the journey : part one, by sea

After leaving our comfortable launch pad in West Seattle, we raced Alaska license plates up I5 to Bellingham and drove around entry lanes and ticket windows almost too late to sit in line for two hours. After putting the car in her place we checked out sleeping possibilities. We heard tell of some camping on the Sun Deck. And there we found it. Veterans had already staked out their folding deck chairs near the sides of deck, so we had to settle around a post under a plexi glass roof spotted with heaters. These are heaters like at El stops in Chicago, or kind of like the broiling part of your oven. We camped out there for four nights.
As we motored North at 20 knots we could feel the beating of the heart of darkness pulling us in. The days seemed to shrink and melt. We slept, we ate freeze-dried meals, we drank tea, read, scrabbled, and slept again.
When the sun would only tug gently on our eyelids around ten in the morning we'd rise groggy on the sundeck to tall white peaks all around. The heavy night fell around four thirty and with it, our bodies onto our stretched out plastic deck chairs, to ponder what might lay ahead as we rocked to sleep.

While there was hardly any sunlight, an old sourdough stopped by our chairs to handout a solar powered porch light. He mentioned he had tens of the suckers, cause he picked em up whenever he spotted em. Uh, thanks. Keith feigned sleep through this conversation.

We were accused of stealing some couple's Scrabble Travel Edition, but we wouldn't be tricked and kept our noses in our game.

We saw lots of young families heading back to military bases all over the state. And quite a few young recruits headed to their first Coast Guard Station.

After a great two day stay in Juneau, with friends of relatives Doug and Martina, we boarded the Kennicott which would deliver us to Homer. Although only after letting everyone else off at Whittier, did we learn there was in fact a road to Anchorage. Only Keith and I, and another clueless passenger ended up making the trip across the gulf to Kodiak, en route to Homer, which by car would have been an easy drive from Whittier.
To further highlight my geographical error, we were stranded in Kodiak for an extra thirty hours when the St. Augustine started puffing ash across our path.

We watched the Seahawks game in the same restaurant as the crew of our boat, who grew friendly with us, two of three passengers on their 748 passenger vessel.

We disembarked only an hour and a day behind schedule on January 15, to begin part two, by land.