Monday, July 20: Day 38-Tuesday, July 21: Day 39

We left for Girl's Camp today! Matthias pulled an all-nighter at work. I dropped him off at about 12:30 a.m. this morning and picked him up at about 1:30 p.m. Poor guy. But it helped him feel a lot less stressed, ironically. He was coming as one of the two priesthood leaders, and I'm so glad he did!

Our destination was Seldovia, AK. And for those of you who aren't familiar with where this is on a map, please refer to the one I've provided for you below. It's a 5 hour drive from Anchorage to Homer and from there, you take a 2 hour ferry/charter boat to Seldovia. The only way to get to Seldovia is by boat or plane, which is the case with a lot of Alaskan towns. It has a population of about 300, 1 dentist, and when women have babies, they travel to Homer to do it. So imagine, won't you, the size of this place.

After meeting up at the church, we carpooled down to Homer, a coastal town that is famous for it's deep-sea halibut fishing charters. tt's a 5 hour drive and we planned to stay the night in an LDS church gym so we wouldn't have to make the drive so early the next morning. At the Homer "spit" (I'll talk more about that when we go to Homer another time), there was a ramp that we had to lug our gear down to pack onto the charter boat.

Since it was high tide, it was super steep. And since it was raining, it was super slick. But we perservered and after many, many trips back and forth carrying sleeping mats, 5 days worth of food, fishing poles, waders, bikes, and anything else you could possibly bring for a group of 17, we loaded onto the boat. We were all pretty wet, but in good spirits because we were ready for adventure. Here are the girls from my Sunday School class getting ready to sail away (from left to right, Haleigh, Cara, and Brooke):On the way to Seldovia, we stopped to see a couple of landmarks. One of them was this huge rock with all kinds of birds on it. And I saw my first puffin! For many fascinating facts on puffins, follow this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffins#In_culture. Because of how cold and wet it was, there weren't many around at the time of our arrival, so I didn't get any fantastic close-ups. This will have to do for now:

Here are some other shots I took from the charter boat:

This is called Elephant rock:

Once in Seldovia, it was still raining. We fortunately had some carts to push our gear up onto firm, Seldovia, ground. We had a 15 passenger cab waiting for us and we stuffed it to the brim with all our stuff and sent it on to our campsite. We walked ourselves through town and then to the outskirts where our campsite was. The challenge was keeping things dry while we set up camp. We covered all our stuff with tarps while we got the tents up. Then we put our gear in the tents we'd be sleeping in and tied the tarps to trees to create a ceiling for the eating/fire area and also for another small area where we kept all of the food. You can imagine how wet we were at this point, so we immediately got a fire going and thankfully the area under the tarp was large enough for us to comfortably sit by the fire and get dinner ready. This is what the main area looked like: During our orientation that night, we heard bird noises and I looked up at a tree not too far from our site and saw a bald eagle! There must have been a nest nearby because we saw a couple of them all throughout the week.

So even though it was technically two days, I included it in one post because it felt like one big long day with a small nap in the middle.