Canoe Camping

We've decided to rent some canoes and a State Public Use Cabin at Red Shirt Lake for tomorrow night. So in the morning, we'll hike 3 miles with our camping supplies on our backs, pick up our canoes at the edge of the lake and paddle the mile across to Cabin #4. Aside from flying in on a floatplane, this is the only way to get to this rental cabin.

I know we swore off this type of camping until we possessed an ATV. But this time we're planning to be prepared for a 3 mile hike with 4 backpacks and 4 people on foot to hoist them. One of the backpacks will be the one which carries Alicia May. We'll take turns letting her walk and carrying her when she tires.

For those of you with Google Earth, our cabin is at 61.6327N, 150.1532W.

Picnic In The Park

Pull!

Today's Section Meeting / Picnic in the Park was a great success. The weather cooperated. We had a good turnout. Food, games, and geocaching.

In the end the Happy Humpbacks reigned victorious. My own Moose Madness team took 4th Place (out of 4!). But the scores were pretty close and I think everyone had a great time.

Tess was on the Giddy Grizzlies who took 2nd place. Folks were able to invite family and friends to the picnic. Alicia and Tess accompanied me. Tess received lots of compliments for being really helpful and fun. Alicia was found to be adorable by all. Who knew? :o)

Drizzle

Well, I've been back in Alaska since Friday night. The weather here right now is not nearly as pleasant as San Diego. But it's supposed to be clearing up tomorrow.

The cat is recovering from his eye surgery. He has a followup appointment this Friday. According to the vet, the surgery went really well and Elmo was the perfect patient. We're still medicating him and trying to keep him from rubbing his eye on stuff and damaging the healing eye.

This week is our office Section Meeting. I'm in charge of the June meeting (and the December one). I'm planning a Picnic in the Park with some geocaching and team-building activities on par with a "field day". Hopefully the weather improves and remains good for Thursday because the plan is to grill out. The back up plan of using an indoor room won't be nearly as much fun.

Old Town & Mission Beach

I’m not sure there is any better foot therapy than a walk in the sea.

I spent yesterday evening strolling the surf at Mission Beach. I gathered shells, watched pelicans dive for supper, and immersed my feet in the salty waves.

Sounds like there’s a beach clean-up scheduled for Mission Beach this evening. All participants get a free ticket to the San Diego Fair! Oh well… I won’t be in town during the Fair, and I already had other plans for this evening. Tonight is the conference dinner with a theme of “American Road Trip”. Free food and live entertainment. Should be fun.

Because of tonight’s plans, I decided if I were going to get to another beach before heading back to Alaska, it would have to be last night. So I took two trolleys to get to Old Town. There I did a little sightseeing. Then I boarded a bus to Mission Beach. A couple hours later, I did that trip in reverse.

Old Town is a historic site. Back in the early 1800’s, Spanish (Mexican) populations settled there. San Diego was the first capital of the state of California. Later this was moved to Sacramento, but the history of this area is very rich.

There are lots of old-fashioned shops in Old Town. One in particular caught my eye. I loved the Cousin’s Candy Shop which specializes in old-fashioned confections. I selected a sack full of “penny candy” which I taste-tested as I strolled around the other sites in Old Town.

Someday, when I’m independently wealthy, I plan to open a real “penny candy” store and candy wrapper museum. It’ll be a money-losing venture because I’ll pay far more for the candy then I’m selling it for, but the atmosphere will be nostalgic.

San Diego Update

It's lunchtime. I'm sitting in the Map Gallery using the wireless connection provided at the convention center.

I'm hoping to take a bus to Old Town (original capital of CA I think) and then to Mission Beach this evening after a couple more GIS sessions.

I found the Marriott hotel fitness center this morning. Maybe I'll make use of that before I leave. It is on top of the Convention Center and includes 6 outdoor tennis courts which I can see from my hotel window. Very nice actually...

Kitty Update:
Elmo is scheduled to have expensive eye surgery tomorrow in Anchorage. There's an animal eye specialist who has a magnifying microscope which he uses to perform surgery. He's a Cornell Vet School grad, so that makes us feel okay about him. Hopefully the surgery (entropion and cornea graft) will save Elmo's eye and restore his well-being.

Yum in the Sun

Okay, so the Wireless Help Desk at the conference helped me get my laptop online. Yay! I can add photos etc and not have to tie up the public use computers with blog time.

So, it's another beautiful day in San Diego. I don't know how folks from San Diego ever take vacations anywhere else. I'd think all other places would be a disappointment. I mean, the weather's bound to be better back home....

