, an independent B&B, was ready for us, and our welcome was warm and gracious. It is another beautiful, clean, very quiet, and private place to stay. The hosts, Linda and Greg, keep it spotless and in good repair, and have fresh cookies ready on arrival.
Tonight is a special night. We are invited for dinner at the home of a pair of Alaskan doctors, one of whom I graduated high school with 60 years ago. (How can that be??)
We found their house easily, following their instructions. While my friend poached a fresh salmon, his wife showed us her show-stopper garden, full of a huge variety of edible berries and fruits and beautiful flowers.
with the salmon, we had special coated potatos and a Caesar salad. For dessert, his wife made persimmons in yoghurt with a sprinkle of brown sugar. The dinner was delicious, and the conversation was even better. When the evening ended, we had trouble saying goodbye; there was still too much to learn about one another’s lives. The conversation was as delicious as the dinner.
We left with three jars of Alaskan-made jam, made by our friends; we can’t wait to try them and to share them with our family.
These heroes, Bill and Jane, spent their careers in Bethel, Alaska, running a hospital treating mainly indigenous Alaskans, far from anywhere. These are people who believe in public service and have lived their beliefs, serving others.
This is a perfect photo of Mt. Denali which Bill took during one of the rare days when the mountain was not shrouded in clouds.
Alaska 2026: Homer Happy Surprises
We are up and eager for our boat trip into the Katchemak Bay. We have cereal and banana, pack up some snacks, and put on our sunscreen. It is not so brightly sunny as prior days, but sunny enough to burn. We find the meeting point, and another couple joins us, then the crew and we get on the boat. Once again, we are four customers and a captain and deckhand.
Even better, the man in the other couple introduces himself and adds “You will notice I have an accent. I am Jordanian.” AdventureMan, ever quick, asks him in Jordanian Arabic “From what part of Jordan do you come,” and we all laugh at his utter astonishment. Once we started talking, we never stopped.
We watched otter, and learned how they attach themselves to the kelp so that they don’t drift too far from their food source.
We saw countless birds, and one great-grand eagle. We saw puffins galore. And at the same time, we were having these conversations, figuring out who we knew in common as we are near to the same age.
We had so much fun with this couple that when the wildlife tour ended, we decided to eat lunch together at Captain Pattie’s on the Homer Spit, a place AdventureMan and I have eaten at on earlier trips to Homer. The wife and I had the Alaska King Crab Legs, which were hideously expensive, but not so expensive as I have seen them in other places, and these were perfectly prepared. True Love: AdventureMan knows me to be a frugal woman. He did not bat an eye when I ordered the King Crab.
I know exactly when I last had Alaska King Crab. It was my birthday, many years ago, and my son and I were staying with my parents in Seattle while my husband attended a military school. As we sat down to dinner, suddenly my husband appeared! He had flown in to surprise me! And my mother served King Crab legs with melted butter, and she made a Baked Alaska for dessert. I must have been 30 years old.
We had such a good meal, and such good conversation. Even the wait staff was part of what felt like a great celebration.
After lunch, we headed out to explore downtown Homer. We ended up at the Homer Farmer’s Market, and oh what fun.
We had thought we wouldn’t buy anything, but I found some Spruce Syrup (like Maple syrup, sort of) and we found some barbecue.
Yes, even though we had just eaten lunch, we knew this BBQ was special, and we ordered up two plates and had them wrapped so we could put them in the little refrigerator and have them for dinner.
They were wonderful! I’d like to say we had them on our deck patio, watching the sun go down, but here’s the problem – the sun doesn’t really go down, or it goes a little bit down but not at dinnertime, more like around two a.m. Even then, as you have seen, it is not DARK dark.
It’s hard to settle down for the evening when it is so light out. We go for a walk in the neighborhood, then come back to catch up – me with my photos and notes on the trip, AdventureMan with his reading.
Alaska 2026: Wonders En Route to Homer, Alaska
We awake to a different day, warm, with fog rising off the water.
We have a sweet farewell breakfast up at Northern Lights B&B (Sarah manages several allied B&Bs in the same area as Front Row B&B) with Sarah, and we pack up for our short drive to Homer.
We have a couple of errands to run as we leave town, and AdventureMan indulges me, I want a photo of the big new cruise ship that has arrived in Seward.
Seward is tourist-friendly, with its train terminal, trolley, good restaurants, and lots and lots to do and see. They recently built a much larger dock, with which to welcome much larger cruise ships. It has caused some controversy, as when a big ships come in, the tourists outnumber Seward residents. Just after we left, the Celebrity Millenium arrived, and sadly, an endangered whale was caught in her propeller, and died, stuck there. Seward loves their whales, visible from most homes and businesses lining the channel. It’s a sad circumstance.
