Oh dang, my bad ya'll. I didn't realize it had been an entire week since I've posted to keep you updated on our oh-so-exciting lives. I know you're all just sitting at the edge of your seats at your computers, constantly refreshing the page, hoping to see what we're up to next. (I hope you're really not doing that, but if you are, thank you for thinking I'm semi-interesting).
So to fill you all in: We finally made it to Alaska. It's been quite the week for us world travelers.
On Monday & Tuesday (7/14 & 7/15), we had no service. Literally none. It was basically the longest two days of our entire lives, although mom seemed to struggle more than I did. I believe her exact words were, "Oh c'mon, even Apollo 13 only lost service for 12 minutes!!!". Ok drama queen, calm down. I think she was mostly upset because she couldn't Facebook humiliating pictures of dad or make smart-aleck comments to anyone. However, I'm currently taking 2 online classes, so I think I had a right to be dramatic. I emailed my professors the other day to let them know about my lack of service, but I really don't think they believe the whole "I'm driving to Alaska in a motor home & am in the middle of BFE, Canada" excuse. After all, it's the oldest one in the book. But you never know.
All we did Monday and Tuesday was drive for literally 14 hours each day. We landed in Tok, AK Tuesday night, which is about 3 hours outside of Fairbanks. I don't remember much else besides we woke up at 6am, left at 7am and didn't do anything besides drive. Honestly, I can't even tell you how large my cankles are. I've never been so embarrassed. We did, however, see like, a million moose and bears on our drive. I wanted to stop and give them all bear hugs (haha get it?) but mom and dad wouldn't let me, I don't know why. We were all a little upset that we didn't see big-horned sheep, caribou, or Sasquatch, even though there were signs to watch for all three.
We arrived in the grand ol' city of Fairbanks on Wednesday (7/16) at about noon o'clock. We did the exciting activity of washing the motor home. When we were finished with that fun, we headed to Pioneer Park to meet up with Nikki Poo for her kick off event for her work. She works at the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce and this week is apparently a huge deal for this ginormous city, as it's Golden Days (you can hit up Google or Nikki for more info).
We headed down to the Golden Days kickoff and received chips and a drink as soon as we walked in, so that's how you know it was going to be a good event. The kickoff itself was like a mini carnival. There was food, games, and FUN! I think the most exciting thing though was that we saw a donkey. Then, just when we thought we had seen it all, we saw three girls taking selfies with said donkey. We also had our first "real" meal in a week (since mom was starving us) of hot dogs, crepes, and ice cream. As you'll find out later, Wednesday night was the beginning of our travels down the road to obesity.
After we were done shoving our faces and being judged by locals for constantly having food in our hands, we said our goodbyes to Nik and then came back to the motor home and passed out because this 4 hour time difference is finally catching up to us.
With Nikki busy with her Golden Days events, that left me to be our tour guide for Thursday, Friday, & Saturday, soooooo we mostly just stayed at the crib. But after the thrilling events of washing clothes and napping on Thursday, we went to the Alaska Salmon Bake at Pioneer Park. All I can say is holy crap. So, so, so good. It was an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet with crab, salmon, cod, and prime rib, and also a salad bar so you can pretend you're not totally fat. I tried a little bit of everything (it was all you can eat, don't judge me), and let's just say I was in a food coma the rest of the night and didn't eat until lunchtime on Friday. So that was our Thursday.
Friday (7/18), we didn't see Nikki at all, so we got really lucky there (just kidding Nikki Poo, love you, xoxoxoxoxo). So when we finally got up and moving at 1pm, we decided to hit up Chena Hot Springs (http://www.chenahotsprings.com/ -- in case you were wondering about what the heck they are). We graced the resort with our presence at about 2pm and bought tickets for an ice museum tour (http://www.chenahotsprings.com/ice-museum-renewables/) at 3pm. We were obviously hungry at that point, so we sat down at Chena's cutie little restaurant for some grub. We got seated and everything at about 2:20 and only had about a half hour before the tour. Well, we're champs and mowed down and inhaled everything in legit 25 minutes. Not even joking. People stared. Once we got our bill and mom told me I couldn't write my number on it for our hot waiter because I'd look too desperate, we headed over for our fancy little ice museum tour.
