Sitka and Rain

Leslie Wednesday, June 18, 2008

It’s been a quiet and gray day in Sitka. I didn’t even take a single picture. Sorry about that.
We spent most of the day inside catching up on reading. After the rain stopped around 6:00 pm we went out exploring. First we drove to the end of the road to the north. That was only a couple of miles beyond our campground. There’s a National Forest Campground located in the rain forest. It looked like a nice place to camp and we could fit our rig in a few of the places. We’re always nervous about the quoted size of campsites in the National Forest because ReserveAmerica who has the contract for national park and nation forest reservations is notoriously bad. They frequently lack basic information about campsites. I was hoping we might see wildlife in the campground but none came out to meet us.

After driving north we decided to explore to the south. We took a gravel road fairly far up toward a lake but gave up before reaching the top. The road was horrible. The potholes were big enough to swallow small cars.

Since we got out too late to find fresh fish, we had to stop at the grocery store. This grocery store had an interesting discount system. If you spend $40 or more, you get a 10% discount. We didn’t know about the discount but happened to spend exactly $40. This grocery store, like many we have visited in southeastern Alaska, has a lot of Japanese foods. There were aisles of food that we couldn’t identify. (I can’t figure out why they carry so much Japanese food since I have not observed Japanese people.) Because it was getting late, we wanted something fast to cook. We had picked up boneless, skinless, turkey breast. I’ve never cooked that before but figured that anything you can make with chicken could also be made with turkey. The resulting turkey picata was excellent.

Tomorrow you will be treated to lots of pictures of bald eagles.