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.