We had a plan

The plan was to set up camp in Denali National Park, hike for a day, then drive through the night to hike across Glaciers in Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park on the Eastern Side of the state, then circle back through Kenai Peninsula and end our trip in Anchorage. 

Things did not go as planned. 

By the time we pulled into Hope, Alaska, we were out of ideas. We were halfway through our trip, but only 30 miles from where we had started. Our itinerary was useless and our phones didn’t have service. We had only found the town of Hope thanks to a guide book and a faith that we actually were where we thought we were on the map.

It could have been anywhere, but Hope was our last... hope. Yes. I hear it. We pitched our tent somberly along banks of the sound. Despite the gorgeous backdrop and the lush forest, I couldn’t shake that FOMO feeling. We had left room in our rough itinerary for the unknown, but with a finite amount of time in Alaska, the fear that we were going to miss out or waste time began to loom large. 

First things first - find food so that our hangry alter egos don’t call the shots. Then, figure out what to do next. 

We decided to treat ourselves to the only restaurant in town, and as we sat in the cozy diner, surrounded by hot coffee and hearty meals, we contemplated…. staying. Perhaps we were too focused on what was next and we weren’t paying enough attention to where we were. And where we were was pretty great. Maybe we’d stay an extra day in Hope; hiking the shoreline, exploring the forest, and inventing new gooey chocolate desserts around the campfire.

The pace of the diner was such that the waitress and cooks had time to chat us up and hear about our plan. 

“You’re staying in Hope?” they asked incredulously. “....why don’t you go to Homer?” 

Homer had crossed our minds when we were originally planning our trip. But at the time it had been too far South and came with too many tails of tourist traps. But now we were only an hour away… 

Suddenly we were back. We packed up camp in record time and drove down the peninsula, talking through the plan that the diner’s cook staff had helped us devise. Find Captain Mike. Hire a fishing boat to take you to an island. Camp.

Once we arrived in Homer, everything went we’d expected. We found the shop, and the woman who seemed to be functioning as part-receptionist / part-air-traffic-controller for the fleet humored us when we burst in the door and said, ‘where can a boat take us, tonight.’ After consulting the topography, and the tides for the next 48 hours, it was decided that if we could be ready in 1 hour, we could catch a ride to an uninhabited finger of the Kenai Fjords National Park and be picked up late the next day. 

One hour…. GO.