Alaska: From Home to Homer (Day 1 - 9/27/11)

With an early morning flight out of Minneapolis, we were up at 4:45am to get ready and be at the airport by shortly after 5:30am for our 7:40am flight.

The flight was pretty uneventful, just long. We played a little Canasta together, I finished reading Water for Elephants, and before we knew it, we were touching down in Anchorage. We made it to Anchorage at 10:20am local time (about 1:20pm MN time).

After gathering our luggage, we took a cab to the car rental place and picked up our car - a tiny little Ford Fiesta. We might have put up more of a fight, but the little thing gets great gas mileage and gas has been spendy!

We found some lunch at Gwennie's, which came highly recommended in the travel forums and books.

I had the reindeer sausage and eggs while Mark enjoyed the burger and fries. He immediately had food envy when our food arrived - the sausage was delicious!

After lunch, we took a tip from a travel forum I'd researched and stocked up on a few essentials at the local Walmart.

After our short Walmart stop, we began the long, albeit scenic drive to Homer: About 4 hours.

Mark did a great job of testing out our new video camera at our pit-stops.



The water in the rivers was this brilliant teal blue color, which was pretty awesome!

As we got further south, we started to see the changing scenery: No more mountains, and lots more trees! The trees were interesting. We're very used to large, bushy pine trees back home, but these were skinny/stickly looking ones.

Also, the weather began to clear, and the sunlight began to peek through!

Before we knew it, we finally arrived in Homer, greeted by this incredible view of Homer Spit and the surrounding area in Kachemak Bay.


Welcome to Homer!!