Day 15 --Alaska

Driving back from Seward--Clouds on the mountains and snow in the upper elevations

(Pictures of Seward =====IN THE TRASH!@#!)

Today is Monday July 19, 2010. We got up very early this morning to get our showers and get everything closed up to drive the motor home over to Freightliner. Larry called Freightliner before we left to make sure they had received the new motor for the windshield wipers. They said they received it and we could drive on over to have the motor replaced. When we arrived at Freightliner, the service manager looked in the appointment book and told us we missed our appointment on Friday! Larry told him that we had called several days ahead of time to change the time from Friday to Monday as we had to far to travel to make Friday. He said they were very booked up today and probably would not get to work on our motor home until the second shift came in at 3:30pm. We were upset to say the least! Since we already had it at Freightliner, we left it(AND THE CATS) and decided to drive down to Seward since we basically had no home for the day.

Seward is about 125 miles south of Anchorage so it was about a 2 1/2 hour drive to get there today. Seward is a pretty town and sets on Resurrection Bay near the Kenai Fjords National Park. It has a huge harbor with both pleasure boats and commercial fishing boats. The majority of jobs around Seward is tied to commercial fishing.

We stopped in at the visitor's center and one of the rangers told us about the earthquake and tsunami in 1964. She said that a lot of the small communities north of Seward were greatly affected and that Seward lost about 2 or 3 streets to the ocean. The tsunami that hit Seward also hit as far south as California as well. The tsunami of 64 was worse than the most recent Asian tsunami 2004 (Indian ocean tsunami). All over the town of Seward, there are signs posted showing the tsunami escape route. The ranger was very informed about the Seward area and was very interesting to talk to. We walked around the wharf and stopped in a few shops and looked around and then drove up to the main street in town and looked for awhile. We also stopped down by the wharf and inquired about a camping area on the water. They had 3 tiers of RV spots on the water, a big majority of which had water and electric, and another area that had no hookups. We considered moving the RV down there for a few days but it's a good distance from the other side of the Kenai Peninsula which we have yet to see. We are pretty tired after our day today so we plan to stay here one more night at least to have a little down time tomorrow. The good news of the day is I took some beautiful pictures in Seward today. The bad news is I was trying to delete ONE picture on the way back to Anchorage and deleted the entire group. I am still very upset about loosing all the wonderful pictures. So basically the only pictures I have from today are of the scenery; the mountains and the waterways from Seward back to Anchorage. The mountains were beautiful again today with the clouds laying across them. The scenes where the mountains meet the water are like the photos in the travel brochures. Of course seeing them for real is so amazing.

We received a call from Freightliner at 4:30pm on our way back to Anchorage wanting to know if we left our keys for the motor home. Of course it was pretty certain that at this point of the day they had not yet touched our RV. To say we were upset would be an understatement!@#! The service manager told us when we left this morning that it would be done by 6:00pm which we knew was probably not going to happen at this point. Well to cut to the botomline---We were driving back to the RV Park tonight at 10:00pm. WHAT A DAY! The report from the mechanic was that he cleaned a part that he thought was causing the exhaust break to fail and the 'check engine' warning to continue appearing. Larry read that the generator should be serviced after 35 hrs of use and when we bought the RV it had many more hours than that on it, so he paid to have them service the gen set. We had the engine oil changed and the new wiper motor installed. The total bill was not pretty but we plan to treat our RV Dealer in Mesa to the chance to share in that expense. The RV was new but I assume it was driven to RV Shows and the gen set was used a lot. We asked the service manager at the dealership about whether the gen set needed servicing when we bought the motor home and he assured us it did not. ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH--the motor home issues are stressing me out so need to move on to happy subjects.

It rained all day again today. When we got to Seward the rain let up for awhile and by the time we got back to Anchorage it had pretty much stopped. We also took a little side trip over to Cooper Landing on the way back as it looked to be a midway point for the west side of the Peninsula. We thought we might find an RV park there that would be closer for the rest of the things we want to see over there. We drove into what appeared to be the town but found nothing for camping. We stopped for lunch at a nice little restaurant, however the place looked nicer than the food tasted. They bragged on the menu about having the best hamburgers in Cooper Landing--We are pretty sure they are the ONLY place in Cooper Landing that have hamburgers. The hamburger were not good--how can you mess up a hamburger??? Oh well it is always nice to mark one more place in the world off your 'bucket list'.