Reflections of My Travel

click for pix
We woke up this morning and continued on our southern course toward Valdez. We stopped in Glennallen for a hearty breakfast at a hotel (slim pickins on restaurants in them thar parts). Back on the road again, we saw signs for Worthington Glacier and decided to stop and see what it was all about. This was very exciting, our first up close glacier. We actually were able to walk right up to/on it. It was beautiful and cold and brilliantly blue. I walked through a tiny stream of the frigid meltwater, which was a neat experience. When we finally arrived in Valdez, we stopped at the visitor’s center to see what all there was to do and where we might stay. As we were getting in the car to leave the visitor’s center, we were approached by a semi-familiar looking couple. They said that they had apparently been following us because it seemed that everywhere they went, they saw our vehicle (easily identified by all of the Just Married stickers on the windows). It turns out that this was the couple that we had conversed with up on the mountain in Denali State Park 5 days earlier. They said that they had seen our vehicle there (not realizing that it belonged to us, of course), then they saw it in Denali National Park (both at Riley Creek and Savage River), then again in North Pole, Delta Junction, along the side of the road (apparently during one of our scenic overlook naps), and now here. We talked for a little while and they told us that Valdez was their last stop before heading back to Anchorage to fly home to Colorado, so this would be the end of the stalking. We laughed and went our separate ways. We decided to stay in walls tonight so we got a cabin at the Totem Inn (chosen because they had free wi-fi and I could post the pics we’ve taken so far). When we got to the room, we unloaded the car so that we could clean it back up and organize better. I did a load of sink laundry and we got a nice shower. We then headed to the grocery store to pick up some frozen pizzas to cook in our little oven and some ice cream. I was appalled by the prices at the grocery store. This was the first we had really run into a steep price difference. A gallon of milk was over $5 and a bag of potato chips was nearly $6. It was insane. We went back to the cabin and cooked up our dinner. We took some time to try to plan out some of the rest of our trip and made reservations with Pangaea to go sea kayaking tomorrow morning. I’m very much looking forward to that. It should be a good time. We spent the rest of the night relaxing and watching tv.