The Illiad

After cleaning up from our canoe trip we headed into Homer to visit with an old friend of mine Chuck and his fiancée Stephanie.  We had a great drive into Homer with views of several volcanoes across the Cook Inlet.  After some home cooked pizza and local beer we settled in to their "guest house" and had a great night sleep.  They have been remodeling the house and have spent a lot of time on it; their house has great views across the bay (they said every house in Homer has a great view, but theirs seemed especially good). 

The next morning they checked the marine forecast and decided that the seas would be calm enough to cross over to Halibut Cove in their boat "pancake" and check out The Saltry where they are going to get married next month.  We boated across Kachema Bay where my dad spent many summers back in the 70s doing research.  We had a great time exploring around Halibut Cove and they even received a bit of pre-marital counseling from Clem the patriarch of the area!  Heading back to Homer we decided to try our hand at fishing but only managed to catch a herring head before the wind picked up. The ride back was pretty wet with the wind blowing the wave tops into our faces but it was great to be out on the water.  Back at their place to dry out Alexis made a great strawberry rhubarb pie (thanks for the recipe Betsy!) from strawberris and rhubarb fresh our of their garden and Chuck grilled up some halibut.  Some guys Chuck knows from work came over and we had a time eating pie, talking, and watching the sun go down. 

The following morning the clouds seemed to be lifting so Alexis called around to find a flightseeing tour, the price of which my parents had generously heavily subsidized.  She found a company with float planes and booked us an hour flight.  Before the flight I went out on a bike ride with Chuck and Stephanie, I got to try out Chucks bike with huge 3.7" tires.  Going down hill through swamp was like riding an ATV, you just rolled over everything.  They use the fat tire bikes to ride on the beaches and on the snowmobile trails in the winter.

 

As you can see from the photos, we had a great time on our flight.  We got to fly over an ice field and saw a ton of glaciers, lakes, mountain goats, ect ect ect.  I got to sit up front next to the pilot and noticed that except for a short hop over the bay the GPS unit flashed "Terrain Hazard" for our entire flight.  Needless to say we had a fantastic time, neither of us had ever been on a float plane before and it was an experience to take off and land on a lake.  The landing was especially exciting as we didn't really know that float planes slow down much faster than normal planes!  It seemed like we were a bit close to the end of the lake when we touched down but the pilot definitely knew what he was doing.  We're now headed off to Denali and Wrangell-St Elias.