Roadtrip!

Lorna picked me up Saturday morning at 9:00 and we hit the road running! I so needed this – to just get away from “life” and have no agenda. It was perfect.

The weather was certainly less than perfect, although I do love a good rain storm. That’s what we had: a good rainstorm. The windshield wipers could barely keep up with it along the coast between Anchorage and Portage. The wind was blowing fairly well, too.

We made it all the way to Sterling before pulling over to stretch our legs and fill up with gas. We considered stopping at Fred Meyers in Soldotna a few miles down the road for another stretch and a mocha, but the parking lot was crammed full of cars so we just kept going on in to Homer.

It was around 2:00 by the time we made it to Homer. Neither of us had eaten anything yet that day so we stopped off at the Two Sisters Bakery for a bite to eat. That’s a cool place: I do recommend it, if you’re ever in the area. It actually reminded me of a place I’d eaten at in Ketchikan a long time ago.

The Homer Library is quite famous for being one of Alaska’s first LEED Certified buildings, so of course we had to stop by and check that out (no pun intended). Wouldn't you know it, they were having a book sale! We spent a good hour browsing all the books before purchasing our finds and heading on up to our next stop.

The Bear Creek Winery: my new favorite place! We sat down at their counter and proceeded to indulge in tasting a variety of their wines while snacking on fresh parmesan cheese and crackers topped off with a salmon pate. I don’t have a list of all the wines we tried but did manage to walk out of there an hour later with two bottles in my bag: a bottle of their Pomegranate Wine and one of their Black Current Wine.

I’m not a huge drinker; normally a glass of wine will last me all night. But that wine tasting – they poured two fingers worth of about 10 different wines for us, which we sampled in the space of roughly 45 minutes. That’s a lot of wine, and I was definitely feeling it.

So our next stop was the Spit. We pulled off on the side of the road, clambered over the rocks down to the beach, and walked along the shoreline. It was overcast and windy, as is usually the case for Homer, but was still quite beautiful. I just love beachcombing: poking through all the kelp and seaweed looking for whatever critter didn’t quite catch the receding tide.

Walking 4 miles on sand, however, is very taxing. By the time we got back to the car we were both feeling it. Thankfully, our next stop was Fat Olive’s for dinner.

I had the best sandwich: 3 types of Toasted Cheese with Apple Smoked Bacon and slivers of a Granny Smith Apple. Who would ever think to put apples in a cheese sandwich? I’ll be doing a lot of that now, I can tell you.

Finally we headed on up to Lorna’s cabin. It’s quite a drive, so we saved that for last. It’s a cute place; rather a shame she’s planning to tear it down, but it really does need to go. There is so much wrong with it that it’s actually cheaper to just start over brand new.

We did a few chores around the place: put together the new weather station Lorna had bought, replaced a circuit breaker, worked on the water pump, and walked the property line to see what was what out there.

The next morning we kind of just took it easy and relaxed for a while. Neither of us was in that big of a hurry to get home, so during the drive back we stopped quite a few times to just take in the scenery.

Eventually we did make it home, where I settled in for some snuggle time with my girls.