Last night I did my annual San Diego trip to the beauty salon for a hair cut. And I followed that up with the annual trip to the See's Chocolate Shop at Horton Plaza which is walking distance from my hotel.

Horton Plaza is a downtown mall with the normal array of pricy mall stores. It's anchor store is Nordstrom's. So by the end of the evening I'm passing all sorts of trendy shoppers with their bags of purchases from Nordstrom's, Gap, and Gymboree... And then there's the chubby chick with her giant bag from See's Chocolate Shop. ;o) But hey, I'm not planning to consume it all myself! I'll be sure to bring at least a couple truffles home to the clan.

Lesson of the Day

Lesson I learned today:

Do the best you can for as long as you live.

I'm at my GIS conference in San Diego this week. I'd have posted earlier, but I can't seem to get my laptop online...

Today's keynote speaker was Prof. Wangari Maathai of Kenya. She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement and won the Nobel prize in 2004 for her work on the environment.

Her talk was very interesting. And inspiring. I'm always amazed by stories of how one person can make such a large impact on the world. It makes me wonder, "what about me?". What's stopping me from doing my part?

Prof. Maathai concluded her talk with the instruction to "do the best you can for as long as you live". If everyone did this... just imagine what we could get done! I don't think we can even begin to imagine. But wouldn't it be something to try this out?

Don't settle for good enough. Don't sit back and let someone else take care of it. Do the best you can for as long as you live.

Bumpkin at the Ritz...

I am in San Diego this morning. The annual ESRI GIS conference is this week.

While I will be staying at the Marriott Hotel, which is connected to the convention center, for the rest of the week, I booked this first night at the Westgate Hotel.

This is probably the fanciest hotel in which I’ve ever had the pleasure to stay. It reminds me of the classy hotels you see in movies about NYC or London. Valets parking your car and handling your bags. All hotel staff greeting you by name and attending to your every need as if you’re an old friend.

When I arrived home from taking a driving tour of Coronado last night, I found that my bed had been turned down, a mint was on the pillow, the in-room mini-bar had been set up in case I wanted to purchase and consume the $6.00 liter of Evian, and the television had been set to the hotel’s channel which plays soothing classical music.

I browsed through some of the hotel literature and found that people slightly more well-known than I have stayed here at the Westgate, including: President Ford, Cindy Crawford, the Monkees, the Eagles, Princess Sarah Ferguson, and Margaret Thatcher. I’m sure they’ll inquire whether they can add my name to that list. I think I’ll opt to retain my anonymity.

As a recap, I spent the weekend with our aunt in Banning, CA. She’s about ½ hour west of Palm Springs in the desert, and 2 hours north of San Diego. Each time I visit her, I’m amazed by just how hot it is there. Coming from Alaska, the heat is pretty noticeable!

We visited, went out to eat a few times and took a workshop in Rancho Cucamonga to learn to use her new iMac. Then I drove my rental car, a Chrysler Pacifica with satellite radio, down here to San Diego.

This morning I need to check out of the Westgate and into the Marriott. Then I need to return the rental car to the airport as I won’t need it the rest of the week. After that, I can begin attending the conference. I did check in at the convention center last night and nibbled snacks at the welcoming reception.

I’m hoping to find a way to take public transportation out to some of the other beaches during the course of the week. We’ll see how that goes.

Kitty Update

The girls and I took Elmo to the Kitty Opthamologist this morning. It would appear that the root of his eye problem is not the herpes virus but a condition called entropion as well as a bacterial infection.

Entropion is when the eyelid (in his case, the lower lid) turns inward and the lashes rub against the eye with each blink, irritating the eye. If left untreated, damage to the cornea is inevitable.

Elmo's right cornea has a pretty deep divet in it. We've now swapped away from the virus meds to the bacteria meds. We have two eye ointments, one eye drop and an oral drop to give him at various intervals. We haven't decided whether or not to do the eye surgery to correct the entropion. The minimum quote we've received thus far is just over $1300. Ouch.

But at least he has a hope of having some improvement in his eye now that we know the problem and are using the right medications.

By the way, in case you haven't looked recently, I did put some more photos out on the dropshots page of our camping/kayaking adventure.

Eklutna Lake

Public Use Cabin Rental: $50
Kayak Rental: $25
Supply of "camping food": $52

Biking 20 miles, walking 6 miles with a toddler strapped to your back, then finishing up with a 5-hour, 13-mile kayak excursion until every bone, joint, and muscle in your body is screaming for mercy... priceless.


