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“We’ll make our own history,” he said, a good long while before asking her “Would you like to have more adventures with me?”
“Yes, of course!” she said.
So their families and closest friends gathered on the hottest day of the year.
Five years. Time flies. Hearts deepen. Affections widen. Romance grows. Respect multiplies. Blessings. Challenges. Successes, triumphs, joy. Laughter. Beautiful smiles. Favorite phrases and lilting voices.
Five years. Adventures. History.
We took a drive this evening …
And we went through this tunnel …
Which isn’t dramatic at all, but I enjoyed the pictures and wanted to share them.
At one point during our trip I counted four Dunkin Donuts within eight miles. I don’t really have a point for that either, other than to point out that Waffle House has some catching up to do. Wikipedia tells me there are about 1,700 Waffle Houses. A story from boston.com says there are 7,200 Dunkins. They have a lot of catching up to do.
Anyway, the purpose of our trip this evening was to eat dinner with our friends Paige and Kevin. Paige took our engagement photos in the middle of a nor’easter. She laughed about that tonight. She took our wedding pictures on the hottest day of the summer. I laughed about that tonight, too. Everyone laughs! And you can do that when the weather is mild enough to dine on the back deck of a Victorian house that has been turned into a restaurant. That place is formal about casual dining.
Here’s Paige and The Yankee:
Things to read … because reading always makes for casual dining.
If it is World Cup time it must be time for more stories about oppressed people who work under a multi-multi-billion dollar international entity: Pakistan workers fire ‘Brazuca’ ball to Brazil
Veterans bid farewell to D-Day beaches after emotional tributes
So this gentleman slipped out of his nursing home and traveled to France. Well, the Royal Navy, for whom he sailed, says “Life without limits,” so this makes sense: Hove veteran disappears for Normandy trip.
I’m a bit surprised this is still the case, Web TV soon to beat terrestrial reception in the US:
The percentage of US households with a television that relies exclusively on an antenna for television programming reception (6%) is about to be eclipsed for the first time ever by the percentage of households relying only on the Internet for TV programming (5%).
It seems it won’t be the case for long.
New head honcho on the Bulldogs’ hardwood … Samford Names Padgett Head Basketball Coach
I forgot this panorama yesterday. It is almost like I felt you might have, perhaps, seen enough of this beautiful scenery and didn’t want to burden you with any more of Denali. Who could get tired of this, though?
As always with panoramas, click to embiggen.
We left Denali today, drove back to Anchorage, cleaned most of our clothes and repacked, this time for the airport. Our Alaskan adventure has, sadly, come to an end.
Cheers to our good friends and wonderful hosts:
They are sweet people and have been wonderful to us as always. And they are terrible enablers. We would have done none of this adventure without them. They’ve only been in Alaska for about five months and they already come off as experts, at least to us. Adam’s work keeps his attention far more than a 40-hour work week, but I hope they get to go and do and see more and more of the area; it is surely beautiful.
Today, Adam is already in France and now Jessica is joining him there. He’ll be jumping as a part of the D-Day anniversary festivities next week, which is some incredible news for him. To catch up, Jessica will be flying with us to Seattle. We are due back in New York at around 1:30 tomorrow. Her trip will, really, be just getting underway. Leaving from Anchorage after midnight to fly to Paris and take two trains to the English Channel is just about the worst red eye flight you could imagine.
If my math was correct she’ll be traveling for almost 31 hours. Of course, she’ll make it halfway around the world, but still.
Her layover in Seattle is ridiculously long, so we bought her way into the Delta club. I insisted. Better chairs, more plugs, no crowds, free snacks, private restrooms. The one in Seattle has showers, apparently. For all of the driving around and putting up with us she did, she deserves to not spend almost eight hours as an airport refugee.
