The Homer Spit and a fish dinner in camp.

Today we awaken to sunlight and clear skies, but it does not last – in a few hours we are dealing with the same low clouds as yesterday, and by the late afternoon a light rain begins to fall.

Jim5 and Mike in Homer

A relatively small cruise ship, looking big in little Homer, enters the bay and eventually docks at the spit.  The rumor is cruise ships won’t be visiting Homer in the future because they prefer visiting ports where they operate the major retail stores.

Marcia has learned to poach eggs in the microwave, and we have a rare hot breakfast.  Soon after we are on the road exploring the historical area of Homer and stumble across the Two Sisters bakery, where we stop for a very good late morning break.  We visit a modern museum of the island existence in this end of Alaska and the Aleutians, walk a tidal nature trail, and end up at Captain Patties for clam chowder.  At the end of the spit we find little but restaurants and charter fishing offices, and a few average gift shops.  The beached boats suggest commercial fishing used to be big here but has been replaced mostly by tourism and fishing excursions - perhaps also unemployment?

We are back in camp about 2:30 PM with a light sprinkle.  The motorhome caravan in our park has moved on, lessening the WiFi demand and I’m able to update the blog a bit.  Marcia works on her gourds, and out the window spots ptarmigan.  (According to legend, the town of Chicken – see July 27^th post - was supposed to be named ptarmigan, but nobody could agree on the spelling, so they went simply with Chicken.)

At 5:30 PM the group gathers on the back deck of the campground office for a dinner featuring halibut caught by our caravaners and prepared excellently I think mainly by Patty and Tom and Jim5.  It is raining intermittently so I load up our plates and take them to the trailer where we are joined by Larry and Martha for a very fine dinner, and stories of Larry’s strange North Carolina heritage.  It seems to explain many things.