28 May 2016 - Totti’s Tantrum
T - We woke up to the sun beating down on the campsite. It was so lovely! And warm! Glorious warmth! It was warm enough for me to be down to a set of thermals and a t-shirt! Even Chantelle took her jumper off! Gasp!!
Our friendly neighbours came over and invited us over for a freshly brewed morning coffee! We of course gratefully accepted. We sat around camp with them and chatted for a while before dragging ourselves away to pack up camp. We still had a ways to go to Homer so we were keen to chip another 200 km’s off the distance. Mabel’s clutch was sounding nasty when we pulled up yesterday. It knocks something terrible when she is put into gear. But when in neutral with the clutch in, she sounds sweet as a kitten!
We said our final farewells to Bob and his wife Anne, and to Mandy and her wife Rhonda, and we were off. Back into the craziness of the holiday traffic.
C – After chatting about the traffic conditions with Bob and his family, we decided that we needed to not to be on the Seward Highway on Monday. Seward and Homer are popular locations for long weekend getaways from Anchorage. We had experienced enough of the insane traffic on Friday, so we decided we were definitely not going to ride on Memorial Day!
T - We were pretty well at the end of the mountain road and soon found ourselves into the more flatter section of highway. There wasn’t much to note about this part of the ride except we did see a lot of Bald Eagles. What a beautiful bird!
We had a short stop on the highway where I adjusted Mabel’s banging clutch to see if I could quieten it down, and we ate the last half of our Key Lime Pie. Yummo!
We pulled into the town of Kenai where we were offered free hotdogs, yes please, and grabbed a bottle of wine for tonight.
We pretty well just rode then for another 2 hours before finding a little track that went over a bank and into a gravel pit. Our home for the night. We were perched high on a cliff overlooking a long stretch of beach on which many many 4 wheelers and ATVs were playing. The breeze here was frigging freezing so we camped amongst some bushes.
C – Riding those last couple of hours along the highway, with the icy strong head wind, murderous traffic and Mabel’s clutch getting worse with each acceleration and gear change led to poor Totti’s mood plummeting into the gutter. Totti ranted about all three of these issues through the intercom for an extended period of time, with me playing good wife and saying ‘yeah’, ‘uh-huh’, ‘sure’. I must admit I had a couple of giggles at his expense. After finding somewhere to camp, Todd relaxed in the sun, out of the wind for a bit and in no time, a glass of wine had cheered him up! As we sat and drank our wine a pair of eagles kept circling past at the edge of the cliff, it was absolutely beautiful to see these birds of prey so close.
T - We enjoyed our wine, which we had to drink all of because it had a cork, and even though we had Dean and Janette's collapsible wine bottle gift, it just seemed right to do so! Then we crawled into the tent. I was tired and worrying about how far Mabel would get before she fell apart. Probably not the smartest idea to ride her an extra 700 km’s like this. Oh well.
Tomorrow we shall go into Homer and have some fish and chips on the waterfront. We only have about 56 km’s to go!