South Alaska-Part 1

Last summer (1 year ago), the 5 of us went to Alaska with the airline miles my dad had accumulated from flying around for his company. We went to Kenai Peninsula, and Denali national park. This trip was different than the others because instead of bringing our camper, we rented a small RV that we got a good deal on. The first thing we noticed when we got there at 5am, was that it was not dark out, in fact it seemed like the sun was rising very slowly. Through the whole trip it was like this, it wasn't (completely) dark there until around 2am, and the sun started to rise at about 4am. It was really weird and disorienting going to bed when it looked like it was 3pm outside.

We got our rental RV from the rental place and drove to the Kenai Peninsula, the first thing we noticed were the huge and snowy mountains. These mountains were a recurring theme in South Alaska. Not all of them were  snowy, but they were everywhere. We got there and camped in a couple different places but only one of them is worth talking about. When we got to the site we started to look at the large amount of birds that seemed to be flying around, then we noticed that all of them were bald eagles. I mean they were everywhere so it was kind of creepy. I felt like one of those kids they talk about on TV that have crows following them since childhood, except these crows were large, flesh-eating raptors. We walked down to the beach to find a group of about 20 of them. Some of them were fishing, some of them were circling above, and we saw a pair of fledglings (which were huge but I could tell because of what color they were) have a bit of a tussle over a piece of fish carcass.

My mom learned that the Time Bandit, a crab fishing boat from my dad's favorite show: Deadliest Catch, was docked on Kenai. So we went there and took some pictures, its always sort of cool seeing something in real life that you've seen on TV. We also went salmon fishing because apparently we were there during the salmon run. We got a charter for the fishing, it was cheaper than renting a boat but we didn't know jack about salmon fishing so we needed a guide anyway. Apparently salmon are cannibals, because we used their eggs as bait, so did everyone else. By everyone else you may think that I mean me and my family, not quite. We got to the fishing spot at about 7am, that was the time we had to wait until we could legally fish. We were parked (or is it anchored? I don't know) in the same spot as about 20-30 other boats, the boats were all about 50 feet apart at the most. Fishing lines were getting tangled, people were yelling at other boats, it was as chaotic as a fishing trip could be. My mom was the only one to catch a fish, so when we finished we were going to take it home. The guide (who my mom luckily made friends with by talking politics the whole time) asked for our fishing licences, which we didn't have. My mom thought we didn't need them because it was a charter. Long story short: he liked us, so he let us go without reporting it, and gave him our fish for the trouble.

That was the last thing we did when we were camping on Kenai, we headed up to Denali after that. Kenai was a really cool place, seeing all those bald eagles at once was just incredible considering that I never thought I would see even one up close in my entire life.