From Midtown to The Last Frontier

It is a looooooong way from Midtown to The Last Frontier. Despite shortening our layover in Seattle to accommodate an airline's snafu, we spent twelve travel hours from the time we shut our apartment door in NYC to opening the garage door at my friend C's home in Alaska. (Without our luggage, of course, because when you accommodate an airline they are obligated to lose your luggage. But it was recovered, delivered and we're moving on.)

Let me just say travel hours are like regular hours only it takes at least three regular hours to recover from one travel hour. I'm not sure why we thought traveling all night after being up all day was going to be a good idea. Adding a four hour difference in our time zones (seems Alaska has their OWN time zone) meant we were crawling into bed when we should have been getting up. Later that same day we were yawning and preparing for bed again shortly after dinner. And by shortly after dinner I mean 5:30pm. Weirdly enough that meant we were ready for breakfast at 1:30 in the morning. The good news is it is already light outside because it NEVER GETS DARK here and that means we don't have to fumble around for the lights so we can see to pour milk on those Cheerios.

A resident here told us you can garden at midnight because there is still THAT MUCH LIGHT. I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson who gardened only at night wearing all white. I think she would have been thrilled with this accommodation. Unfortunately I didn't think of packing my all white gardening outfit. But it IS strange, even after waking up in the single digit morning hours to bright city lights for the last year, to look out the window and see a natural dawn-light glow outside at 2AM.

We've been here for almost forty eight hours now and our time zone/lack of darkness fog is starting to lift. I figure if we wear ourselves out enough during the daytime light that the nighttime light isn't going to keep us awake. We've already discovered people grow ridiculously large vegetables here because of the long summer days and they don't have to do it on cramped balconies or rooftop gardens like in the city. We've explored a glacier that is twenty seven miles long, and I had trouble finding a bag of crushed ice in the city. We're driving a car which only make stops where we decide to stop instead of on a bus making stops every two blocks to pick up or let off passengers.

It's a long way from Midtown to The Last Frontier but definitely worth the trip. Just let me get a couple more hours of sleep.

11pm. It didn't get much darker than this before midnight.