Have you heard people rave about Alaska and say it’s on their bucket list? Yeah, me too.  Honestly I am not a cold weather person so I was interested but not thrilled about going.    

We have friends that also wanted to go to Alaska and we planned a trip several years ahead to allow time to save and plan.  The girls of the trip were excited to do this together but were also concerned about being cold and having to learn about trees and stuff.  

It was time to go on our trip and one of our friends fell, broke her hip and simply couldn’t go.  Of the guys in our group, her husband was the main person most excited about going and was the one that researched it to know we needed to see the interior of Alaska.  The rest of us were clueless and we were just going along with his suggestion.  After 10 days of discussion my friend and her husband worked out the details so that he could go on his dream trip and she was left in good hands going though rehab.  Not an easy decision for either one of them, we watched them struggle and respect their final decision.

Me, I cried for several days because my best friend couldn’t go and who would I have to complain to when we were cold and bored?  And laugh with when we had to learn about trees?   We had all these great plans with matching jackets and cutting up while the guys got all nerdy with learning.

It was finally time to go on the trip we had planned for so long.  We packed a ton of stuff (honestly too much) and also we brought my friends photo on a plate so that she would in a small way come along on our journey.

  
Everyone said they couldn’t wait to see our photos on Facebook and at the same time I didn’t want my friend to be sad about not being able to go. It was the best I could do.

   
  
Now here is the fun part, putting out sadness to the side, we flew across the country and landed in Fairbanks with a four hour difference in the area known as home of the “midnight sun”.  Seriously it never gets dark.  It’s sort of like dusk from 12am-3:30am.

Fairbanks AK was a strange place.  Princess seemed to be real organized with our luggage but took forever to get us to our hotel.  It took two hours instead of 10 minutes.  The Westmark is the only hotel in town and is pretty old.  The rooms were good enough, but the restaurants were not that good as they were pricey and crowded.  Basically they were the only game in town.  When we got in our room I opened up the curtains and saw this place called the Iris Cafe within walking distance.  We ate there, the food was okay and we were exhausted but entertained by some colorful locals named Charlotte and Pat.

Charlotte gave us tips and when her husband spoke it got really strange.  We figured out he was just a dirty old man.  He did give us stuff to laugh about though and that is always fun.  They are at the next table, Pat is wearing overalls.

  
We struggled to stay awake, as we were eating dinner, we realized it was 8pm local time, midnight to our bodies.  I felt like I was having a dream as we were so tired I could hardly hold my eyes open but the reality of being in Alaska was starting to sink in.  I was starting to think, this might be a cool trip after all!  

   
9:00pm

 
3:30am