We also need to stop on our way out of town at the Safeway; my lips are dry and I’ve used all my Vaseline. My pens are all leaking on my hands, my purse, ruining anything I write by hand, so I need to pick up some pens I can leave behind. And the local grocery stores are just fun.
Driving past the entrance to Exit Glacier, we get back on Alaska 1S to Homer, spotting elk along the highway and fervent fishermen heading to the salmon-rich rivers and through Cooper Landing and Soldotna.
Heading south from Soldotna, we start to see the far-off beginnings of the volcanic mountains heading down a long chain to form the Aleutian Islands. The day is sunny, and the view is stunning. Every new perfect snow-clad mountain is showing off for us on this gorgeous day.
We keep trying to find a good spot to stop and take a photo – the frustration of trying to capture the wonder of a chain of perfect mountains is a challenge. AdventureMan spots a Russian Chapel and says “Let’s try here!”
We drive down to a church, an onion-domed chapel, and a much larger church overlooking an old village. As I walk out to a vantage point, another group drives up in a van, from one of the cruise ships, to have a picnic on the church grounds. We stroll around, loving the old cemetary surrounding the old Russian church, and the new military veterans cemetary under creation. We’re not that far from Homer, so we head on, gassing up in the roadside version of Ninilchik, at one of the Three Bears (Shell gas) stops we see so often selling gas, groceries, and the variety of items people living in relative isolation might need.
As we come into Homer, still a little early for our hotel, we spot Fat Olive’s. We’ve never eaten at Fat Olives, but we’ve tried, and it has been too full too many times. This time, we are in luck. We are eager for some Tomato Basil Soup. I have something called The Trio, and AdventureMan has the meatball pan, sizzling hot out of the oven. It’s all served with more sourdough bread, so much food that as good as it is, we pack up enough to take with us for dinner.
Welcome to the Ocean House Inn; we can’t get out of the car because there is a moose crossing the parking lot to get to the roses.
The Ocean House Inn is on a bluff, high above the water, looking out at the Homer Spit.
It is small, and beautiful. We love our room, which has a small refrigerator, microwave, and a coffee maker, with some cups and utensils – enough that we can work with. Life is sweet.
We settle in, sit outside on our deck, enjoying not-driving. The sun is shining – this is something to celebrate in Alaska. The mountains across Katchemak Bay are gleaming. We have neighbors, but they are all very quiet.
On our way into town, we got a call from the people we are going on a bay Wilderness Game tour the next day, asking if we would like to be moved to an afternoon tour, they have room. Oh no, we respond, we prefer the mornings. “Uh, OK,” they say. I can worry about anything; I am a little worried the boat is overloaded or something.
We take a quick drive to 2 Sisters Bakery, only to find it closed about ten minutes before we got there, and we hit the local Safeway to pick up some milk and granola. The Homer Safeway is a happening place on a Friday afternoon, and lots of fun.
So late Friday night that it is actually two Saturday morning, I get up to check if I can see the aurora borealis; reports say with sun activity, the borealis should be very active. Alas, at two in the morning, it is not dark, just a glimmery grey and no aurora borealis is to be seen.
You can still see the bay and the mountains. No aurora borealis.
Alaska 2026: The Tundra Wilderness Expedition
(Maps are courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service)
We get a great night’s sleep when we fall into bed around 6 pm local time – a combination of our bodies still being on Pensacola time and the body cost of a full day’s drive following a full day’s flight to get here. We were wide awake before 6 a.m., a really good thing because we had reservations on the Denali Tundra Wilderness Tour and needed to be at the pickup point by 7:40.
Denali Park Village is just across busy Alaska Highway 3, which is not busy on a Sunday morning so we get there, get a parking place and AdventureMan asks me if we have our paper with the confirmation. No. As we left the cabin, we were busy unplugging all the heating devices – fireplace, radiator, and the coffee maker and the microwave, washing up the breakfast dishes.
No, I had left it on the table, where I had put it, so I wouldn’t forget. We got back in the car, drove back to our cabin, I ran in and got the paper, and we were back in the same parking place in five minutes, still early so we would be on time.
The lobby was packed! There must have been two hundred people there for tour pickups. The first pickup was the Denali Raft Trip. It’s 40 degrees outside, and the rivers are formed from glacial runoff. Still, a group of hardy twenty-somethings is headed out on the waters for an Alaskan adventure, and a part of me momentarily forgot I am not a twenty-something and longed to be going on that trip.
