Furniture: I promise to never take you for granted again.
After 20+ days of living life on the floor, it’s nice to catch a meal on our second-hand table, in our tacky country chairs. My favorite mis-matched decor hangs from the walls, while yard sale books and knick-knacks clutter the shelves. From the comfort of our sofa I can watch television, edit photos, or read stories to Margot. It’s wonderful to be surrounded by our familiar home goods again.
Continue reading “Home Sweet Home”
This post is coming to you from Fairbanks, AK where we are the newest Cheechakos (or Canadian/Alaskan newcomers)! Our travels through Canada went off without a hitch, but I sure did miss reliable cell service and wi-fi.
We were your typical tourists: camera and baby clumsily in hand, an overweight dog on a retractable leash, and a dirty Subaru with out-of-state plates. The back seat became our diaper change-station, the front seat, our refrigerator. We lived in that car for up to 14 hours a day. Margot was patient, even when I wouldn’t let her crawl on the floor of at least two off-putting hotels. She was content to roll around in her pack ‘n play or hang out in the slightly cleaner beds for a energy-burning nightcap.
The Watson Lake Sign Forest was a fun tourist destination. We weaved up and down the aisles, looking for artifacts from our respective hometowns. Isaac was a little more successful than I was, oddly enough.
Then there was the beautiful Whitehorse, YT; a beautiful Canadian city with friendly locals and great food. We strolled along the river front, poked around in gift shops and ate BBQ Salmon at the famous Klondike Rib and Salmon BBQ on their very last weekend of the season. Many northern businesses shut down for the winter months, presumably because of the lower number of travelers passing through. And little did we know, the Yukon Territory, with an area the size of Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined, only has a population of about 36K, most of which (26K) live in the Whitehorse metro area. My high school was bigger than nearly all of their towns. Mind-boggling!
Continue reading “Fairbanks’ Newest Cheechakos”
Well Friends, it’s been one whole year of me going on and on about our upcoming PSC (Permanent Change of Station) to Alaska. In a week the movers will be here to neatly pack our lives into boxes and transport them to the interior of Alaska.
The Military lifestyle is still a foreign concept to me, probably because my upbringing was one of such permanence. If you bumped into the couch, you’d uncover depressions in the carpet where the legs had long settled. Dated shag carpet, wicker wall hangings, and oatmeal colored curtains decorated our home until I was well into Jr. High.
I left that childhood home when I was sixteen. I packed my bags for Oklahoma and never looked back. That was the first in a series of big changes in my life.
The next place I called home was Norman, OK where I was a college student turned townie. I almost made it an entire decade there, but a PCS to Washington changed that. Now, not even two years later, we’re off to yet another location. A friend recently suggested that change is the only constant for me these days. So true.
In just over a week, we’ll have our Subaru all packed up, with a roof box on top, travel trailer in tow and a big fat beagle in the cargo area. Yours truly will ride in back with the baby (I’m too tall to fit in the front seat with the carseat behind it), and the snacks. We’ll wave good bye to our first family home, and say hello to a much larger town home on Fort Wainwright.
So here we go again, off to make new friends and to explore another region of the US, this time with our ever-changing baby girl Margot.
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Your prayers for our safe travels (and the survival of my houseplants) are greatly appreciated!
Yea Yea Pueblo 