For those of you too lazy to click the link, I don't blame you, it's not worth the effort. The ice museum is literally a museum made of ice with ice sculptures in it. It's the only ice museum in the country, and I think world? But it's about a 45 minute tour of you looking at ice sculptures that this couple sculpted and you have a tour guide yelling at you constantly to not touch the ice and promising he'll only talk for 10 minutes, when in reality he doesn't shut up the entire time. This had been my second time visiting the museum, but mom and dad's first, so they were all giddy with excitement. They were served Appletini's in martini glasses made out of ice - how "cool"! But yeah, I don't remember much else from the tour. Oh wait, just kidding, I do. In the museum, there's 4 hotel rooms, all made of ice, that (insane) people can stay in. While attempting to push dad through one of the doors to look at the room, he got stuck on the carpet. Long story short, the carpet for the Polar Bear room is completely butchered and I'm pretty sure they know it was us. So after ruining the museum, we left and came back to the motor home and I passed out at around 6:30pm, so I don't know what my wild parents did for the rest of the night.
On Saturday (7/19), we had the opportunity to see the Golden Days parade. It's one of the largest parades in the state and literally the longest parade I've ever been to in my entire life. It lasted 3 wholeeeee hourssssss. Then after the world's longest parade, we watched 7,000 rubber ducks float down a river. Seriously. It's an actual event. You pay money to buy a duck and then if your duck is the first to cross the finish line, you win. The winner gets like $15,000. It's pretty legit, not going to lie. I bought a duck and it won, but since I'm such a good Samaritan, I donated all of my winnings to charity. After that all went down, we watched Nikki sleep. When we got bored of her, mom, dad, and I went to the Santa Claus House in North Pole. For those of you who have been to Bronner's in Frankenmuth, it's like that, but smaller. For those of you who haven't been to Bronner's, I can only describe it as Christmas heaven. Last time I was there, Santa wasn't because he was still resting up from Christmas time. But this time we got lucky and got to meet him!!!!! He was such a cute old man.
See? Isn't he so cutie
After we met Santa and told him what we wanted for this upcoming Christmas, we went and played outside and looked at his reindeer. We had gotten there just in time because they were holding auditions for Santa's new lead. Guess who got the part?
Scotty did! (People were judging us)
Sunday (7/20) was a pretty mellow day. We headed to Silver Gulch Brewery and shoved more food into our faces. I don't know about the rest of the fam, but I was still full from the past week, yet couldn't pass up free food, so I continued to eat until I hated myself. After we all stretched our clothes to their full potential, Nikki led us on a tour of Ft. Wainwright, the army base where Andrew works. It was cool and all, but I didn't see any cute army boys, so I wasn't as interested as the rest of the family. Actually, now that I think about it, mom was passed out in the backseat so I really only think dad was listening to tour guide Nikki.
Also on Sunday, mom figured out the total number of miles we had traveled and the route we had taken -
We started at point A in Goodrich, MI (I started at B in Houghton), and landed at point N in Fairbanks, AK, with a grand total of......................... *drum roll* 5518 miles! (For those of you who are on Facebook, you already knew this if you saw my mom's picture. Just humor us and pretend like you're shocked all over again). That's about 5500 too many miles for me, and I'm sure mom and dad too. But once we got past the point of wanting to punch each other in the throat, we were all good and having fun.. Most of the time.
Ok, once again, my bad for keeping you all waiting on this. I'll try to be more consistent with my posts, but I've just been having so much FUN that I keep forgetting. Real talk though, I'm about to start another post for this week that's already happening, so don't yell at me.
P.S. I added a design for your viewing pleasure.. You're welcome ;)
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