Alaska 2026: My Favorite Photo of the Entire Trip
We ate a quick breakfast the next morning and made some new friends. They were intrigued that we brought our own breakfast cereal, and we explained that we are trying to eat well for our health. As we went back to the lobby to check out, AdventureMan spotted something we had missed the night before, and insisted on taking my picture.
The best picture from the worst place we stayed during our entire trip:
Some things are just meant to be.
Alaska 2026: Have I Made a Big Mistake?
There’s a certain amount of anxiety when you do your own trip – like how bad can it be if you make a bad choice?
For the first time, our grandson picked us up to take us to the airport for this trip. He’s working for his second summer, two jobs, maybe three, so we hired him to pick us up and drop us at the airport. He showed up on time, helped with the bags and was courteous and professional – and a lot of fun. What a great way to start a trip.
We slipped in between the early-departure crowd and the mid-morning departure crowd, and, because we are not going overseas and we are doing only carry-ons, we were able to go straight to the gate.
For the first time ever, we didn’t see a single person we know at the Pensacola Airport. The Pensacola Airport is intimate – lots of people making quick trips here and there, sometimes to Atlanta or Houston and back for work in the same day. We always see people we know! Not this time.
Our plane boarded quickly, even though it was a full flight, it was efficient, departed on time and arrived on time. We had a good layover in Dallas/Fort Worth and wanted some Texas BBQ. We went to a BBQ restaurant in the airport, and it turned out to be nothing special so I won’t even share the name. It was just a disappointing place to eat. Nothing memorable.
On our next flight, something interesting happened. I was just about to nap when I heard a voice say “Go Back! This is a national security issue. Go back!”
That will wake you up in a hurry.
One of the female cabin attendants was standing at the front of the cabin, barring access to the forward lavatory, while the captain and co-pilot took brief comfort breaks. She was formidable and serious. She was protected from the back by a barrier and two other attendants. She later told us it was a procedure in effect since 9-11. I had never experienced it before.
And then we started seeing mountains. Blue sky and snow-topped mountains. Exhilarating.
We landed ahead of schedule in Anchorage, our car, exactly the one we wanted but with new technology we had to figure out, was waiting for us. We were totally fried, so tired, but the rental agency had a task for us – to photograph the car and send them eight photos.
Our hotel was nearby and we got there easily.
I really do my research. This hotel was nothing special, but the Marriott where we stayed the last time was $658 per night, and I was shocked at how expensive Alaska hotel rooms had become. I was shocked again when we reached the hotel I had reserved. It was unkempt, with trash in the parking lot and on the property. I found a surly desk attendant at the check-in desk.
She was dealing with an unhappy guest who found no shampoo, conditioner or body wash supplies in her room, and no hair dryer. As I wait, I am thinking I have made a big mistake. She agreed, or maybe she was put out by the previous guest; she gave us the worst room in the hotel, on the hotel sub-floor, right by the elevator and fitness room, and right across from the swimming pool. From the time we arrived until late in the night, it was full of squealing children, lots of children.
I had asked for a higher room and she told me she had groups coming in who got the higher floors. True, the flight we came in on was full of cruisers, and AdventureMan and I were tired. AdventureMan is philosophical, he figured we could manage the one night. I didn’t want to try to find another hotel; we were really tired. And I still had to connect to the internet and send the car photos to Budget.
The room was tired too, but the bathroom was clean and well supplied. While AdventureMan showered, I got the photos sent, listening to the shrieks and laughter from across the hall where the pool was in full party mode. While I bathed, AdventureMan went sound asleep, and to my great surprise, once I hit the bed, I did too. It was only for one night.
Map of Alaska 2026
AdventureMan first started talking about going back to Alaska in mid-winter. He found a very expensive, exclusive six-people tour. As a frugal Alaskan, I objected. “Let me see what I can do,” I said, “I’ll try to put together something where we can choose our own adventure, but include the places you would like to see.”
This is what we came up with:
The drawback – we did the driving ourselves, but the longest drive was six hours. We won’t do that again, but we had some wonderful breaks and was not a bad day.
There were hazards:
By the grace of God, we managed, amidst this glorious beauty, to stay on the road.
Alaska 2026: Still the Last Frontier
For a welcome shift in pace and point of view, I am about to take you with AdventureMan and me as we escape “the lower 48” and the current murky political situation and escape, as so many have before us, to Alaska, The Last Frontier.
I’m a born Alaskan. I lived there until I was 11. I still know all the words to the State Song, although Alaska was not a state when I was born; it was still a territory, and became a state while I lived there.
Eight stars of gold on a field of blue
Alaska’s flag. May it mean to you
The blue of the sea, the evening sky,
The mountain lakes, and the flow’rsnearby;
The gold of the early sourdough’s dreams,
The precious gold of the hills and streams;
The brilliant stars in the northern sky,
The “Bear,” the “Dipper,” and, shining high,
The great North Star with its steady light,
O’er land and sea a beacon bright.
