Talkeetna

While doing a little cleaning on the computer I realized I never posted a couple of pictures taken one and two days before the smoke from the fires hit town. The clear, bright picture is the normal view from the top of the hill looking into Talkeetna, and the much darker picture is from the night before I learned about the fires.

Here's the before picture:

There are two major forest fires burning in Alaska right now, one in Caribou Hills (20,000 acres, 300 miles to the southest), and one in Trapper Lake (5,000 acres, about 35 miles southeast of Talkeetna).

I was sleeping in bed most of the morning, thinking the nice dark was from the clouds, as we had thunderstorms for several hours last night. I laid there thinking "How nice it is to enjoy the dark for a little while, I'm so glad it's overcast and raining", then rolled over, and the clock showed 10:30 a.m.

Ahh, a beautiful morning, I think I'll drive up to the gas station the neighbor told me about and get some coffee and donuts ... what the heck???

Wow, they take this "gas" thing seriously. No attendant, no building, only takes credit cards, no donuts, no coffee. This may take some getting used to.

I just got the DSL internet access working in my Talkeetna cabin. The local phone company seems to be another monopoly, as they charge for bandwidth in excess of 10GB per month, something unheard of in Louisville. Their pricing information can be found here.

A friend asked where I'm going to live after September. The truth is that I don't know, I'm just going to play it by ear.

The biggest surprise during my search for a medium-term rental property in Alaska is that there isn't a significant market for people willing to rent homes for 4-5 months at a time. There is a short-term market for 1-2 week renters, and the obvious year's lease market, but I assumed that with the long, cold, dark winter here there would be a market to rent homes just for the summer, but there isn't.

Well, it's adios Anchorage adios fast food restaurants, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, book stores, grocery stores, and hello Talkeetna. Today is move-in day.

I'll be driving up to Talkeetna shortly (a 2.5-3 hour drive), after one last stack of sourdough pancakes at the Downtown Deli.

On the way up I'm going to stop at the WalMart in Eagle River to pick up a few more items, but as I think about it, there isn't much room in the car, so it's just going to be very basic items like laundry detergent, soda, hmm, and a bag of Oreo cookies :).

A friend sent the following email this morning after I told him I was going to move into the cabin in Talkeetna:

Holy sh*t, you're out there. At the foot of snow-capped mountains, next to a river.

Apart from the contiguous 48 states. Wild animals at your back door. Are you ok? Everything alright?

FREAKING AWESOME.

Look, I don't think you should ever cut your hair or shave until you rejoin us, ok? LMAO

I've been sick today -- my allergies have wailed on me again -- and ended up laying around the hotel room all day, which gave me plenty of time to think.

After all this thinking, I sent the following email to the owners of the cabin in Talkeetna:

The house-hunting has gone better. Here's what I have ATM: