Whittier and Seward Alaska

The weather made us continue on past the planned stop and we continued south past Anchorage. Grey, overcast and on and off rain plus poor showers the past couple days and we chose to stop in Bird at the Bird Cage. The beds were poor, the pillows worse, but the shower was to die for. Fabulous water pressure and piping hot with no limit. That alone was worth the cost of the room. Tomorrow we will go into Whittier. To get there we must travel through the longest single lane tunnel shared with train tracks in North America. Since it is a one way tunnel they run one direction each 1/2 hour for a period of 15 minutes and then the train goes. The tunnel is just over 2.6 miles long and motorcycles are forced to go last because we must run between the railroad tracks on metal decking for the entire length. They don't want to have a bike go down and block the tunnel with other traffic inside. Pictures were not allowed.

We have planned a boat cruise tomorrow out of Whittier into Prince William Sound. The one we thought we would take said they would take us to 26 Glaciers in the 5 hour cruise. We decide to establish camp on the outside of the tunnel prior to going through. We setup at the Portage Valley RV Park. Decent price but lacking amenities.



Once through the tunnel, we started looking for the cruise ticket office. We found the wrong one and didn't have time to catch the boat we had planned for, so we took a different cruise. This one was a Major Tours cruise to Blackstone Glacier. Included in the price paid was a Prime Rib and Salmon buffet. That alone was worth the price and the cruise was fantastic. We saw Orca whales, Humpback whales, a seal and many species of birds besides the Glaciers. We also managed to pull aboard some glacier ice used to fix cold drinks. The only downer about the whole day was a passenger suffered a fatal heart attack after we docked.

We returned to our campsite in heavy overcast. The night produced only small amounts of precip, but it was enough to have us decide to change to another location, so onward we went traveling to Seward in search of BLUE skies. It took most of the ride but we finally achieved success and spent a nice afternoon in sunshine in downtown Seward. Tomorrow we will head to the other side of the Kenai Peninsula and Homer.