As we’re sitting in the airport, waiting on the plane, listening to these guys talk about their work schedules on the north slope — the real frontier — I realized something: This is the first time that I have seen darkness since Tuesday of last week in Wilton. Every waking moment it has been daylight or something vaguely resembling twilight. It wasn’t creepy until just this moment …
Anyway, here are the last of the scenic Alaskan pictures — I have some random shots that’ll land on the Tumblr site eventually — but these are the last mountain shots. It has been a wonderful trip, and they tell us we have to come back to see the other Alaska, the winter Alaska. Wouldn’t that be neat? I bet all of these mountains would look different then!
The only two bears we saw:
But this guy was the best animal in the entire 49th state:
We booked a tour at Husky Homestead, home of Jeff King, the four-time Iditarod champion, and his many dogs. At first, I was a tiny bit skeptical. Learning about the Iditarod would be interesting, but Jessica and The Yankee were more interested in seeing the puppies.
They did not disappoint. And they’ll win you over. Cuteness follows. You step off the shuttle and they thrust dogs right into your hands:
Those puppies are all about six weeks old. We’re told we are a part of their training. We’re socializing the animals. They should be paying us for our help!
This is Chase, he gave us the general idea of the place, introduced us to a few of the 60 or so dogs there, including a couple of champion huskies and told us about their general life with the mushmaster. Some turn into competitive sled dogs, others get passed along to a more domestic lifestyle. For now, they’re all pulling stuff. In the winter they drag a sled. Right now, as we were there, they hooked up nine or 10 to a four wheeler and the dogs ran like the kibble bowl was on fire. The rest were loudly jealous.
The short version: they’ve got it pretty good.
This dog is already a champion, and at a young age. King said she could be one of the best ever before she’s done.
This one is a couple of months old. Each litter is given a theme name. This litter is named after Jeeps. This is Cherokee. Or Wrangler. Hard to keep them straight:
King has a nice patter as he talks about running the races. I have some video of this I’ll be putting together in the next few days. Be sure you come back to check it out. It is informative and entertaining.
In the afternoon we went out riding four wheelers. There’s a large parcel of land that abuts the national park that is private land. The story goes there was a coal operation there when the park was federalized. And that was in a time when the government wouldn’t just snap things up. So the mining continued. When that played out, the land stayed private, and now there are ATVs.
And this guy is our guide. What could go wrong?
He was good, a personable fellow, a fine guide. He didn’t drive fast enough.
He took us up close to views like these, though:
We saw the train on our way back to the lodge:
More mountains:
And a moose — unconcerned on the side of the road. I walked to the center line on the road before the moose would worry about me. That’s, what, 15 feet? Not a bad evening find.
Tomorrow we head back to Anchorage and, much later tomorrow, back to the lower 48.
We are visiting here for the weekend, which requires a drive about four hours north of Anchorage.
That means that just over … there … somewhere … is Mt. McKinley, the highest point in the country. Jessica drove us to Denali because Adam is on his way to France for work. Some kind of life, no?
The drive was, of course, beautiful. Lots of verdant scenes dotted by small towns and pure-Alaskan wide spots in the road. We saw some wildlife, but not the bigger animals we were seeking:
Also, there are mountains.
I’m taking a lot of pictures of mountains. I’ve noticed. But I’m not the only one:
Today we took a hike alongside the Savage River, which we saw at an elevation of 2,780 feet. Here’s The Yankee:
Perhaps she was taking pictures of a small thing:
Here’s what the hike looked like:
The water, snow melt that was probably 15 minutes old, was perfectly clear.
The rock formations through this little valley are some of the oldest on the continent. The Outer Range of the Alaskan Range are thought to be somewhere between 600 million to more than a billion years old. That little river is believed to be even older than the mountains.
The rocks feature schists, blended ribbons, of quartzite, mica, slate, marble, greenstone and phyllite.
OK, fine, one more mountain shot.
Oh, last thing. We had an Auburn family reunion today. I put the picture on my War Eagle Moments blog. I also met a nice lady from Birmingham as well. She goes to church, she said, with some of my Samford colleagues.
It is a small world, even in big Alaska.
