No way, jose!

Only about a month left in Alaska and then we're headed home.. Its way crazy to think about because I know its going to go by super fast. It'll be good to get home and see our family though, I just hope we'll be able to jump back into our regular schedule quickly.
So yesterday we drove another 9 hours to a new area. It's gotten to the point where a 9 hour drive isn't so bad. As long as its not above 20 miles, the drive doesn't seem that long. It's pretty funny I think. So last night around 10:00 pm we get to the new city and its like this tiny podunk town in the middle of nowhere and me and Gabe are looking at each other going "what the freak?!" and we arrive at the motel we're booked to stay at while we're here and it was like an old long school portable that some handyman put up walls in, looked like it hadn't been decorated since the 70's and was just in super bad shape. The first thing I think about are bed bugs, there's no way we're going through that again! There were pipes coming out of the walls, different colors of shag carpet in every room, and painted on faux wallpaper borders. Gabe and I had a room in another building that you had to get to from the outside, after climbing up a rickety old staircase. Not to mention our first impression of the place - we walk up to the main building to check in and there's 4 grungy lookin guys standing out front by their truck and as we walk up, a kid with one front tooth looks up at us and says, "sup homies!" and gives us a half chuckle, half snorted laugh. After a bunch of complaining from everyone, it was decided that we needed to find a different place to stay. We stopped by another "hotel" and asked for recommendations on where to stay and she recommended a bed and breakfast place, so that's where we're at right now. Its a cute place! Right now we're just a group of 3 sales guys and 2 technicians and we're staying in a big house away from the "city." We woke up this morning and the couple that owns the place made us biscuits and gravy and hash browns. Whats ironic is that the dumpy motel we were going to stay at is the same price as this super nice bed and breakfast. It seems like we all just took a big long road trip and are staying at one of the guys aunts house. Its quite the adventure... Quite a bit different than I had expected. The drive up here was really really pretty and we got lots of cool pictures. I love that we have a camera and are able to document everywhere we've been. Here's the pictures we took of comparison of the two places:

If you can on the one below, zoom in, their faces are priceless.

     

 Bed and Breakfast:

Time for a trip to Walmart!

I opened the fridge today and laughed. The Pepsi has taken over our hotel fridge! We should probably go to the grocery store....

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Sunday we decided to go explore. Gabe was told by a couple customers that there is this one spot in Alaska where it opens up and if you go there at dusk and look out you can see moose and bears and all kinds of wildlife. We haven't seen any bears in Alaska yet, so we decided to go on a bear hunt. We went with a couple other guys from the company and made them drive so it would be more enjoyable for us :) We found a couple campgrounds and stopped to look at the bulletin boards to see if they said anything about bears in the area. We knew if we found a bear warning on one of them then it would be a good place to start. And we found one! The paper on the bulletin board said that there was a "problem bear" that had been recently sighted in the area. I just wanted to find a nice cuddly bear, not a problem bear! That just sounds like trouble. We wandered around a bit (I left the car door open, just in case) but all we ended up seeing was a moose across the river. There was a couple trails that you could take up the mountain, but we saw a family getting out of their car and the guy was taking his gun with him. Naturally, I chickened out and decided we weren't quite prepared to meet a bear. 

We left and drove out to the end of the road and found a cool beach spot. We wandered around and looked for interesting things in the rocks. Gabe actually found a glass bubble that had formed from lightning hitting the sand. That was an awesome find, apparently those are really rare.

Isn't it cool?

Something new is that I finally have something to do that'll keep me busy. At least for just a week. The office manager out here had to leave town and so I'm helping out and taking her place for the week. It's a fairly simple job. All I have to do is text the techs when a job comes in and scan the paperwork. And I get paid a couple hundred dollars to do it. So it aint too bad of a gig I'd say.
Work is going well, Gabe is still doing AWE-SOME. Every install he goes to he has the opportunity to sell the customer some "upgrades" or extra equipment and he gets money for what he sells. Right now he is #2 in the company for upgrades! And its not a small company, that's for sure. So proud of my husband for his hard work.

We spent a little "Wii time" together

At 11:30 at Walmart last night I gave in and this was the result:

I’m still not too sure how I feel about it:

I vowed I would never ever own a game system, but here we are. Gabe has been talking about getting a wii for a long time and so he got it as his belated birthday present and it made him pretty darn happy!

We’ll see how it goes..

No Tresspassing

There is an episode from the tv show “The Office” where the boss, Michael, uses a GPS to get somewhere and the GPS sends him the wrong way. He continues to go that way assuming that the GPS knows the way and he ends up driving his car into a lake. Such a funny episode by the way, if you have not yet seen it. We love “The Office.” But anyways, we had a similar experience this weekend. It didn’t end up the same way for us though. We weren’t that stupid, thank goodness. Thanks to our parents who passed along the smart genes!

Here’s our story.

Gabe got a text Saturday afternoon letting him know that he got a job and he was texted an address of the house. We have already figured out that the GPS isn’t that reliable out here in Alaska, but it’s usually just a couple streets off. So we start driving out there and we turn down a dirt road, which isn’t uncommon. There were houses but they were a bit, pardon my phrase, uh umm “white trash-like.” It was a slummy area. After a few houses there are signs on the sides of the road which read:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

NO TRESPASSING

AREA UNDER 24/7 VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

The signs kept popping up further down the dirt road and I didn’t make much of it until I started seeing weird objects off the side of the road. There were old broken appliances, white trash bags of who knows what, and what caught me off guard – a ratty boot with a hole in the bottom of it. I convinced myself it was a bullet hole. I told Gabe, “I think they take the “Trespassers will be prosecuted” phrase a bit serious.” Only joking. The road got narrower and bumpier. We were off-roading in our Honda civic. But we figured the road had to be taking us somewhere. There was a tree that had fallen across the road and we drove right over it, and we passed a shooting area of some sorts. We drove maybe like 2 and a ½ miles on this road without seeing a sign of life and decided that maybe we ought to turn around when we saw two big mud holes in the road ahead of us. We had to back up for ½ a mile because the road was too skinny. Thankfully, Gabe inherited the good-backer-upper gene too. The GPS told us we still had 3 miles to go and I don’t think we would have made it there safely. It should have taken us 10 minutes to get there but it took us 45.

At least we weren’t as stupid as Michael.

Sincerely,

Sun Deprived Me