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July 25, 2009, a Saturday
Valdez to near the Worthington Glacier, Alaska, USA
— A fast internet connection and photographed waterfalls
Had a normal breakfast. The clouds had small breaks with some blue visible. We haven't seen blue in the sky in along time. Prepped the RV, then departed at 10:51 with me in the RV and J following in the Jeep.

We went to the grocery store in town to drop off the RV, then we took the Jeep over to the harbor area. We walked around the marina looking for a sea otter that frequents the area. We didn't see it, but the woman at the fueling station said the otter would probably be back around 6:00.

We went back to the grocery store and did some shopping, our first grocery shopping in the states in about two months, and J was glad. We finished shopping around 12:25, and I went online through someone's open wireless network and started to set up a gallery on my photography website for images used on this website. Had lunch, then the network connection started dropping out. :(

We took the RV over to the Tesoro so we could use the WiFi from the Eagle's Rest RV Park. I finished setting up the gallery on my photography website with the images used on this website and added the URL's to the images on this website so they'd be clickable.

We went over to the marina at 5:50 to look for the sea otter. We didn't find it, but one guy who was cleaning sea kayaks said "Oscar" usually hangs around in the general area where we were looking. As we were leaving, a European woman, who was also looking for the sea otter, said other folks in her group had seen it sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon.

I dropped J off at the RV in the grocery store parking lot, then I took the Jeep to the Tesoro to fill it up.

Had dinner at 7:20 of chicken with Sharwood's Balti sauce and J had chicken with Contadina Sweet & Sour sauce. I learned about Balti Chicken while in England — it was a common dish in the Indian restaurants there. However, the Sharwood's Balti sauce had a very heavy cumin flavor and not much of the sweet flavor that I liked. J wasn't impressed with the Contadina Sweet & Sour sauce either. I did the dishes and the gray tank was rather odorous. :( We had been using "blue stuff" (Oxy-Kem) to control odors on our gray and black tanks, but we couldn't find it in Canada. So, we bought some BioSource Zymo P, which is a bacteriological odor control product, and started using it two dumps ago. J had done a great job cleaning out the shower the other day using a mild bleach solution, and that may have killed off some of the bugs that had been keeping the odors under control.

We prepped the RV and departed at 8:05 with me in the RV and J following in the Jeep. We usually drive separately if the Jeep isn't already hooked up and we're only driving a short distance because it takes some time to hook up the Jeep. Also, driving options are limited when we're hooked up because it's not possible to back up the RV/Jeep combination because the tow bar isn't designed for pushing a towed vehicle backwards.

Horsetail Falls Detail
Horsetail Falls Detail
Near Valdez, Alaska, USA
Canon EOS 1Ds Mk II, 100-400 (at 380mm), polarizer,
1 sec, f16, ISO 100
We stopped to photograph Horsetail Falls at 8:42. The conditions were very good for photographing the waterfall: solid overcast to produce nice uniform illumination. Because the light level was a bit low, I only used a polarizer to reduce glare on the wet rocks. A neutral density filter wasn't needed to get a long enough shutter speed have the water look nice. The image was converted to black and white because the rocks were almost black to begin with.

We took the Jeep to the unnamed waterfall a short distance back towards Valdez at 9:30. While it had looked nice as we were driving by earlier, it wasn't very photogenic, so we didn't spend much time there.

Because it was starting to rain and the light level had dropped way down, we returned to the RV instead of photographing Bridal Veil Falls. We left with me driving the RV with J following in the Jeep.

The right-most lane heading up to Thompson Pass was on the narrow side and the guardrail was right by the edge of the lane.

We reached a nice boondocking spot near Worthington Glacier by ~10:15, and I parked the RV so we'd have a nice view of Worthington Glacier out the passenger-side windows.

Responses

July 28, 2009, 7:20 PM
by ottmarrohe
Mom (J) you're starting to sound like Uncle Richard, cleaning with bleach and all! James, I just sent the e-mail about your blog to Josh; he'll get caught up this week.

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