It was a socked-in, misty kind of day today but I needed to find a bank and withdraw some cash (most non private campgrounds only take cash) and I also needed to find a pay phone. One of the things that popped into my head last night while I couldn't sleep was the length of time we have been...and will be...in Alaska. I needed to call our travel insurance company and get a "top-up" for the extra time we will be here. The policy we have allows for multiple trips of 30 days or less...since it is obvious we are going to be in Alaska (i.e. the USA) longer than that, I had better ensure we are covered. So, with umbrella in hand, I headed out, leaving Steve to go through the multitude of pictures we took yesterday on our Kenai Fjord tour.
Well, I certainly got my exercise this morning...I had no problem finding a bank (okay, I missed it the first time and had to backtrack a few blocks) but finding a public pay phone was another story! I don't have an international plan on my Rogers cell...so I didn't want to use it...and I hadn't bothered to activate our Tracfone for the short time we are in the USA. All I needed was to make one phone call but there were absolutely no pay phones around...and believe me, I looked! I asked numerous people who told me..."there might be one here....or here..." and I walked and walked from one end of town to the other. Finally I gave up...I guess public pay phones are becoming a thing of the past now that most people carry cell phones.
I guess we are going to have to buy an airtime card and activate the Tracfone, so Steve and I drove to the visitors center for one last try at a pay phone...no luck...no more pay phones around. We stopped at Safeway and I picked up a Tracfone air card and then Steve dropped me off...with my laptop...at the public library so I could use their free Wi-Fi. The library was busy with people taking advantage of the Wi-Fi so I ended up asking a young couple if I could join them at their table. It turned out to be the girl who works in Safeway that I had chatted with the other day. She and her boyfriend are students from Oregon who thought it would be fun to spend the summer working up in Alaska.
I finally managed to activate the Tracfone and a very nice librarian let me use one of their research rooms for privacy so that I could call Pacific Blue Cross in Vancouver. Once that was taken care of, I managed to get one blog post written and then decided to head home.
I arrived just as Steve was about to walk up to the library to see how I was doing. He wanted to go for a walk, so I joined him...he took a few pictures around town. This is the Alaska Sealife Center...This end of town (south end) is the main part of town housing lots of quaint shops and restaurants along a main street. The library, police department and town administrative buildings are also located in this area. The northern end of town is where the harbor is located...all of the tour boats and fishing boats depart from there. The cruise ships also dock there when in port.
We stopped at the Seward Brewing Company for a beer...we love checking out the local breweries......and then continued our walk...
They have a very nice modern library (up top) with a museum below. Pretty fancy siding on the outside of the building...
Once home, we hunkered down inside for the rest of the day and evening...I guess we have lost all of the great weather we had experienced over the last month and are now into "typical" Alaskan weather! With the long days of clear skies and sunshine since arriving in Alaska our 446 watts of solar panels have done the job...now it's time to break out the generator.
This is the Radiance of the Seas leaving Seward...
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