Back to Palmer

Leslie Thursday, July 24, 2008

Our plan for today was to drive from Glennallen back to Palmer. As we were unhooking our water and electric connections, a woman (mid 30s) who had ridden in on her bicycle stopped by. She asked, in a strong French accent, if we were going to Palmer today. We replied, yes. Then she asked if we had room for two bicycles – in unison we replied, “no”. We’re guessing that they had ridden from Palmer to Glennallen and knew that the road consists of many up hills and down hills ...and if the weather held as it began .... very low clouds threatening rain... it would not be a pleasant ride. While observers may think that because we have a large rig we have lots of extra storage, in fact that is not the case. With four slides, when we close the slides, all of our floor space is gone. There is no extra storage. While I’m always looking to “adopt” foreign exchange students, we really don’t have room for bicycles.

I drove the trip from Glennallen to Palmer. We traveled 130 miles in slightly over 4 hours. There is one section of blasting where we had to wait for a pilot car. The journey through the blasting area takes 20 minutes and is over dirt “roads” – ha! Our rig that was so recently clean is dirty again.


We’re staying in Palmer at Mountain View RV Park, the same place we stayed when we were here previously.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Palmer&state=AK#a/maps/m::4:61.599701:-149.112793:0::/e

I’m sure some of you are wondering why we are doubling back on our route. The reason is that we had little time to make the trip from Haines to Anchorage to fly to Katmai to see the bears. We weren’t able to go to Valdez on the way. We wanted to go back and see Valdez before we continue down the Kenai Peninsula. That meant that we had to double-back on the Glenn Highway.

Unfortunately like our earlier trips on this route, the clouds remained low and we didn’t see any great pictures of the Matanuska Glacier. We returned to the Mountain View Campground in Palmer. After unhooking and getting things organized, we decided to head out to Three Bears (a COSTCO owned grocery store) and Safeway. It was around 5:00 pm and as we drove out the access road what appeared but a MOOSE. YES, A LIVING, SMALL MOOSE. She (I think) just stood there about 20 yards away and watched us. She was in the front yard of an auto repair place. She stood there and looked at us as if to say, “well, you wanted to take pictures so here I am.” Unfortunately for probably the first time since we left Colorado on May 9th — I didn’t have a camera! What – we had long ago decided to always leave the little camera in the truck in case we saw something along the way. Blast it – the little camera was in Robert’s backpack in the trailer. Bummer. It gets better tomorrow.

Three Bears and Safeway were welcome places to resupply. We learned that if we spend $100 at Safeway, cumulatively, we get a 10 cents discount on fuel. We’ll come back tomorrow to ensure that we get the fuel discount.