Onward to Soldotna!! We have people to see!!

Our first night was in the glamourous parking lot of a Fred Meyers (similar to Walmart, but classier). Amazing how well Sarah sleeps with the white noise of a generator in her ear.

The next day was filled with oil changes, laundry and dreams of chest waders. When will the world of unicorns and rainbows ever end?! *side note.. laundromats are not only time sucks.. they are quarter sucks… our 100 bucks in prepacked quarters from home will meet it’s end in Soldatna. I don’t think either of us anticipated the amount of time we would spend pushing quarters into those machines and hoping for the best.

While Jim did laundry at a laundromat, Sarah took the RV to a service station for some TLC. In our world, home maintenance includes things like oil changes, tire pressure and air filters. She tried to get into a Ford dealer, but as soon as they heard the word “motorhome”, they clammed up and sent us to a different local repair shop down the road. She wasn’t sure if this was the first time they ever saw a woman pull up because when she drove in, they asked if someone was going to pick her up and she said no, that this was all we had, and everyone was told to drop what they were doing to get her out of there! Sarah was also informed that this was not a minivan, and she has now graduated into the world of “big rigs” which now requires “big rig service stations.” Isn’t that cute – they called it a “big rig”. It was also a sight to see these grown men going “awwww, a puppy!” when she brought Iggy out. We got great service at Buddy’s with super friendly help and we’d go back there in a minute.. but we hope we don’t have to.. cause that would mean we were broken down.

This leg of the trip was not so much for sight seeing as for fishing and friends… so here is the long and short of Soldatna for us in recap format:

• Fishing, thinking about fishing, shopping for accoutrements related to fishing, eating Tylenol and Advil due to fishing, and some more fishing. We may or may not have filled a box with 50lbs of sockeye salmon to ship back to the lower 48.
• Dust, dirt and rocks. Not the most glamorous campground, but the company and the fishing were worth it! The first parking spot we lovingly refer to as the “Dust Bowl”. Iggy did NOT like it.
• Coffee and waffles.
  Such good coffee.
  Such good waffles.
  brew@602
• Donuts
  The Moose is Loose
• Moose
  
• Just how many times can you drive to the hardware store or to Walmart in a week. ALL THE TIMES!!

Most of our time was spent with friends and fishing, so not a lot of pictures… but here are a few!

Some land scapes and nature…

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The Moose is Loose – they have a theme…

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The real moose is loose…

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Fishing and views from the river…

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King Iggy…

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It will be really hard to leave this place and our dear friends. The amount of support and love that we receive from them is immeasurable and the primary basis of choosing Alaska for our big adventure was to see these people that we love.

Sometimes you just go where they are to be close to them… and sometimes where they are is amazing.

We can’t thank them enough for sharing this world of theirs with us, and the wealth of information that they have gleened over the years.

Sometimes a million thank you’s seems a paltry amount.