Another Foggy Morning. Weak Dining Choices. Let's Go Shopping!

Alaska Travelog #20
At breakfast at a gas station - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 11am

Today has been another foggy morning in Seward. Instead of lazing around the room all morning waiting for it to lift, though, we got going around 9am. So just a bit of lazing. We figure it'll be clearer up in the mountains away from the bay.

Speaking of lazing, yesterday evening was lazy, too. We got back from our amazing hike to Exit Glacier and went straight to dinner. Since  it was early-ish (only about 7pm) we had our choice of restaurants open. But at the dining choices in Seward are weak, we decided our best bet was a highly rated hamburger stand. Reader, they had a 4.5 star rating on Yelp yet served cooked-from-frozen hamburger patties. That tells you how weak the choices in this town are. Well, at least we improved upon the evening by going to an ice cream parlor afterwards. The ice cream was really good. And it was funny waiting in a line out the door in 55° weather to get ice cream.

This morning we had our usual in-room breakfast. I microwaved a couple of Hot Pockets I bought at Safeway last night, Hawk ate crackers and cheese. I tell you, if this room had an oven— like was common at small motels in New Zealand— we'd have bought better eats at the grocery store and skipped playing restaurant roulette simply to cook here.

We did a bit of gift-shopping in town before heading out for a day of hiking. Gift shops are mostly tourist traps, so we didn't expect to buy much. We were there to see if anything caught our fancy. ...Which means mostly rocks and rock art for Hawk, and commemorative stuffed animals for both of us. We bought an eagle! I'll share a photo later as I'm composing this blog at a gas station.

Yes, I'm sitting at a gas station right now. For breakfast. Well, second breakfast. ...Okay, more like brunch.

We were hungry for more eats before heading out hiking for the day, but it was before 11am so few of the town's restaurants were open yet, and they all suck anyway. (Except ice cream. But 10:45am is too early for ice cream.) So we headed to a gas station with a convenience store and ready-to-eat hot food.

The first gas station didn't have the eats we were looking for, but the second one, right next door to it, did. Fortunately Seward is just big enough to support two gas stations! 😂 I've chowed down on a beef-and-cheese burrito rolled by some guy in the back.  It was... passable... especially in a place where "South of the Border" means British Columbia, Canada. 🤣

Now it's time to get rolling toward today's adventure.

Exit Glacier and Climate Change

Alaska Travelog #21
Glacier Overlook Trail - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 1:30pm

Yesterday when we visited Kenai Fjords National Park to hike partway up Exit Glacier I noticed there were signs along the road and the lower part of the trail, indicating how much further down the foot of the glacier extended not that long ago. Today we've come back to the park to hike another trail, and I've made a point of recording bits of video showing these historic markers. Check out this 3m43s montage I've put together.

Watch on YouTube

In the video I mention "global climate change" a few times without elaborating on it. Climate change is a real and ongoing thing. The climate on this planet has been changing since long before modern humans first emerged. Consider how different things were even 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. That's natural climate change. But there's also man-made climate change.

Man-made climate change is a real and ongoing thing, too. Carbon dioxide and other substances we've been pumping into the air since the start of the industrial revolution, often called "greenhouse gases" are accelerating the rate of natural warming since the end of the last ice age. And it's not just a little bit of acceleration. Various scientific models show that man-made causes are changing the earth's climate anywhere from 10x faster to over 100x faster than has ever happened before in millions of years.

There is no serious scientific disagreement about man-made climate change. It may seem to a layperson that it's "just a theory" and "there are two sides to the issue", but that is just a distortion created by, on the one hand, propagandists and denialists who peddle disinformation for various financial reasons, and on the other hand, weak minded news media lacking both scientific literacy to sort fact from fiction and the spine to hold habitual liars to account.