Winter Wonderland

This trail is off limits during the summer due to high bear traffic

There are various trails throughout Anchorage for cross country skiing; it is one of the few places with groomed public trails. Last Saturday Daniela and I rented some cross country skis to give it a try, we both agree that mastering the correct technique is much harder than it looks and ended up sticking with the middle age woman technique of keeping skis planted and going straight. We asked a few locals about a loop for begginers that would take about an hour... 2 1/2 hours later we made it to the wrong parking lot, when we asked someone else how to get to the correct lot she said that it would would take about 30 mins... so we hitched a ride back. ha ha.
It was very pretty, we went through a section that is closed off during the summer because it is grizz territory; it was gorgeous. Near the end of our time we saw our first live moose here in Alaska, I wanted to take a picture but it was close enough that my better judgement, Daniela, persuaded me to keep going.
If you look at the bottom right corner of the picture you'll notice some really fat bike tires; they are about 4" wide and are used for winter mountain biking. pretty cool.

Thanksgiving

Daniela making raspberry Italian soda

 

Deep frying turkey in the snow, in our driveway

For our first exclusive Thanksgiving in Alaska we decided to switch things up a bit: we chose a Louisiana deep fried cajun recipe, I injected the turkey and let it marinate over night and then deep fried it for 1 hour. I thought that it would be really quick, but it took an hour and a half to heat up the oil and then the teperature dropped a hundred degrees once we added the turkey- it said to cook it for 36 mins, but the oil was not hot enough. The turkey was amazing! We also had dinner rolls, olives, corn, oven red potatoes, mom's fruit salad, and raspberry pie.
We were invited over by three different families for dinner but we politely refused; we spent the day, and most of the weekend, watching movies and being lazy. No black Friday for us just a nice, relaxing weekend.

Life in the arctic valley

We are getting pretty close to our first wildlife sighting; Sunday morning we found moose dropping all over our side walk. By the time we got back from church there was another pile. Today we heard some suspicious noises coming from the woods; we wanted to check it out, but the risk of being trampled is currently high.
We experienced our first "ice rain" today; Alaska roads are constantly icy, they don't lay salt on the roads but instead lay sand/gravel. Imagine the whole road being black ice; thats normal, but with the rain last night and this morning there was a sheet of ice over absolutely everything.

It looks like a clear truck bed liner over the whole vehicle

Many drivers are idiots and cars filled up the ditches. Daniela, was caught in traffic on the way to the base for almost an hour; when she got there they announced that the base was closed due to driving conditions. The university of Alaska was also closed. Walking out to the car, even the packed snow was like uneven ice. Daniela is lucky enough to have the garage so that she did not have to shave the ice off the car- as for the envoy, different story.

Mt Baldy

Highest point in all of Eagle

 Moon rising to the east

 

Pristine view of the city below

Sunset to the west of us

Today we went on a nice hike up Mount Baldy; it is about 10 miles north of Anchorage. The hike was surprisingly hard, it was a pretty direct route straight up the mountain on snow. It was well worth the effort, right as we made it to the top, to the east side of the ridge, we had the view of the sun setting over the ocean; on the other side of the ridge the moon was out. Either view had spectacular colors- not well portrayed by our camera phones.

Finding shelter

We arrived in Anchorage, AK on October 20, 2010 Daniela's plane landed at 1:20 pm and Jacks at 12:40 pm. The first few weeks we traveled all around Anchorage to find an apartment, our desired sq footage and original budget went up after seeing the first few places and we decided that we'd need a garage or car port. after seeing about 12 places we signed for the lowest level of a large house apt. We signed and paid a hefty deposit and had to wait one week to move in (Nov 1).
When we called the moving company to have our stuff shipped that day, but the soonest that he could get us in was on the 2nd- we were anxious but accepted the wait. On Nov 2 we woke up early to meet the movers, signed out of our hotel and at 9 am, an hour late, the moving van showed up. He took out four boxes and a pull up bar; when we called to have our "household goods" sent, they sent us Daniela's stuff from Missouri. We had to call a different moving company and they were able to bring the rest of our stuff two days later. It was disappointing and we didn't sleep well on our blow up mattress, but once everything arrived it didn't matter because we've finally moved out of the slums of West Valley... to the slums of Anchorage.