We Made It To Alaska Part 2

If you're interested in the prequel of this post, go here.

  (This is a picture of me, from the view of our 2nd hotel room. I was trying to attract moosen).

I figured once we landed we would rent a car at the airport to get all of our crap-ola to the hotel and find ourselves an apartment.

Fun fact: when renting a car at the Fairbanks airport, there is a 20% tax on top of your rental fee. In other words, it was going to be $300 to rent a small car for less than a week.

Fun fact #2: You must have a credit card to rent a car. No, a Visa card linked up to your checking account will not work. I even offered my first born child, but the lady behind the counter looked at me like she'd rather be skinning a griz (colloquial term meaning grizzly bear).

You may be thinking that at this point in time I was about ready to throw a tantrum in the airport. I was running on little sleep and little food. And I wasn't even running. I would have thrown a tantrum, but I'm pretty sure I heard that TSA has some regulations against it. We found a taxi instead.

Driving to our hotel, I was a little disappointed in what I was seeing. I guess I thought Fairbanks would be this quaint town with only log cabins where moosen and bears had afternoon tea with the human inhabitants. Nope, it's actually a regular city, just on a small scale and with lots and lots of snow. Somehow seeing a McDonald's kind of kills a little bit of the adventure. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty here, and I've grateful for the civilization.

I had booked us at the Holiday Inn Express through Hotwire.com. Which, by the way, I highly recommend. I've gotten killer deals on that site. Thankfully, the hotel shares a parking lot with Walmart, Petco, Lowes, Old Navy and a couple of food places. I was in need of some 2x4s, and I was able to walk over to Lowes to get some.

Wednesday we just crashed. My brain was the equivalent of a a sour patch kid, citric acid included.

Thursday we got bought a car. It's a 1995 Toyota Avalon XLS. It even has a sun roof. We were very blessed to find this one for such a decent price and so quickly. We decided that it was a good think that we didn't put all that money towards a dumb rental, so the Lord does work in mysterious ways. Although I don't think He goes around wearing sunglasses and a trench coat with the collar up.

Despite having some aesthetic challenges (i.e. duck tape), it runs really well and does awesome on the icy roads. Mitch is a little sad it has such good traction, he's tried multiple times to get it to slide all over the place. Silly him.

We do need to give it a name, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

For the most part I haven't noticed people having an accent up here. I was talking to a lady about shoes and she said "yeah I love ski-chers" (she meant skechers).

I'm kind of rambling, but I'm trying to make sure you live vicariously through me, hence the insane detail. And I know it's not as cool without tons of pictures, but I'm working on it.

Friday we had our first training session. It went pretty well. Right now most of the class consists of people over 55, but they'll be based in Denali. The other drivers for Fairbanks will be coming up in May, they've been getting trained in Utah and Seattle, and will probably be a younger crowd.

Because of the dynamic of the class, there were some interesting questions asked. Like we were told that the uniform for the men include a tie. An elderly gentlemen raised his hand and said "Could we get clip on ties? I think regular ties are a real safety issue. If an older person tripped, they could grab your tie and bring you down with them." The trainer informed him that no, they couldn't get clip on ties. No judgement, just merely reporting on my life here.

Then after an exorbitant amount of time talking about our log books, some crazy asked the trainer what would happen if our bus somehow traveled in time 3 years in the past, but our log book was in present time, would we be in violation of any laws, beside the law of space-time-continuum. 

Okay, if you haven't already guessed, that crazy was me. And yes, I really did ask the trainer that, but after class was done. I had to make sure they got vague idea of who I was the first day. I can't have them claiming they knew nothing about my ways at the beginning if we ever had to go to court. Which I'm not worried about going to court, because I'll obviously be stuck in time. 

That about sums it up for today. It feels like we've been here forever. We should hopefully find an apartment this week (we've been persistently looking, promise) and then I'll make a fun post about that. 


Don't you miss me?