Welcome to Alaska
First of all, curtains: the third best thing after bears and lemon sorbet. I was so excited about Alaska, I completely forgot that summer here means that the sunset and the sunrise are so damn close together, it doesn\’t get completely dark. Newfound appreciation for curtains and being able to read time.
We had a bit of a rough start this morning. Two of the couchsurfers we arranged to stay with during the conference cancelled and we spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how we would work around our budget if we needed to add 7 days in a hostel/hotel.
Here is where I need to introduce the people we are currently staying with. I don\’t want to share people\’s names, but I can say that this is a house with an open door, warm people and K – a girl that cooks, sings and makes the most amazing pink lemonade in the world! W, the couchsurfing correspondent of the hosuehold (and K\’s dad) invited us to stay here for the duration of the conference and, just like that, solved all our problems. We have a room to ourselves and we are meeting new couchsurfers every day.
So, with that solved, we joined C and went to a shooting range. Yup. I also forgot about the guns being a totally everyday thing… So we got our earplugs, put some safety specs on and watched C prepare his AR10 and AR15 rifles while his workmate was emptying his AK47 downrange and the guy on our right was trying to work out how to load his p90 sub-machine gun (which looked like a hockey stick). Oh, and then we had a go too. I now know how it feels to fire a gun (and it\’s pretty damn fantastic) and Bert refreshed his competition target-shooting memories and he is pretty impressive – that\’s the one to call in a zombie apocalypse emergency, not me. I get too excited.
We shot some arrows with his longbow and admired his beautiful (and terrifying) compound bow. People go bowhunting here. They can kill most animals with a single arrow and they will die within seconds. Despite my views about hunting, I can appreciate those who hunt with skill, not for trophies and show respect to the animals they take by using every part they can.
But the pork ribs were being smoked back home, so we headed back to take care of that. Bert and C had a generous amount and I had a cheese sandwich. Right after that, we both decided that it\’s the best time to play \’crack the egg\’ on the trampoline with K. Oh, that cheese sandwich was not happy about that… But how fun!
For the rest of the day we helped out with some house and garden work, took a bike ride to the supermarket, cooked an enormous amount of pasta and made two lots of pink lemonade. And suddenly it was 11pm and the sun started setting.. It\’s 00:50 as I am writing this and there is still some light out there.
We are enjoying our new home for the next few days and we are very grateful to our hosts.