Tuesday (or should I say Mooseday!?), October 14, 2025
Good morning!! We slept in a little bit today, getting up around 7ish rather than 6ish and followed our regular morning routine of coffee, chatting, journaling, and, for me, at least, playing word games. I play several on-line word games pretty much every day to try and keep my brain healthy and working. Waffle, Wordle, Connections, Strands and Quartiles. Then I also play the mini crossword through the Apple News app (that’s where Quartiles is, too), along with Sudoku and their Emoji game (which is really hard!). THEN, later I play Jeopardy, Question of the Day and Puzzle of the Day through Alexa. I got Kathi to join me today. I even got her to play Song Quiz with me even though she tells me that she really hates this one!!
The weather today is beautiful. When looking at the weather app prior to our flights, it looked like it was going to rain every day of our trip. Turns out however, that the only time it has rained is during the night or early in the morning before we are ready to go out. We always feel like God smiles on us for our trips and blesses us with good weather. This trip has proved to be no exception. We showered and dressed, grabbed a few snack items and hopped into the car for today’s outing. Our destination for the day is the Pratt Museum, which is a natural history museum here in Homer that also has a few trails surrounding it. On our way down the hill, we came around a corner and there was a big bull moose in the middle of the road!! I have been hoping to see moose since we arrived and here one was!! He turned off the road and went up someone’s driveway. Kathi followed him so we could try and get photos but he was way faster than us and disappeared into the brush. I got a couple of pics, but nothing very clear. But we were very excited!! Out of the blue, Kathi made a prediction that we would see three moose today, and, by golly, she was RIGHT!! More on that later.
We stopped off at the post office first so that I could mail off some postcards that I wanted to send to my grandkids, then we went back to Ulmer’s so that I could try and find a gift for Beckett. I had already found something for Margo (a cute little skirt) and for Theo (a pair of rainbows with sports balls all over them), but still needed something for Beckett. Ulmer’s was a bust but as we drove by a bookstore on our way to the Pratt Museum, I asked Kathi to pull in because I thought I could find an Alaskan themed book for Beckett now that he is reading. Success! I found a children’s illustrated book about the Iditarod. Perfect! This bookstore had an entire section devoted to banned books. This section included "The Color Purple" and "To Kill A Mockingbird" which were required reading when I was in high school!
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| Banned Book Section |
We stopped at the Zen Den Cafe for some coffee and sat in there for a bit for drink it and so that I could eat the chocolate croissant that I ordered, then on to the Pratt Museum.
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| Skeleton of a Bering Sea Beaked Whale |
Upon entering the Pratt Museum, the first thing one notices is a fairly large skeleton hanging from the ceiling. After paying our admission fee (we get the discounted senior rate these days!), I asked what the skeleton belonged to. The woman at the desk told us that it is the skeleton of a beaked whale that had washed up on shore. Apparently beaked whales are rarely seen because they live deep in the ocean and exhibit reclusive behavior. I found it interesting that the bones in the fins actually look like the bones of a human hand. The museum has the skeletons of many sea creatures along with taxidermied mounts of mammals and birds native to this area. There is a very interesting exhibit about the Exxon Valdez oil spill (11 million gallons of crude oil was spilled) that occurred in 1989 that had devastating effects on marine wildlife and affected over 1300 miles of shoreline. There is also an exhibit about coast guard rescues and how long a person can last in the frigid waters in this area if one should be unlucky enough to be on a sinking boat. They have survival suits available that you can put on to experience what it might be like to get into one before your boat sinks. You are encouraged to try and get into it in no more than 30 seconds. Kathi got into the suit but was not able to get it zipped up. To be fair, the zipper pull appeared to be gone, but I’m not sure how one would have the dexterity to pull it up because the hand portions of the suit resemble claws rather than fingers!
We watched her (no rack on this one) for quite a while. I’m sure she was aware of use because she appeared to look our way a number of times, but I remember reading somewhere that their eyesight is really quite poor, so I’m guessing she heard us rather than really saw us. She didn’t appeared to be too bothered by us, because she didn’t run off and eventually she laid down. We couldn’t do the entire trail because it looked to me like she laid down right on the trail!
After walking a bit more on a different trail we returned to the car and decided to make our way to The Homestead restaurant, which had been suggested to us by the clerk in Nomar’s, for dinner. She told us that they have excellent food and, in particular, have oysters, which Kathi has been wanting since we got here. Their menu is mainly New Orleans style food and it was delicious. Kathi got her oysters and she and I split a 1/2 pound cheeseburger with some scrumptious and perfectly cooked potato wedges. Kathi also got a pomegranate cocktail, which she said was quite tasty. We also had a very friendly and accommodating server. This has been the only meal that we have eaten out since we have been here and it was well worth it.
We hopped into the car and started the drive home. We hadn’t been on the road for long when I looked to my right and saw a moose at the foot of a driveway. I wasn’t sure if it was a REAL moose or if it was a statue or carving of some sort. I told Kathi what I saw and she said, “should I turn around?” and I said yes. So she pulled into a driveway to turn around and as we were traveling back the way we came, sure enough, the moose ran across the road in front of us! This is moose #3! Unfortunately he ran down the road away from us and my camera was in the back seat, so I was only able to get some video of it’s rear end as it ran from us with my phone before it veered off of the road and into some brush. A three moose day!!
Once back in our cottage, we settled in for our evening routine of journaling, photo editing and sharing. We also watched one more episode of “The Morning Show”, then called it a night.
“Travel isn’t about checking places off a list-it’s about collecting stories worth telling”
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