Sunday, August 4th-Good and Bad News on the Way to Soldotna

Soldotna is on the Kenai River a few miles from where it empties into the Cook Inlet. For some weird reason, Lake Kenai and the Kenai River are turquoise! Not blue or even dark blue like Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe, But a turquoise blue. Here’s a pic of Lake Kenai:

The good news is that our campground in Soldotna is small but very pretty, neat, and clean. Soldotna is a salmon fishing down and one camper we talked to had shipped over a thousand pounds of filleted salmon to his family near Austin! 

The bad news is that we’re not going to be able to take a ferry part of the way back to the lower 48. The Alaska Marine Highway is a system of ferries/cargo ships that go from Bellingham, WA to many of the cities and villages along the BC and Alaska coasts. The AMHS services a lot of the coastal communities and islands that have no real roads to them. We thought we could catch a ferry in Whittier to Prince Rupert, BC. The conversation was going well until they told us the earliest space for our truck and camper was September 16th. That’s way too late for us so we asked to be put on a waiting list. It would have been a two-part trip: From Whittier to Juneau then from Juneau to Prince Rupert two days later. We were proceeding with the waiting list process until they told us the price-about $5,000 to get us and the truck/camper just to Juneau. We explained to the nice customer service lady that was way above our pay grade. So we’ll drive the Alaska Highway back South through BC to the lower 48........