Every Day is a Gift!
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of staycation is “a vacation spent at home or nearby.”
There are so many fun things to see and do near where we live that we decided to stay home this summer instead of wandering in the RV. Here are just a few things we’ve enjoyed so far this summer.
Happy New Year!! 2013 was a great year for wandering!
This year we checked off one of the biggest items on our bucket list: from May to September we made the trip of a lifetime to Alaska and back in our RV. In the fall we visited a beautiful COE park in West Point, Georgia. I’ve already posted about those trips in previous posts on this blog so here are a few photos from our January 2013 journey to south Georgia and North Florida.
We started 2013 with a short trip to three different parks. The first was Little Ocmulgee State Park in Helena, Georgia.
Our main destination was a week in the United States Forest Service campground in Salt Springs, Florida.
Our final stop was at one of our favorite parks, Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida.
So where do think we will be off to in 2014? Stay tuned for more.
Not all of our wandering is to far away places like Alaska or the Yukon. Sometimes we wander close to home. On Monday, we hitched up the Titanium for a road trip to Auburn, Alabama to watch the south’s oldest football rivalry between Georgia and Auburn this coming Saturday. We decided to take a few extra days and explore a new to us Corps of Engineers park on West Point Lake in West Point, Georgia just off of I-85 near the Georgia/Alabama line. It’s great traveling during the week during the off season. We are almost the only ones here.
We spent three relaxing nights in site 113 in the campground with no other campers in our loop. The trees were wearing their fall colors and the sunsets were spectacular.
Our only neighbors were the geese.
R Schaefer Heard Campground on West Point Lake is one of three Corps of Engineers campgrounds on the lake. Our site is about 40 feet from the lake and like most COE parks we have a large site with plenty of room between our site and the ones on either side. Our site is a paved, back in site with water and electric hookups, a tent pad, fire ring, picnic table and a beautiful lake view. For more information about the park or to make reservations you can go the Recreation.gov site for R Schaefer Heard
Although we left Tok, Alaska almost a month ago, our memories of Alaska will never leave us. Here, in no particular order, are a few photos of some of our favorite places and adventures.
Our favorite place was Oceanside RV Park in Haines, Alaska where we could sit and watch for whales, watch eagles fly by, and watch the ferries and cruise ships sail by.
The most exciting and most memorable experience of the entire trip was the South Face McKinley flight-seeing tour and landing on Ruth Glacier with Talkeetna Air Taxi.
We loved all of the boat trips we took.
Driving to the Coldfoot, sixty miles north of the Artic Circle was a drive to remember.
Catching Halibut and watching the sunset in Ninilchik, Alaska.
Denali National Park.
Driving the Top of the World Highway, panning for gold, going for a train ride on the Alaska Railroad, watching for wildlife on the side of the road, seeing the Fireweed blooming everywhere, seeing glaciers off in the distance and up close are all highlights of the trip we will never forget.
Every day was memorable, every day was special, every day we saw something spectacular.
Day 82: Monday, August 5, 2013
Our original plan was to spend 3 nights in Valdez and then start heading back home. We liked it here so much we ended up spending 5 nights.
We couldn’t pass up our last chance for fish and chips so we had lunch at Old Town Burgers. My halibut and chips were delicious and Henry enjoyed his fish tacos.
We met a great group of folks on the boat yesterday who told us there was a mama bear with four cubs on the way to the fish hatchery. Of course we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see a bear so we took a drive back to the hatchery. We took Blondie down to the water and she wasn’t sure what to make of the fish.
As we drove back from the hatchery Henry spotted a black bear on our side of the road. We pulled over to the side of the road and watched the cub follow his mama back into the woods. With her cub safe and sound mama made several trips to retrieve dead fish from the creek bank to take back to the cubs. While this was all going on a Bald Eagle was preening on the top of one of the trees. After watching the bears for a long time we got ready to leave and saw a golden eagle fly overhead.
It was a great day to end our stay in Valdez. We will now begin our journey back home with one more night in Alaska before entering Canada to head south.
Wandering Dawgs 