Go Back to Alaska

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I’m anOrganized Romantic Extrovert

I miss it muchly, I do, I do.

I made several trips to Alaska a handful of years ago. A group of geologists held a field conference in Juneau and visited several glaciers including Hole-in-the-Wall, Mendenhall, Herbert and Eagle. We tromped around and made a choice of which glaciers to bring students to the following summer in order to do field research. We returned the next summer, did our thing, and I ventured on a few trips with Alaska Discovery. That’s when I first kayaked Glacier Bay and also ran the Tatshenshini River – at flood – in a flotilla of rafts. I returned the following summer to guide for Alaska Disco on 2 of their inn-to-inn trips where we kayaked, hiked, rode bikes, and generally enjoyed a selection of SE Alaska’s finest.

I lived in Alaska for two years in the mid-nineties. I’d like to go back to visit someday. In particular, I’d like to go back to the Kenai Peninsula.

Just being relegated to long-term goal.

I volunteered in Alaska (through the student conservation association) a couple of summers back, doing trail work near exit glacier on the kenai penisula in Kenai Fjords National park. it was the most amazing place I’ve ever been and now I have promised myself that I will move to alaska. I know that a lot of people complain about how remote alaska is but I love it. I’m not a huge people person, I’d much rather be left alone with a dog and a horse than a bunch of people :D

And got a definite invitation to come stay with her any time when she goes back to Alaska. Yay!

I love this lady. She helps my grandmother when she is down here, and when my Pop was sick and dying, she cared for him around the clock. (She is a nurse.)

Plus she knows how to grow her own food and make all kinds of useful clothes and crafts. Today she showed me these beautiful walking sticks she is carving.

And when my Pop died, she took all of his clothes, cut them up and made blankets and Christmas stockings out of them, then gave them to all of the family. Those stockings are very dear to me, and every year when I take them out, I see those familiar patterns from the shirts he wore and I remember.

I would love to go back with her this summer. Airfare is so expensive, though, and right now I only work enough to get by, so that I can be the primary caretaker of my daughter. She is too young to fly for 12 hours anyway. But this is going to happen. It’s too much of a gift to pass up, having family who live someplace so wonderful.

I was born in Alaska and lived there until I turned six. It’s been eighteen years, and I haven’t even visited once. All of my most wonderful childhood memories are of Alaska, and while I know I’m probably idealizing a lot of it, I really want to reconnect with the places and people from my past.

I want to take my future wife there, she really wants to see it.
We can also do all the touristy stuff that I never did when I lived there.