The next morning we happily arose and enjoyed a few more moments by the river.
After we went through our morning paces we decided to pack up and head back to Homer; to the end of the road, and the end of our journey.
It would add a last 150 road miles to our trek, putting our straight destination mileage at 1,716 miles.
So we went down to the lovely grove of trees and turned ourselves around, headed back up the hill, and out onto the highway to finish our way through the mountains.
Eventually we hit the Kenai Peninsula again and made our way down through Cooper’s Landing. Where we caught some beautiful glimpses of the Kenai river… 😃
… as well as observed more extremely unsafe driving behavior. 😔
It was a nice and easy drive down the peninsula.
All Throughout This Area You Can See Burnt Trees From The Wildfire Last Year.
One notable thing happened on our way down though:
When we were fueling up at Fred Meyers in Soldotna, we were across the gas pump from another RV. The gentleman fueling up across from me asked if we had a coupon.
I had no idea what he was talking about, so he promptly handed me a small stack of coupons and proceeded to explain that Fred Meyer has a really sweet deal for fueling up your RV in Alaska. To promote RVs to purchase their traveling fuel from them, they have these coupon booklets that give you a nice refund on gas.
I thanked him profusely and we gave it a try.
There is an option on pump to select RV Coupon. Once the pump attendant clears the request, you can fuel up. Then you go into the attendant station and they give you back your refunded money in cash.
The poor kid at the pump must have been new, because he seemed apprehensive throughout the transaction. When I went back to The Ohana and looked at my refunded money, it was about three quarters of my overall gas cost.
😇🤑😈
Naw… I didn’t want to take advantage. 🤣
I went right back in and returned the value and waited while the manager went over the steps with him. Eventually I was happy to walk out with my much smaller refund.
Maybe he wasn’t used to having to give such a small refund for RV’s? After all, it only takes us around $30 – $35 bucks to re-fill and be flying down the road again.
But in the end- Thank You So Much to the friendly gentleman at the gas pump who let us in on this awesome tip!
Oh- and to answer how to get the RV coupons. All you have to do is go to the attendants station and ask. Usually they just give you a new coupons when they give you your refund. 😉
So a few hours later, it turned out to be a beautiful sunny day when we came over the top of Baycrest Hill into Homer.
And after our long trip I finally backed The Ohana in to our driveway to be unloaded.
It had been an amazing trip!
Yeah- our straight destination road miles had totaled 1,716 miles, but that wasn’t counting all the back and forth through and around areas looking for camp spots and stuff to do. Laura and I figured overall we had easily cleared 2,000 miles on this journey! For a shakedown, or our shakedown “Re-Write”, that was pretty dang good! Having lived here for so long, it was finally nice to have gotten to play tourist in our own state.
But now that we were finally home, there was work to do!
Geoff Murphy 9/16/2020
Nice job!!!