Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Trip to the end of the Spit


If you have a free day in Alaska, Homer is a great destination. It's a nice little town at the Southern end of the Sterling Highway. I'd heard a lot about it and wanted to check it out. There is a pull-off as you first enter Homer with a great view of Cook Inlet and a little bit of Kachemak Bay. Even on a cloudy day, it was beautiful.
Our first stop in Homer was the Visitor's Center. They had some great displays and a short movie about the Tiglax - it's a research ship for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Tiglax is the Aleut word for Eagle. (See, I slipped in some education before you even realized it!) The film was really interesting.




From there, we headed on down to the Spit. It's a long, skinny piece of land that sticks out from the shoreline, and consists of a main road and lots of shops and eateries along both sides. There are also lots of places to fish. At the end of the spit is a restaurant and hotel (with the appropriate name). We checked out a lot of the shops and had some ice cream.

We headed back to the downtown area and went to the Pratt Museum. That was really interesting, too. They had a lot of great displays and short films on the local wildlife and history.

There is an old saying, "It's not the destination, it's the journey!" This is definitely true of Alaska. We seem to love the views along the way as much as any part of the place that we are going.


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