Our campsite is roughly 15 miles north of Homer. For the most part we are located off the beaten trail where there’s little traffic and beautiful views across wetlands. Even as I write this I hear the chatter of eagles outside near the trailer.
Once we had our morning coffee and a bit of food we headed south into Homer. I find Homer very interesting. For me Homer breaks into various categories. The two that just about every visitor notices would be “Old Town” and “The Homer Spit.” After a stop at the Visitor Center getting oriented to the area we explored Old Town. This is the old downtown section of Homer where there are a few places to eat and the various older type buildings. We checked out Two Sisters Bakery and it’s a hit. Great food and great price (considering the area). Along the Homer bypass many of the new business have come, the gas stations, Safeway (grocery store chain), a bit of fast food, and other services. Along this stretch includes The Oceans and Islands National Wildlife Visitor Center. It is a beautifully designed building on the commercial strip yet out their backdoor are a couple of miles of trails within a slough or tidal estuary.
On to the Homer Spit. This is where many people go when they head to Homer. It’s a 5 mile long spit that sticks way out into the Cook Inlet. It’s where the harbor for the city rests along with marine service type business. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention there are plenty of shops and restaurants for the tourists. There are plenty of tourists on the Spit. Too many for my taste. Parking was an issue yet we found a place at the end of the spit to park and checked out the many shops. Here there are many places to book excursion trips to see glaciers, birds, bears, whales and more. I was interested in some of the bear tours to photograph the brown bears. For roughly $750 per person you can be flown to a great bear observing location for the day. There are a few openings for the tour next week so we are thinking about it. In the meantime we would like it to be decent weather if we are to spend that amount of money for a day. Many of the shops are interesting yet I don’t do well in crowds so after an hour there we were ready to move on.
I’ll talk more about the different components of Homer in a future post.
Next stop was back to Two Sisters Bakery for a late lunch then back to the campsite. We then went to the water about ¼ miles from our campsite to check out the eagles again. Tide was high so there was not much action. Back to camp and did a few tasks that were waiting to be done.
Seeing North America 