July 7, 2010

We are at another campground without cell service.  When we leave, we will have gone ten nights without cell or internet.  I don’t mind the lack of phone coverage since I don’t talk on the phone that much.  I do scan the internet daily when it is available, although perhaps I waste too much time with it.

Perhaps our bodies will pay a price for this lack of non-physical activity.  We have managed to do something physical every day, most days twice.  I am fighting a good fight against my dropping weight, but I am tired of eating.  Kris has dropped very close to her target. 

We changed our travel plans slightly since we had spent a rainy day working on the condo.  We wanted to kayak Eklutna so we stayed another day.  Monday was the first sunny day we have seen in quite some time.  Unfortunately, the winds kicked up.  We walked down to the lake in the morning to take a look, knowing that kayaking was an unlikely activity.  We enjoyed a casual afternoon and decided, as an alternative, to take a bike ride in the evening.  I rode my bike down to the lake late afternoon for one last look at the kayaking potential, but it was even worse.  White caps covered the surface of this relatively large lake.  The only people who found this enjoyable were the three kite boarders and even one of them looked like he was getting severely beaten by the wind.  We stayed an extra day to kayak and it didn’t look like it was going to happen.

Kris’ friend Charlene had indicated that she had a cabin up there for Monday evening, so we guessed that she had the one along the lake shore.  We rode the four miles from our campsite to the cabin and found Charlene and her family getting ready for their dinner.  We enjoyed a beer and some fun conversation with them before heading for home.  The return bike ride was interrupted by a young bull moose who blocked the trail for a minute or two before it found a route into the woods.

It was a perfectly pleasant evening, but it was so far from normal that it struck me.  Who takes a bike ride four miles into the wilderness in the late evening to have a beer with a friend and then has to wait for a moose to be done with the trail on the return?  When you consider that the trip started from our home which is now a trailer that was parked in a campground ten miles up into the mountains with no cell service, our reality becomes even more surreal.  When I pointed this out to Kris, she had to think about it to realize that it wasn’t just a normal evening; it had seemed normal to her.  I have concluded that we are not mainstream America.  We haven’t watched TV since Valdez and that was only to catch the news at dinner time.

Of course we awoke to no wind on Tuesday and decided that we had time for a quick paddle on the lake.  By the time we got organized, a little bit of wind had begun.  The wind was coming from our end of the lake which meant that the water wasn’t going to be too rough, but also meant that the wind was going to fight our return.  We explored the far side of the lake, the side without the trail.  We paddled down almost a couple of miles before the waves started getting uncomfortable.  Then we fought our way back, taking a little more time than we had allotted for kayaking that morning.

Tuesday was a moving day so we quickly packed up after our adventure and headed down the narrow winding road toward civilization.  The first stop was in Eagle River for a dump station.  We had gone five nights and we figured we should empty the tanks before another five night stretch without services.  Then it was time to go to the grocery store.  It was strange to push the grocery cart to within a foot of the refrigerator.  I almost thought to tell them not to bother with bagging things, but we could use the bags.  The next stop was the landfill to drop off some old partial cans of paint, the motor oil from the oil change I did on the generator, and some household chemicals.  I was surprised that there was a line at the landfill.  Most people, a combination of commercial deliveries and residents with pick-up truck loads of junk, were there to dump trash.  We waited in the long line before driving up to the hazardous waste collection facility, sort of parking in a parking space, and dropping off our chemicals.  Our water supply was running low so we next headed to one location in Anchorage that we knew had a potable hose connection.  We fueled up the truck there as well.  Then we stopped at Target because it had a big enough parking lot and I needed a couple quarts of motor oil; I have found that the van burns a little oil and you can’t stop at the local auto parts store with our trailer.  Finally we were on the road again.  This seemed like an endless list of tasks.

We camped last night at Granite Creek Campground.  We didn’t find an abundance of campsites available, but we found one that was large enough for our rig and surprisingly level.  We planned to take a bike ride from there, but were feeling too tired.  Instead, we spent the evening walking around the campground and beyond, about three miles of walking.  When we get started, we just don’t stop. 

Much like our kayaking adventure, we decided to take our bike ride the next morning.  Instead of starting from the campground, which would have been a rush to leave before the noon checkout time, we drove down to the Hope cutoff where I knew there was adequate parking.  It also had the benefit of being at the downwind end of the ride.  We pedaled our road bikes hard into the steady breeze, all the way past the campground we had stayed at last night, and turned around at the Johnson Pass trailhead.  The return trip was fun, with a couple stretches of sustained 20 mph speeds.  The fourteen mile ride was invigorating.

From there, we only had a short drive to our destination, the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.  Unfortunately, we stopped at Watson, Petersen, and Kelly lakes to see if we could find a free campsite on a Wednesday afternoon.  All the spots were taken so we headed back to Hidden Lake, a campground that we have always thought looked nice, even with the 3.5 mile trek up the rough Skilak Lake Road.  We found a huge campsite on the Lake Loop which puts us close to the lake, nowhere near lakefront, but this lake is a bit big to count on any kayaking anyway.  Unfortunately, the cell service disappeared before the campground so we had to run back out to the visitor center to check our email, voicemail, and the general state of the world.  We sat there in the parking lot with our laptops and our little portable WiFi, communicating with the world before returning to our seclusion.