This is how the kids and I spent the past two days. I have no need or desire to do another stitch of exercise for the next 5 years.

We arrived home from kayaking at 11:30pm only to discover that the kitty needed to have a drop of medicine put in his eye every hour for the next 24 hours! So much for those daydreams I'd been having of a nice comfy warm bed while I was freezing out on Eklutna Lake paddling against the wind towards a shore which only seemed to get farther away.

My arms hurt so badly all night that I could barely hoist the kitty each hour when my phone alarm went off waking me from my doze.

I returned to work today feeling like a moose had stomped me a few times and left me by the trail.

Stephen brought the cat to the vet last night to have his terrible oozing eye examined. Apparently he has kitty herpes, and could have kitty AIDS, which has attacked his eyes. He has an appointment with a kitty opthamologist tomorrow morning in Anchorage. We presume he'll need eye surgery as he has an ulcer in his eye which almost perforates the eyeball. Please keep him in your thoughts.

Talkeetna and the Great One

We had the most amazing views of Denali yesterday as we drove up to Talkeetna for some exploration. I have never seen the sky so blue and Denali so visible as it was yesterday.

Folks who aren't from here probably don't realize how lucky they were to have been seeing The Great One that clearly.

We all drove up in two vehicles to Talkeetna. Jim, Alie, and Tess were in the van. Stephen, Donald, Alicia May, and I were in the truck about a half hour behind. When we got to Talkeetna and met at the Roadhouse for lunch, I asked if they'd stopped to photograph Denali on their way up. They hadn't because they figured they were going to take a flightseeing trip in the evening and would get better pictures then.

I suggested Jim head back to a nearby viewing spot just outside town and start snapping photos. There were no guarantees that Denali would not be completely concealed by clouds by the time they boarded their little plane.

As it turned out, by 5pm, the clouds had begun forming around Denali and it was almost 1/2 way concealed. They took their flight at 7pm which included a glacier landing at the Sheldon Amphitheater. I'm sure they got some great shots. But Denali was no where near as clear as it had been earlier in the day.

After lunch at the Roadhouse, we headed to the River Park on the banks of the Talkeetna River where you can also see Denali in the distance.

Here we're doing the Chickaloon Horse Pose.

Glenn Highway Road Trip

We had a great day of exploration yesterday. It started out a bit overcast and less than 50 degrees. But by the afternoon it was just gorgeous with blue skies and almost 70 degrees.

We drove up to the Long Rifle Lodge for lunch at mile 101 of the Glenn Highway. (We live near mile 23.) Then we back tracked about a mile to visit Glacier Park which lets you hike out onto the Matanuska Glacier.

Other things we were able to capture on film included a moose, an Alaska Railroad train, lots of great mountain and lake vistas, and the amazing ponies of Chickaloon.

The horse scene was the best of the day. We took a little side road through the Native Village of Chickaloon, hoping to get a picture of "how the Natives live". In all honesty, Native Alaskans live just like us. But that's not as interesting... So anyway, I digress.

As we were driving through Chickaloon we came across a quaint scene with 2 horses grazing in a field, framed by green trees with King Mountain in the background. So we pulled over. Jim crawled 1/2 way down the road shoulder to get the best angle. After about 30 seconds, we saw a couple more horses trotting in from the right. No wait... there's 4. No, it's now more like 25 horses trotting in from the right. What the heck? Where are all these horses coming from? They must have heard the camera shutter and took that as their cue to get to their spot in the field.

It was like a scene in a play. "Come on everybody... places... places! Alaskan Farm Scene: Take One."

These 25 horses run in... position themselves throughout the field and then simultaneously turn and look at the camera. It was bizarre, yet hilarious. Poor Jim missed some good shots of running horses because he was laughing so hard.

Wrong Turn

After I left work yesterday, we did a little exploring around Anchorage. We ended up having dinner at the Arctic Roadrunner which is a great little Alaskan style burger joint.

We also took a tour of Lake Hood which is the busiest float plane airport in the world, I think. It was pretty busy when we were there. So much so, that we even got a dirty look from an arriving pilot. There is a small runway for wheeled planes alongside the lake. This fella apparently didn't take kindly to us accidentally driving down his runway instead of the regular road. Some people are just so detail-oriented. Sheesh.

Anchorage is in full bloom for the summer tourist season. More flowers get added all around the city each day by diligent city gardeners. Lucky for me, lots of these are around my office building.