Alaska’s flag to Alaskans dear,
The simple flag of a last frontier.
Marie Drake
I am still moved by the song.
Happy Anniversary, AdventureMan
Today I received this.
At first, I thought it was some friend reminding me and wondered who it was, but I think it is a WordPress function, giving me material to post.
Truly, it’s the whole reason I started this blog, twenty years ago. We are human. We forget. As I read, I was back in that earlier time, early COVID, and I forgot how restricting it was. I had a wonderful, brave real estate friend who showed us houses, and then my sweet daughter-in-law called and said “Are you still interested in THIS house?” It was the house we had sold to them ten years before, but now, with a growing family, they wanted something larger and were happy to sell the house back to us, with one condition – that they inherit the house when we move on. We happily agreed.
And here we are, 6 years later, doing what we love to do – travel, see new things and talk with people. We have had the most amazing adventure, back to Alaska. We love stories, we love to hear how people came here, how people live. Yesterday, we had the joy of finding ourselves on board a small ship with just four passengers, one of whom was a Jordanian man, almost our exact age, and we had so many friends in common, and we had so much fun together.
As he introduced himself to us, he said “You will notice I have an accent, I am from Jordan.”
AdventureMan, always quick, responded in Jordanian Arabic, asking which part of Jordan. The look on the doctor’s face cracked us all up, and from that moment, we were not fellow passengers, but family. We ended up having lunch together after the excursion; we couldn’t stop talking.
Tomorrow, we have dinner with a man I graduated from high school with, lo, those many years ago, and who is, in my eyes, a hero. He is a doctor with his own airplane, and he spent his career flying to outlying Alaskan villages and providing medical services to those who otherwise would not have access.
Life is sweet.
Once I get the photos organized and the trip written up, I will share with you. Meanwhile, thank you, WordPress, for the prompt.
Prayer for the Feast Day of Saint Cuthbert
From today’s Lectionary readings:
Merciful God, who called Cuthbert from following the flock to be a shepherd of your people: Mercifully grant that we also may go without fear to dangerous and remote places, to seek the indifferent and the lost; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Of Little or No Interest to Most People
I began this blog in 2006, living in Kuwait. Kuwait was resource-rich for blogging; lots of bloggers, all kinds of interests; as a new resident in Kuwait, it gave me a portal into a new world, a new way of seeing things, and a way to meet wonderful people I might otherwise have never encountered. Kuwait was also rich in ex-pats, people from all over the world came to Kuwait to work, to send money home to their families, to create a better life. Many of those stories are in previous entries.
One story in particular still makes me laugh. I was at a dinner party at the British Embassy, seated next to a Nigerian woman. “So how did you come to live in Kuwait?” I asked, as I always do, because the answers are always so varied and unexpected.
She said she came to work with her husband. She leaned in and said in a low voice “I look deep inside you and tell you things you never knew about yourself.”
I’m pretty good at keeping a polite face, but I think I slipped a little then as I looked at this very respectable woman and thought “Witchcraft??” “Psychologist?” And she laughed, and said “I’m a radiologist.” We became good friends. I loved her sense of humor and her love of life.
There was a lot to write about, so many things that were new and unusual and often lovely. Before I left Kuwait, my blog had more than a million hits. Before I left Doha, I had more than two million. That was 16 years ago, and blogging has diminished, I no longer live such an exotic and interesting life and I have less time to write. The blog has struggled on.
This morning, I noticed I am about to hit 2,900,000 hits. Maybe this week. That’s fun for me. And it makes me wonder if I will live long enough, write long enough, to hit 3 million.
Rabbit Holes: Paul Samuelson, John Steinbeck and Anu Garg
It’s a rainy day in Pensacola, and Florida needs rain. The reservoirs are depleted, and a drought has been declared. As I go through my e-mail, I come to Anu Garg’s A Word a Day post. (Today’s word is “incubus”). I subscribed to his daily e-mail many years ago as I studied teaching English as an additional language.
Anu Garg is profound. He chooses wonderful words, words my foreign students adored. He also includes a quote at the end of each post. Today’s quote was from John Steinbeck.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (27 Feb 1902-1968)
And it just so happens that this coming month, my book club is looking at three Steinbeck novels; Tortilla Flats, Cannery Row, and The Moon is Down.
One thing leads to another. Tortilla Flats takes place on a hill above Monterey, California, where paisanos live.
Of all the places I’ve lived, I have never loved a place the way I love Monterey, California. We lived on a hill above Monterey, above the old Del Monte Hotel, now the Naval Postgraduate School. The location sounds very suspiciously a lot like Tortilla Flats. The book bring back so many wonderful memories, particularly lying in bed at night and hearing the sounds of the sea lions barking down on the rocks, the gulls screeching, and the fog horn warning – we had a lot of fog.
