
Our summer vacation ended on July 23rd when we started our journey back to Dillingham. We spent our last few days in the lower 48 with Tim’s parents at his Aunt and Uncle’s house. Our original plan was to spend the majority of the summer with Tim's parents in Utah in their new home. Unfortunately, those plans had to be adjusted since the home-buying process took months longer than originally expected and Hal and Joyce didn't have a home until after we returned to Dillingham. It was sad to leave them and the rest of our family. We would love visitors in Dillingham. Please come if you want. You can use sky miles to fly all the way to Dillingham! (Just one of the perks of living in Dillingham and not Togiak!)
Tim, Kaylee, and I flew from Salt Lake to Seattle and were able to spend about 8 hours with the Jensens. We love being able to see them nearly every time that we fly to and from Alaska. Those Jensen girls are so cute with Kaylee and we love all the good food and cooking that Carmen introduces us to. We left Seattle in the evening and flew to Anchorage where we spent two nights.

After all that shopping we headed back to Petersen’s. We had a dinner appointment to make, but before that Tim had homework he needed to finish for his master classes and we had totes to pack. While Tim did school work and watched Kaylee, I madly packed totes as quickly as I could.

After dinner, Tim went back to homework and I went to the post office to mail 5 totes. (Good thing the post office in Anchorage is open until 11:00 pm!) Earlier in the day I had mailed our 3 suitcases and Kaylee’s portable crib.
Thursday morning (July 25th) we woke up early so we could get out the door and to Sam’s club to pick up our cart full of frozen items. We stood in the parking lot and packed our frozen items into 4 totes. We somehow ended up being 35 pounds overweight, despite the fact that we had recorded the weight of everything we had put into the cart to make sure we didn’t go over 200 pounds. I guess we must not have recorded everything as perfectly as possible. We needed to head to the airport, so we didn’t have time to figure out some alternative plan with the extra weight. We figured we’d just bite the bullet and pay the overage fee. When we check in the attendant pointed out that we were overweight but didn’t charge us. There are a lot of people that work at the airport that realize it’s hard to live in the bush and are pretty sympathetic to the situation so they just let things slide. You never know if you’ll be given a free pass or not, but we were grateful for it.

All in all we made it home safely and are happy to be here. I’ll write more about our first few weeks here in another post and perhaps in a future post we'll give a tour of our apartment.