Travels 2011 #2

 Hello again, OK – I’m on a roll now. On May 11th, after being in Washington for over a month, Joyce and the two of us flew to Ketchikan, Alaska where we were picked up by a seaplane and flown 60 miles northwest to Thorn Bay on Prince of Wales Island. Jim and Jeannie McFarland have a wonderful resort on this beau ful bay called McFarland’s Flotel. Joyce went to college with these two and has been spending me in Thorn Bay for over twenty years. I actually had been there twice before, long ago, but it was Mike’s first trip. Google it.....very cool place. We stayed in one of the mini lodges that are on land, overlooking the floating home/business of Jim and Jeannie. The actual town of Thorn Bay is a couple miles away by boat and has no restaurants or bars....but it does have a liquor store and nice market. No going out to eat on this vacation but that is no problem. The cabins have all you need to do it yourself and we had a boat to do our shopping and other ac vi es. Like fishing.....though we didn’t do much of that. Mostly we did clams, lots of crabbing, and catching sea cucumbers at low de. We had some very low des during our stay and got lots of sea cucumbers! Any of you who have ever seen these creatures probably wonder why in the world we would want to catch them and I will do an email with photos and let you know in a bit. The weather in Seattle had been pretty bad and we expected worse in Alaska but it was actually quite nice. We only had a couple days of rain and more than a few days that were sunny. We were able to go on a few day trips by car to various places on the island. The one pictured here was to Craig, which is on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island. There are totem parks and we had a great lunch near the waterfront. There was s ll lots of snow on the peaks....beautiful.

We saw lots of deer by the side of the road but no bears. It’s a wild and wonderful and very large place. The island boasts over 2,000 miles of roads! I’m going to do a couple more emails from our Alaska trip and show some other places and stuff. I’ll get caught up eventually to where we are these days! Aloha, Gayle and Mike