Welcome Home sign posted at the Peterson's in Anchorage.
Hello everyone. This is our first post since returning to Alaska. We count our years from August to July, so in a sense, this is the beginning of the New Year. This past week was very much a “preparation” week for us as we were getting ready to make the move back to Alaska.
We started the week with Tim finishing his first semester of Graduate School at Boise State University. He spent a lot of the summer working on classes and finished late Sunday evening. He did well and received two A+’s. Tim really enjoys his masters program; so the long days of working on it is equivalent to him playing anyway.
Monday we went clothes shopping and found a ton of deals. It feels so nice to go shopping for cool clothes, especially when it’s 80% off! While we were in Idaho Falls shopping, we decided to take a break and go to lunch. We decided to go try this new place that we had heard about in the news called Chic-Fil-A. If you haven’t already heard of it, it is a fast food restaurant that serves nothing but chicken as the main food group (as opposed to other fast food joints that serve beef). Another cool thing about this restaurant is that the founder is a strong Christian, and chooses to operate his restaurants based upon Christian principals namely: not going into debt, closing all the stores on Sundays, and being super kind to all of their patrons. I have to admit, it’s pretty nice to hear a business operate with a set of values these days rather than operating based on a bottom line. Anyway, we just have to say that Chic-Fil-A is our new favorite restaurant. It was simply a fantastic visit. The food was great, the service was extremely nice and polite, and the atmosphere of the entire restaurant was very mellow and calm (no buzzers or beepers going off in background). They even had a carnation on each table in the restaurant. Suffice to say, that we were super impressed and would very much return to eat there again (when we live in a place with restaurants).
Tuesday we picked up our car from the mechanic (we’ve been trying to get the cruise control fixed for some time now). We picked up our car around 1:00 pm and headed for Tim’s parent’s house in Zillah, WA. It’s roughly a 9 ½ — 10-hour trip to Zillah from Rexburg. We passed the time listening to an audio book (which is pretty common for our traveling road trips). This time we listened to Percy Jackson: The Titans Curse Book 3. We like the Percy Jackson series. We arrived pretty late at Tim’s parents house, around 10:30 pm. We spent the next two days hanging out there. We stored our car on blocks under their back deck, which worked out great for us. We also got our one and only chance to watch the Olympics in London. We flew out to Anchorage on Thursday evening.
We arrived into Anchorage late Thursday evening, around 12:30 am. We rented a car and were lucky enough to stay at Chris and Julie Petersen’s house. Chris is our branch clerk. We slept pretty hard that night and awoke around 10 am. We started our day by shopping at Costco in Anchorage. This is one of Tim’s favorite parts. It’s really fun to go on a shopping spree. We spent three hours in Costco for round of shopping number one. We packaged up all the non-perishable items into three totes and took them, with two of our suitcases, to the Post Office. We must have arrived at the Post Office at an inopportune time, because we waited in line for 90 minutes before we were able to ship our stuff. Once we got to the front of the line we were told we needed return address labels on all our totes, something we forgot; luckily we weren’t sent to the end of the line! By this time, it was pretty late in the day and we had scheduled to meet with the Alaska chapter of Families Supporting Adoption leaders for dinner in Eagle River. We grabbed a quick bite (because we hadn't eaten lunch yet and were starved) and drove up to Eagle River for dinner. They live just across the street from the old LDS church building that Tim used to attend as a kid. We spent a few hours with them, and then went back out to go shopping for round two. This time we went to Walmart, for all the smaller non-bulky items. We spent another two hours in the Eagle River Walmart. We filled another four totes with goodies to take back to Togiak. Instead of going to the Post Office then, because the Anchorage Airport Post Office is open from 6am to midnight, we decided to just go home and mail everything in the morning.
Before going to bed we packed up three more totes and one additional suitcase and then Saturday morning we mailed them to Togiak, which hardly took any time at all. We then went to breakfast at the Village Inn and relaxed for a few minutes. We packed up all our frozen items in coolers and used them as our checked bags. This is a nifty little trick that saves us a lot of money! We made it to Togiak around 6:30 pm. We traveled with Alaska Island Air from Dillingham to Togiak where Tim got an earful from the pilot how Bellview was the original capital of Idaho. Tim chatted with him for the entire trip.
