Drive to Alaska

Sean in the Yukon. Lake Kluane in Destruction Bay.

Buffalo near Liard
Caribou

The mountains near the Banff ski resort in Canada.

Hike to the hotsprings

The hot spring pool

Jared and I photo dueling on who can capture the dew on the leaves the best. Jared and Sean on the bridge on the Lochsa River in Idaho. The hotspring was in the Bitterroot National Forest.

Sean's Barrow Adventures

Its far away and fuzzy, but it is a Polar bear swimming between the beach and the ice floe in Barrow Alaska.

Update!

Our retirement home if things don't turn around! I know this beastie has been around since I was a kid so it must be durable!


Graysen catching some zzzs before the redeye flight home.



Doug decked out with his bling while we are camping on the Homer spit.



Here is our update for August. Sean is at this time working at an Arctic research facility in Barrow as their safety engineer. He got this lovely opportunity the last day of his severence package. It was a call on Monday and he had to report to work Wednesday at 8am. He has the camera and is taking pictures. We are hoping that this is a permanent gig for him. He is getting a good look at village life in Alaska. He has been invited out for whale watching, seen several polar bears and experienced a grocery store whose stock rotates based on what comes on the plane. He comes home in another week for two weeks (fingers crossed)! Then he will go back to work.

At this time our house is on the market. We are still in limbo, but I support this life change for Sean and if this becomes permanent we are considering moving closer to Barrow. For me that means the vicinity of Anchorage. Sean loves summer in Alaska, we will have to see about the winters! Especially in Barrow.

Our plan is to downsize for the time being. We will still have a home in St. George and want to save for a condo in Hawaii or some other exotic locale so in January when Sean has been in the dark for a few months he can bask in some trade winds somewhere. But I am getting ahead of myself. Right now we only know what we are doing today!!! But things are not as grim as they once were and we are still excited to see where life takes us.

Funny Story!
I admit it, life has been stressful lately. I feel no small amount of remorse that Sean has had to sell his toys. His Jeep was picked up last week by the buyer. Sean wanted me to start it since it had been sitting for a while. No problem, it started right up. The buyers didn't have AC and were driving down from up north, so they didn't come until 11PM. I went to pull the Jeep out of the garage and......."click"! I started to panic as I am totally ignorant when it comes to auto maintenance. Long story short.......NEVER! start a vehicle when not being in it!!! I crashed the Jeep into the workbench (thank goodness it did not end up in my storage room INSIDE the house!!). The winch took a big bite out of the workbench. After a panic attack and a long string of curses....yeah the neighbors may have thought I was a psycho chicken with all the "cluck" words I was saying. But the Jeep made it, the third stall is empty and thank goodness all is well! My husband now affectionately calls me Crash.

Take care everyone!

Scenery from the Seward Highway.


Mom's flowers. We just don't grow them so vibrant in the desert.



Some Lupines and driftwood. Sean and I take photos wherever we go and them have some blown up and make black and white prints to hang on the walls. We have some impressive conversational pieces.




Jared still has his super hero pose. I am not sure if he perfected that in high school or college, but as of yet, he has the pose but no super powers.





Our haul of halibut. Mom caught the biggest one. She does every time!!! But I got her back. My gloves got wet and my arthritis kicked in so that my fingers were inflexible so she had to help me reel in my 30 lb "minnow"!

One of Sean's fine halibut.


Our fiesty little deckhand tasting a bit of herring "sushi"! He kept us laughing all morning.



Sean catching his first fish of the day.




Sean and Graysen

Sean and I on the bluff overlooking Homer after a couple of days in the motorhome.

Sean and Graysen right before we boarded the charter at 5:45 AM


Mugging it up as tourists on the boardwalk in Homer.

Eagle in Kenai sitting on a post in the back yard.

Me fishing on the Kenai. No waders for me, just rolled up jeans, my sun hat from St. Lucia and flip flops. We fished in the water until midnight at which point I could feel nothing below my legs! And though we caught some lovely stick and log fish, alas no salmon!