Our visit to the cosmic hamlet by the sea

A couple weeks ago, we visited Homer, Alaska, which is the halibut capitol of the world.  Homer has a way of stealing people's hearts and it has lots of cute descriptions.  According to Wikipedia, "one of Homer's nicknames is "the cosmic hamlet by the sea"; another is "the end of the road". A popular local bumper sticker characterizes the town as "Homer - A quaint little drinking village with a fishing problem."  While in Homer, we stayed at a place called Land's End.  Back in 2006, we visited Land's End in England while I was in my first trimester of pregnancy with Liam.  I hope to someday visit Land's End, Maine. 

My Alaska friends told me that Homeer was a must see, but when I asked for activity suggestions, no one had any.  I am a planner by nature and couldn't fathom visiting somewhere with two small, active boys who like to be kept busy without activities acheduled.  I researched and found lots of tours to Kodiak Island to view bears, but these trips run upwards of $600 PER PERSON, and include being on an island with LOTS of grizzly bears for up to 8 hours.  The websites mentioned not approaching the bears and I couldn't get the visualization of Ben yelling "doggie" while running towards the bear and getting picked up and carried away out of my mind.  There were lots of fishing charters, but they usually were a minimum of 4 hours.  Both Ben and I get seasick and could never survive a fishing charter and Dave didn't want to leave me alone to go fish.  I started the trip with trepidation that we would be bored.  Our hotel was on the Homer Spit, which is 4.5 miles long and about 1.5 miles long. 

We survived the 4 hour drive, which took over 6 with boys who got a bit stir crazy.  We discovered this view from the room:

On a clear day, this is what we could see:

I don't know why I was so worried.  The boys were so excited to be there.  They could have spent days doing nothing but throwing rocks in the water.  They didn't really care about anything else while we were there.

As far as us, there were lots of interesting things to see:

We even saw a sea otter at our hotel beach.

That wasn't the only wildlife we saw.  We saw too many bald eagles to count, and even saw a bald eagle nest.  At the Alaska Islands and Visitor's Center (free and awesome) we took a walk on the outside trails and discovered that Alaska has cranes (this one had a baby):

Homer had a very cool atmosphere, and all that worry about things to do were for nothing.  I would love to go back before we leave Alaska.