Guests and Fishing

Our first out-of-town guests of the season arrived at midnight last night. We've got plans to do lots of sightseeing with them over the course of the coming week.Right now, they're probably still sleeping off their jet lag. They arrived tired and starving having had their 1.5 hour layover in Phoenix reduced to a 15-minute sprint to their connecting flight. So they were unable to grab any food on their way. Luckily the Taco Bell drive-thru is open very late and we were able to get them some "sustenance" on our way home.

In other news, today begins the Slam'n Salmon Fishing Derby here in downtown Anchorage just behind the railroad depot. I walked down there on my lunch 1/2 hour yesterday and saw the banks of Ship Creek lined with anglers hoping to catch a king salmon. For those who don't know, the king salmon is the largest of the 5 types of pacific salmon which make their way up the rivers and streams of Alaska each summer. This is the time for kings... The others follow throughout the summer. You can see more info on that derby at www.shipcreeksalmonderby.com.

Deering Revisited

I finally laid my hands on the few non-work-related photos Stephen took on his Deering trip. There are about 5. This one shows the most "detail".

This is a street (or I should say, THE street) in Deering, Alaska. So this is "how the eskimos live...". See those nice pre-fab igloos and the power and phone lines which they have a hard time burying in the permafrost....

This photo, as stamped, was taken on May 17th. Still plenty of snow around and the Kotzebue Sound was still completely frozen as you can see in the second photo. Not many actual cars or trucks in Deering. You can see to the right a 4-wheeler pulling a trailer. This is the airport shuttle.

This photo was taken just outside the City Office. (Frozen Sound in the background.)

I owe, I owe.... so off to work I go.....

Back to work this morning. But for me it's not too bad. I have a 4-day week this week, a 3-day week next week, and then I'm in San Diego for a conference....

This is summer in Alaska. It's hit or miss who you see at both work and church or around the neighborhood because folks spend a lot of time traveling or entertaining out of town guests. There's lots of "living" to be done during these long summer days. By September, we should all be completely exhausted and ready for a long dark winter rest.

I put many new photos on the Dropshots page. I still have to transfer some photos over from Donald's laptop which he brought with him to Virginia. But included in the new Dropshots pics are some from my recent Fairbanks trip.

The Way Home

Home again home again... jiggity jig.

This is the gang walking in front of me through Dulles Airport in DC on our way to the B Gates.

We again had 2 four-hour flights, one to Salt Lake City and the next home to Anchorage. The first flight was considerably rougher than the second. Lots of turbulence and plane bobbing... hard on the tummy. So much so, that about 3 minutes before we touched down, Alicia May decided she'd had enough. Or at least the contents of her stomach did. We landed absolutely covered with vomit. So much for those cute little puke bags....

We swabbed her down as best as we could and tossed her clothing in a plastic Delta sack to be rinsed out in the airport bathroom. Naturally, we had no "spare clothing". So she made the remainder of her journey wearing her pink zip up jacket and Tess's string-tie basketball shorts cinched around her waist. She sort of looked like a funky Amish girl.

We had a 2.5 hour layover in SLC, so we grabbed a tentative bite to eat at Dick Clark's American Bandstand Restaurant, wondering how much of this meal we'd see again during the coming flight.

Thankfully, the second flight was pretty smooth and late enough at night that Alicia May slept the entire time.

We followed the dusk from Salt Lake City to Anchorage. It was still twilight when we were driving home from the airport at midnight.

We're spending today resting from the journey. We'll go back to work and daycare tomorrow.

Homeward Bound

This morning we'll make our way back up to DC to catch our return flight to Anchorage. We have a 2.5 hour stop in Salt Lake City and won't arrive home until after midnight tonight, Anchorage time.

I think this vacation has been a pleasing assortment of stress and entertainment. We've seen lots of things (historic sites, water parks, theme parks, beaches, natural areas, good dining, and shopping). We've also been able to visit with lots of friends and family (mostly family) who have joined us in Virginia.

We spent yesterday at Virginia Beach. We rented a cabana and were given a pre-rented lounge chair which was not longer being used. The kids played in the surf and dug huge holes in the sand. I lounged on the chair under the cabana and read my book and snapped photos.

Pam got some shopping done on the boardwalk and the guys were able to sit at a beachside bar and watch the waves while drinking beer. Needless to say, a really good time was had by all. We should have done that day at the very beginning of our trip just to unwind. But better late than never.


We ended up going to Hooters for dinner. And surprisingly enough, their chicken wings ARE really good!

See you back in the Great Land....