I think a month of travel caught up with us today.  After perusing every brochure I had picked up, plus my BCAA tour book on Alaska, there was still nothing jumping out at us that we wanted to see.  Other than Earthquake Park.  Most of the items listed that interest us are scenic things to the east of Anchorage and we will be seeing them on our travels over the next few days.

We had lousy service at breakfast.  There was a group of four waiting to go into the hotel restaurant when we got there and two more couples arrived after us.  All four groups got seated about the same time.  The three couples all had the same server. The four guys got the gal that hustled.  Our server brought us menus, then disappeared for ages and when she re-appeared she took the orders of both of the couples that came in after us.  They both had their food and were eating before she came back to take our orders.

We had dinner in the hotel lounge last night and it was good.  We went again for dinner tonight and once again, we were invisible.  The server brought menus and drinks, said she would be right back, disappeared for awhile and then took orders of people who arrived after us.  We waited about a half hour and she still hadn’t come back so we left and went somewhere else where we had prompt service and good food.  I am generally not too fussed if service is slow if the place is busy; which was not the case tonight – but we were not in a frame of mind after the long wait at breakfast to go through it again in a different eating establishment in the hotel and with a different server.

We spent the morning in our room.  I caught up on my blog and John booked our hotel reservations for the next week.  We went out about 1:30 and drove to Earthquake Park. The shadows from the leaves of the trees make this hard to read.  There was supposed to be an interpretive loop trail with information about how the land at the coast had changed since the quake.  We found one sign and then the trail just became one of many mountain bike paths.

There were little ponds all over in the bush and the water was so still the reflections were mirror-images.We went back to the main paved trail and walked down to the shore.  This cliff is the new shoreline after the 1200′ that was in front of it disappeared in the earthquake.We had tried to find a couple of geocaches that were hidden in the park but had no success. We knew there were a few near the hotel and a huge black cloud was moving in so we decided to drive back and pick up a the nearby caches before the storm broke.

Our hotel is right beside the Lake Hood – Lake Spenard aerodrome. There are float planes tied up at docks all the way around the lake.  Each space has a small shed where the owner keeps tools and stuff.  The planes take off and land all day – one after another.  It was fun to watch them while we were cache hunting. This plane owner had a lovely stained-glass window in his little tool cabin. The big black cloud hung heavy over the neighbourhood but nothing came of it, except to bring a few of the planes back again. We found three caches and then went back to the room and were lazy until we went down for dinner and the subsequent neglect.  But we are all happily fed up now, so all is right with the world.

We leave in the morning for the Kenai Peninsula.  We plan to spend two nights in Kenai – and maybe drive down to Homer from there – and then one night just on the other side of the land spit in Seward.  From Seward we go to Valdez on another of Alaska’s southeast coast peninsulas.