We discovered that many of the guests to be picked up were from cruise ships – the Princess Line and the Holland America Line maintain their own hotels just up the road at a busy, very tourist-oriented center with lots of shops and fast food restaurants. A group of Windstar people arrived and were being given their instructions when our tour bus drove up, stopping in front of AdventureMan and I. We got on, and sat a few rows back from the front.
AdventureMan said “This is a Blue Bird bus!” We used to see them all over Doha, old school buses with names of American schools in cities that had long since updated their buses. It was not roomy or luxurious, but it was heated and had windows that you could pull down when we spotted bear, or moose, or other game.
Our guide, Mike, was excellent. Without sounding the least bit authoritarian, he laid down some routines which would make our next few hours together more civilized – he formed us into a working team.
“If you see something,” Mike said, “Yell ‘STOP!’ and I will stop. Don’t yell ‘BEAR!’ or anything else, just yell “STOP.” Then he explained about the clock system of pointing out a location, like twelve is the front of the bus and three is 90 degrees to the right, etc.
“And even if it turns out to be just a log in the field and you think it’s a bear, yell STOP! Don’t be embarrassed if it’s just a big rock or something, that just happens. If we all work at spotting, we’ll have a great day.”
And he was right. The people on the bus went up and down, and we spotted. It was a grand day.
I probably should tell you that it was a cloudy day, and then we had some heavy showers, and then we had an hour or so of snow. Truly! And between all that, we had some great game sighting, and heard some wonderful stories of the founding of Denali Park, and even had a Ranger get on the bus briefly and quote from a poem by a poet named Abby, a poem about the magical transformation we experience surrounded by the natural world. It was a lovely moment.
One of the funniest things that happened right off the top was one of the Windstar passengers talking about the hotel he had stayed in in Anchorage coming in a day before meeting up with his cruise.
“It looked good on paper,” he said. “It had all the bells and whistles, on paper,” he said. “But it was like a Motel 6 that was really a Motel 3.” I laughed along with everyone else, very happy that I was not the only one horrified by the hotel I had chosen in Anchorage.
Even before we entered the park, we saw a Mama Moose and her baby, and then another Moose. We stopped for photos for the first, but not the second, as it was on the railway tracks and Mike did not want to stop on the tracks, as there are trains arriving in Denali all the time.
Soon after, we saw Ptarmigan, the Alaska state bird, and little rabbits, and then, out sleeping in the tundra, a Mama Bear and her cub, maybe a year old. Mike had special equipment, a large camera connected to monitors throughout the bus, so even those not on the left side of the bus (us) could see the bear. We thought it was one big bear until the cub raised its head. Mike was also very patient every time we saw something, we could spend a lot of time until everyone was able to take photos, and the group worked together very politely.
Finally we reached a potty stop, with lots of potties, but thanks to Mike, we were the first bus to arrive, and even as we were walking to the potties, other buses, many many buses, began pulling up. We ran into some people we had met at the Mt. Denali North Overview, and had a delightful, if short, reunion before having to reboard our separate buses to continue our tours.
More bear. Dall Sheep. Ground squirrels, which Mike described as “Denali fast food for bears.”
I had no idea! Because tundra is a thin layer of soil atop permanently frozen soil, bear eat a lot of roots (we saw them digging furiously for roots) until berries and nuts begin to ripen. A bear will eat about 200,000 berries a day. But their most efficient protein is ground squirrel.
At the turn around point, a raven’s nest on the support of the bridge we had just crossed. We got out and stretched and walked at every opportunity – it is a long tour.
On the way back, more bear, and this time, they walked right up to the bus and alongside without seeming to be aware we were there.
And a fox! I didn’t think I had caught him; he moved so fast. It wasn’t until I uploaded my photos that I saw I had captured him:
I did tell you, didn’t I, that it was snowing once we got to the second set of bear, and the Dall’s sheep?
The raven’s nest on the bridge at Mile 43, where we turned around. The white stuff is snowflakes falling.
All in all, it was a lovely day, a great wilderness tour, and a lot of fun. We were bundled up, and we had heat in the bus, but we had so much fun we forgot it was drizzly for a short while, and then we also had snow. It was more than six hours before we got back to the drop-off point and back to our cabin. It was a long, exciting day.
Time for a nap. After a day so full of learning, exploration and the excitement of spotting different game, we needed quiet time just to soak it all in.
We had dinner at the Denali Park Village, and it was a combination of the divine and the ridiculous. I ordered the Halibut, and it was really good. It had a crisp, tasty coating, as cooked perfectly, and had a delicious sauce. It was served on a bed of wild rice, and had corn and peas with it – simple and simply delicious.
AdventureMan ordered a charcuterie platter, and when it came, his face couldn’t hide his dismay. He just laughed. His first charcuterie board ever was at the Lake Restaurant in Glacier National Park, where the server showed him which was elk, which was venison, and which was wild boar – all locally sourced and processed. Even the mustard was local, with local jams, fruits; it was an abundance of delicious flavors and textures – at the Lake Lodge. At Denali, he had expected something with Alaska specialties. Not at Denali Park Village.
What he was served on this night was the equivalent of Ritz Crackers and store bought cheddar cheese, something that approximated blue cheese and supermarket cold cuts. Worse, the meats were very fatty. It had some really nice grapes, lots of grapes.
We laugh at things others might not find funny. We laughed at that dismal charcuterie board. I shared my halibut with AdventureMan. The halibut was really good.
We had gotten chilled on the Wilderness Tour, and even with the fireplace and the radiator, we couldn’t seem to get warm enough. We took hot showers, piled on every blanket, and snuggled under them until we fell asleep. We slept wonderfully.
Into The Great Wide Open: Day 11, The Tetons, Jenny Lake and Jackson Hole
We are up leisurely, no place we have to be in a hurry, and breakfast is included in our room. We get up, dress, head down to the breakfast room where there is not a buffet, I am guessing a concession to COVID, but a nice menu from which we can order. I order the muesli with a bowl of fresh berries, and AdventureMan orders an omelette. I get a great big pot of coffee, and he has tea. The breakfast room is so like being back in Germany.
We are headed for Jenny Lake today, and are directed once again to Moose Wilson Road. As we near the middle, we see a car stopped and a lively elderly woman is hanging out of her car gesturing wildly to our side of the road and mouthing “MOOSE! MOOSE!” We drive slowly; I am so close that I have a hard time getting a good shot because the side mirror gets in the way. The moose, a cow, is very thin and enjoying some nice fresh shoots in a freshwater creek. If she is aware of us, she doesn’t let on. She just munches along.
Although we are early, Jenny Lake is crowded, and there are no parking places. We head up for the overlook, and spend some time on a trail that leads to the Jenny Lake recreation area. The Jenny Lake Lodge is closed except to registered guests, a great disappointment because I love to look at the lodges.
The view from the overlook is purely awesome. Mountains have that capacity, to awe and make words insufficient. We just filled our eyes.
Remember that guide back at Yellowstone, as we watched Old Faithful erupt? He had told his group (and us) that one of the best places to eat in Jackson Hole was Teton Thai, in Teton Village, so we thought we would have lunch there. As it turns out, no, at least on Mondays they don’t open until dinner, so we needed to find somewhere else, and were told to try Spur, at the Mountain Lodge. I ordered Salad and a side order of brussel sprouts, which were roasted and crispy and melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and AdventureMan, who has never had any fondness for brussel sprouts even tried one . . . and then another . . . and another. They were really good.
AdventureMan had a salmon – avocado toast which was also very satisfying, very tasty.
We spent time just walking around Jackson Hole, exploring, observing and yes, shopping. We are getting close to the end of our trip and we like to have something to bring back for our family.
Jackson Hole is a lot of fun. It has a very young, energetic vibe. It has a lot of public art, and it seems to have a sense of humor about itself. We found some nice things for the family, and then, we also found an Eddie Bauer where we found some things for ourselves, too.
This day had one sad event. We had booked a couple months ago for a restaurant in Bozeman that we really love. The day before we were going to arrive we got a call from the owner that his front staff had all quit and he had to close the restaurant. We were shocked, and sad for him; he has a truly distinctive and elegant restaurant, with foods we loved. I have to believe he will find a way to hire new staff, or convince former staff to come back. It would be too sad if such a lovely restaurant disappeared from the Bozeman scene.
At the same time, I am reading the Jackson Hole newspaper and there are nine full pages of help wanted ads. Many of the hotel and restaurants seeking help are offering free room and board in addition to salary and benefits. There are ads all across the spectrum though, librarians, engineers, substitute school teachers, airport security, etc. If we were young people, Jackson Hole would be a wonderful place to work, full of other active young people and world class skiing.
Dinner that night at the Alpenhof is French Onion Soup and salad. We want to go a little easier on ourselves.
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