And I remember Paul Samuelson, the author of the Economics textbook I used for an introductory economics class I took my freshman year in college. I never intended to like economics, but I found Samuelson readable – and even riveting. I remember one quote from his text: “Man does not always starve quietly” which had to do with his theories on economic development. Within that chapter, he also explains comparative economic deprivation.
This was a long time ago, so I am paraphrasing what I remember, and I might be getting it wrong. Samuelson talked about how once the most basic needs are met in a developing country, food, housing, clothing, jobs – you’d think everybody would be happy, but once people can stop scrabbling to survive, once they are stable, they start looking around and see someone who has more – and this is relative deprivation. The see someone with something they didn’t know they needed, and now they need this, too, to be happy.
So how does this relate to Steinbeck, and La Mesa Village, and Paul Samuelson?
My husband and I and our brand new little baby were leaving one military school and headed for schools in Monterey when he got a call from military housing in Monterey. It was such a nice, positive call when it started out, telling my husband about the lovely house we were to have with three bedrooms and a fireplace in La Mesa Village, and went on to give information about measurements and furniture and we were joyfully amazed. Our military housing had never been so fine, nor had any housing office called us and treated us so respectfully.
And suddenly everything changed. “Oh wait,” she said. “You’re not Navy?”
“No,” replied my husband, “I’m in the Army.”
“You’re not a Navy Captain?” she confirmed.
(silence as we looked in horror at one another)
“No,” my husband said shortly, the way you respond when a short-lived dream-come-true has just died.
“Oh. Well you’ll be in normal student housing then. Sir,” she added, respectfully, but all the pleasantness was gone.
And that’s where my friend Paul Samuelson, the first Economist in the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize (1970) comes in. How much do you remember from your college classes? As we accepted our student housing – not a beautiful 3 bedroom house with a fireplace, but a flat in a quad with two bedrooms and linoleom floors (no fireplace) I remembered the concept of relative deprivation. I had a roof over my head in Monterey, California, heaven on earth. I had a baby and good child care and great grocery stores; I attended the Naval Postgraduate School and the Defense Language School. On weekends, we hiked at Point Lobos, and we were happy. Happy, except for that occasional twinge of jealousy when we passed the houses higher on the hill with three bedrooms and a fireplace.
And when I felt that twinge, I smiled and thought of Paul Samuelson.
AdventureMan’s Quest
Our marriage is cross-cultural. I am of the North, my husband is Southern. I learned to make decent cornbread, thanks to his grandmother who shared the secret of the cast-iron skillet, but I never mastered biscuits.
When he retired, AdventureMan went on a quest to make the perfect Southern Biscuit. He researched recipes. He tried recipes. He found an almost perfect recipe and worked with it, tweaking an ingredient here, an amount there. One day, with great glee, he made the perfect biscuit.
Part of the secret, once again, is a cast-iron frying pan.
The biggest part of the secret is butter. Lots of butter.
He was up early this morning, making biscuits for the family. The biscuits have buttery crusted bottom, and they melt in your mouth. One batch is enough for each of us to have one, and the rest we share with our family, nearby.
He texts our son that he just made biscuits, asks if they want some. Within seconds, the response comes “YES, please!”
It’s not just biscuits! For Valentine’s Day, it was Pasta Carbonara. For Thanksgiving, it was Smoked Salmon Fettuccine. He is skilled with duck, and sauces, and with steak. He has found his Secret Superpower, and he is a happy man.
Oath of Citizenship: Joyful Celebration
It’s not often a courtroom is packed with joyful people. And only for this one significant celebration are cameras allowed – even encouraged – in the courtroom. The difference in atmosphere is palpable.
Yesterday, 33 people from a variety of nations took their oath to be responsible American citizens. There were moments when their was no sound, no noise at all, in the courtroom; the silence was a salute to the importance of the event, and respect for the moment.
Judge Collier managed to be both solemn and celebratory, lauding the diversity of the group and the importance of their choice to be US citizens. He, and other, congratulated the applicants for “earning” their citizenship by learning our history, customs and language, and appreciating it’s rewards even more than those of us who are citizens by birth and heritage.
David Stafford, our long time Supervisor of Elections, now the right-hand man to Pensacola’s Mayor Reeves, gave a moving and motivating speech about the gift of citizenship, its rewards, and the great responsibility each citizen has to sign up to vote – and to vote.
My friends, you receive my frustrated rants and my frequent musings. Today, I share with you a day full of pure joy. A packed courtroom, for all the right reasons; official speeches, short, pithy, and full of positivity and possibilities, and people who fully believe in the Rule of Law, Equality, Diversity as a strength, and the great inclusionary current of neighborly brotherhood that connects people in the United States of America.
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Early Voting in Florida
