The Trip

After taking care of my phone and electric bills in Wasilla (at the MTA and MEA, respectively), I made this video while driving south to Anchorage this afternoon:

Driving through Wasilla, Alaska, September, 2007

How beautiful it is to see the mountains becoming covered in snow! Things are significantly whiter up north in Denali, where it was snowing when I left two weeks ago, but this is still very pretty, and all the white makes a huge difference in the scenery.

I've done my research, and I'll be heading up the Dalton Highway to Deadhorse, Prudhoe Bay, and the Arctic Ocean as soon as I can. I'm told that I'll need spare tires, and in one stretch there are no services of any kind for 240 miles, so I may need to carry a few extra tanks of gas to be cautious. I know there's not much to see when I get to the top, but I just want to take in the drive.

Squirrel generations

It turns out that the squirrel goes back to two previous generations of renters here. I asked the people who lived here before me if they knew of him, and they said oh yeah, they had a picture of him eating the wicker chair that's on the deck, and the renter before them also fed him.

I should have taken many pictures before this, but I'll have to get them on my next grocery trip. Here's the first picture, a few of the buildings in the Independence Mine exhibit:

I took some time off yesterday to drive on Hatcher Pass, and I'm so glad I did. It reminded me of some of the roads I drove on in the deep-woods portions of Canada to get here.

Hatcher Pass is about 45 minutes south of Talkeetna. You get to it by taking the Parks Highway south just barely past Willow Creek, then take a left. Alternatively you can get to it from Wasilla, which is how I got on it.

I'm not sure what it says about me, and I don't think I want to know, but I listened to Christina Aguilera's song "Walk Away" for about four consecutive hours the other day. If it plays about 11 times per hour, I guess I listened to it 44 times in a row.

I got hooked on her music before leaving Louisville after hearing songs like Hurt, Impossible, and especially Cruz.

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.

I left my last job on May 4th, 2007, and dealing with health insurance since then has been a pain in the rump. I worked for a small company (I was the founder and part-owner, actually), so after leaving COBRA is not an option for small businesses. But, in the state of Kentucky, there is a plan called the Kentucky Continuation Plan, so I've applied for that with my previous health insurance company (who shall go nameless).

In the meantime I also applied for insurance with a few online health insurance companies to see what they have to offer.

Alaska photos: Resting comfortably in a hotel in Anchorage, Alaska now, I thought I'd share a few pictures from the last day's travel before I get into house-hunting mode.

The first picture is of an incredible mountain range that I ran into during the drive in northern Alaska:

Well, it's almost 12:45am here, and it's still light out. I haven't tried it, but I think you could read a book outside as light as it is. ATM I really do feel like the Al Pacino character in the movie Insomnia.

You think of crazy things at a time like this. I was just recounting all the people I've met on this trip, and that's a cool thing.

I left Louisville on May 8th, and it's now two weeks later -- wow!