Friday - 125 miles to Seward and the Ryndam
soft bed, dry sheets …

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We ride 50 miles down the Anchorage - Seward Highway, thoughts of soft beds and dry sheets billowing through our hypothermic, calorie-deprived brains …

It rained all night in Anchorage so I'm glad we were in the hostel. Wendell in his infinite wisdom decided we should take the city bus to the south end of Anchorage. This cut off 10 miles of our ride through what is essentially Everett. So we bypassed what would have been an icky ride. Alaska has a lot of paved separated bike paths, but there is no map and no signs letting you know where they are. they do weird things like the one we rode on along the Seward highway crossed in the middle of the highway. There wasn't an intersection, no light, no stop sign, no crosswalk, just boom, you're expected to cross a busy 4 lane highway and pick up the train on the other side. Maps show connections between roads with nice red lines or whatever and make it look easy, but when you get to the intersection it isn't always as easy as it looks on the map. We stood on the bridge looking down at Seward highway knowing it was where we needed to be, but not sure how to get there. We ended up riding down an onramp onto what looked like I -5. After about a mile it went down to two lanes and felt more like what we expected to be riding on. The first 40 miles of our ride was along Turnagain Arm. The wind was blowing North at 20 - 30 miles an hour. We were riding South. Knowing I wouldn't last I had Wendell ride point and I drafted him. Drafting involves riding very close to the person in front of you. So I spent most of the ride looking at his front tire. Wendell could maintain a steady pace except for the occasional gust of extra wind that would hit him like a wall. I looked up occasionally to see the pretty view, but not much. We stopped to look at the arm every now and then. Our average moving speed was about 4.5 miles an hour.


Wendell at the Anchorage Gun Club

After 24 miles a bike path started and went for the next 12 miles almost to the end of Trunagain Arm. Some of it was sheltered from the wind, but not all of it. The path is really nice, they had cool information signs and view points, but we couldn't stop too often because the wind had put us behind schedule.
One of the things I really wanted to see was the bore tide. We stopped for lunch and during that time the tide turned. It had been low tide all day, so I got to see the sticky Mud, but Wendell would not let me play with it. We actually managed to chase the bore tide on our bicycles, it was pretty cool to see the tide going out on one side of the line, and in on the other. It created a little wave, not the huge 6 foot ones they sometimes get, but enough to see it. At the end of Turnagain arm we got out of the headwind, but now we were climbing the pass. So our speed was still about 5 miles per hour. Our campground was at mile 63, 54 miles from where we got off the bus. Once again we rolled into the campground at 11PM. The campground guide said it had potable water and bear proof food containers, neither of which we could find. Finally I said 'what's that?' in reference to two little cylindrical containers. Sure enough they were the bear proof food containers. First I had to fish the garbage out of the food containers and put it into the bear proof garbage cans nearby. !!!!! >:( Then we filled up both containers they were so small. It's a good thing we were the only ones that needed them. You're supposed to put all of your cooking utensils in it too, but it was so small we couldn't fit our mess kit pots into it. After walking around looking for the water for a while, I finally decided to check out the decorative old fashioned hand pump at the entrance. Sure enough, that was the water. The thing was as big as me. Be sure to check out the picture on our web site. It had been nice all day, but it started to rain as we set up camp. The problem with cycle camping is that there is no place to get out of the rain. We cooked in the rain, ate in the rain, took out our contacts in the rain. It rained all night long. We were warm and dry in the tent, but knew that wouldn't last.


Us at Turnagin Arm

The tide is all the way out - note the mudflats behind us.


Hobbit and fully loaded bikes at Turnagin Arm


Photo of the train from Seward to Anchorage


Hobbit at the warning signs ...

Hobbit posing next to the Windy and Dangerous Mudflats signs


Wendell standing next to sunken trees

During the big Alaskan earthquake in '64, the ground sank along Turnagin Arm, causing saltwater to flow into this area of trees - the saltwater killed the trees pretty quickly.


Looking for Beluga Whales

People kept telling us to "watch for Beluga whales" on Turnagin Arm, but the tide was out. Hobbit asked, "Can you see any Beluga Whales?" when I was looking over a mud flat and I quipped, "The only Belugas out there are Beluga Moles."


Hobbit with a Beluga Whale

We stopped at a park and they had marble Beluga Whale statues coming out of the ground, so we snapped a photo of Hobbit with one of them.


The pump for water at our campground

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