In what has become a bit of a routine, I took a Sunday drive with the pup in the back to get him used to longer rides and to get myself motivated to get into hiking/outdoorsy shape.  Today, I made a 250 mile round trip to Seward.  Seward is a coastal port town on the eastern side of the Kenai Peninsula.  The port is reasonably deep and protected, and being the end of the Alaskan Railroad line it becomes a popular entry port for cruise ships, cargo ships, and its main industry commercial fishing.  It’s actually prefered by some ships over Anchorage because the tides aren’t as severe, and Anchorage is a few days further by boat just to get around the Kenai.  I never been to Seward, but heard stories about it and saw a movie that used flying into Seward as a replacement for flying into Nome (I haven’t ever been to Nome, but NOONE will mistake Seward for Nome).  So, this was the destination of choice for a beautiful Alaskan Sunday … and while I barely spent 30 minutes there, I thought I would give you my impressions.

Seward is tucked into fjord.  Let me restate … its tucked into a Fjord … we have fjords in Alaska, in your face Norway.  For those of you who don’t know what that means (even if you just like saying fjord all the time), those are long narrow inlets with steep cliffs running down to the sea created by glaciers.  Seward has that definition locked in.  The town is  on one side of the water, because the mountains run directly into it on the other.  While there is a little space for the town on the town side, there isn’t much.  The mountains loooooom  over Seward like a snow covered vulture.  For the record, Seward is the jumping off point of the Kenai Fjords National Park including a drive-up glacier (though the road was closed today).

It’s a small town too, just 3000 people, and its clear that they either work doing something for the tourists or fish.  The town is filled with restaurants, hotels, all sorts of everything rentals, museums, and shops.  The port was filled with boats, but mostly those you would see on fishing reality shows – real commercial fishing boats with big nets, lines, poles, etc etc.  It also seemed like half the town was camping / RV parking sites.  Since it is still winter-ish (the first cruise ships only just passed through this past week), much of the town was still quiet; but you could see that there was alot to come.

In the end, it really was just an impression of the town.  I was there way too short of a time to do much of else.  We got there, we found the first geocache of 2013 (and Auggies 1st physical cache), we took a short lap around town, I had a soda, Auggie had a pee, and we were on our way back to Anchorage.  But on first impression, it was what I pictured it to be — beautiful, small, salty, and begging for a return trip.