Downtown Seward at 6 pm...

... on a weekday in the winter. Rush hour took about ten minutes. Not quite like Fort Lauderdale.

Here are the boats I came to check...

... m/v Chugach had exhaust risers from DeAngelo Marine Exhaust, newly installed, and I wanted to see that they were working okay. They were. It was not our practice to travel that far to check on an installation, but Kenai Fjords Tours had invited me primarily to look at m/v Coastal Explorer's exhaust system, and propose means to resolve a heat problem with a competitor's product. Eventually, we did.

Looking South from the end of the road...

... you can't quite see the ocean because the bay curves between the mountains.

I guess it's not really a bay, but a fjord. Starkly beautiful by any name.

The end of the road at the end of the road at...

... the end of the road, looking North toward Seward in the far distance.

Downtown Seward...

at noon on a weekday, looking East. It gets busier in the summer, with tourists.

In the far, far distance, to the right of the old railroad station and the tree, is a shipyard, and up the valley beyond, a prison.

I had come to Seward...

to make measurements on a couple of boats. The huge raven lolling around the dock didn't seem to be scared of anything, least of all me.

Along the Turnagain Arm...

... part of Cook Inlet. The name seems appropriate, as the water seems to turn, again and again. The highway follows it for its entire length, skirts the end, then climbs to a pass.

I was dumbstruck by the scale of the place. Okay, I'm dumbstruck a lot anyway, but it's, well, big.

Here, I'm maybe halfway along the Arm, looking back toward Anchorage, which is on the other side of the distant gap between the mountains.

I had expected to take just a couple of hours to make the trip. The highway is excellent. I called my customer a couple of times to report that I would be 'later' arriving, because I kept stopping to take in the view.

The second morning...

... dawned bright and sunny at the Millenium hotel, home of the Iditarod, right next to the Anchorage Seaplane Port, frozen hard. After breakfast of eggs and reindeer sausage (excellent), I set out for Seward, ~125 miles away by highway, less as the crow flies. The crows weren't flying; it was 27 degrees F outside.

The first night's hotel room...

... was eminently satisfactory. As would have been a warm Dumpster. I had flown from Fort Lauderdale, to Chicago, to Seattle, and then to Anchorage, all in one day.

The camera didn't do justice to the bright colors and patterns of the bedspreads.

The moose- themed lamps just flat would not fit in my suitcase.