We are excited to be back in Togiak. The work is hard, but we don’t really remember that so much. We do remember how awesome Alaska is and how much we like it here. It doesn’t matter how far away we go, Alaska seems to always call us home.
We started the week with Tim finishing his first semester of Graduate School at Boise State University. He spent a lot of the summer working on classes and finished late Sunday evening. He did well and received two A+’s. Tim really enjoys his masters program; so the long days of working on it is equivalent to him playing anyway.
Monday we went clothes shopping and found a ton of deals. It feels so nice to go shopping for cool clothes, especially when it’s 80% off! While we were in Idaho Falls shopping, we decided to take a break and go to lunch. We decided to go try this new place that we had heard about in the news called Chic-Fil-A. If you haven’t already heard of it, it is a fast food restaurant that serves nothing but chicken as the main food group (as opposed to other fast food joints that serve beef). Another cool thing about this restaurant is that the founder is a strong Christian, and chooses to operate his restaurants based upon Christian principals namely: not going into debt, closing all the stores on Sundays, and being super kind to all of their patrons. I have to admit, it’s pretty nice to hear a business operate with a set of values these days rather than operating based on a bottom line. Anyway, we just have to say that Chic-Fil-A is our new favorite restaurant. It was simply a fantastic visit. The food was great, the service was extremely nice and polite, and the atmosphere of the entire restaurant was very mellow and calm (no buzzers or beepers going off in background). They even had a carnation on each table in the restaurant. Suffice to say, that we were super impressed and would very much return to eat there again (when we live in a place with restaurants).
Tuesday we picked up our car from the mechanic (we’ve been trying to get the cruise control fixed for some time now). We picked up our car around 1:00 pm and headed for Tim’s parent’s house in Zillah, WA. It’s roughly a 9 ½ — 10-hour trip to Zillah from Rexburg. We passed the time listening to an audio book (which is pretty common for our traveling road trips). This time we listened to Percy Jackson: The Titans Curse Book 3. We like the Percy Jackson series. We arrived pretty late at Tim’s parents house, around 10:30 pm. We spent the next two days hanging out there. We stored our car on blocks under their back deck, which worked out great for us. We also got our one and only chance to watch the Olympics in London. We flew out to Anchorage on Thursday evening.
We arrived into Anchorage late Thursday evening, around 12:30 am. We rented a car and were lucky enough to stay at Chris and Julie Petersen’s house. Chris is our branch clerk. We slept pretty hard that night and awoke around 10 am. We started our day by shopping at Costco in Anchorage. This is one of Tim’s favorite parts. It’s really fun to go on a shopping spree. We spent three hours in Costco for round of shopping number one. We packaged up all the non-perishable items into three totes and took them, with two of our suitcases, to the Post Office. We must have arrived at the Post Office at an inopportune time, because we waited in line for 90 minutes before we were able to ship our stuff. Once we got to the front of the line we were told we needed return address labels on all our totes, something we forgot; luckily we weren’t sent to the end of the line! By this time, it was pretty late in the day and we had scheduled to meet with the Alaska chapter of Families Supporting Adoption leaders for dinner in Eagle River. We grabbed a quick bite (because we hadn't eaten lunch yet and were starved) and drove up to Eagle River for dinner. They live just across the street from the old LDS church building that Tim used to attend as a kid. We spent a few hours with them, and then went back out to go shopping for round two. This time we went to Walmart, for all the smaller non-bulky items. We spent another two hours in the Eagle River Walmart. We filled another four totes with goodies to take back to Togiak. Instead of going to the Post Office then, because the Anchorage Airport Post Office is open from 6am to midnight, we decided to just go home and mail everything in the morning.
Before going to bed we packed up three more totes and one additional suitcase and then Saturday morning we mailed them to Togiak, which hardly took any time at all. We then went to breakfast at the Village Inn and relaxed for a few minutes. We packed up all our frozen items in coolers and used them as our checked bags. This is a nifty little trick that saves us a lot of money! We made it to Togiak around 6:30 pm. We traveled with Alaska Island Air from Dillingham to Togiak where Tim got an earful from the pilot how Bellview was the original capital of Idaho. Tim chatted with him for the entire trip.
We are excited to be back in Togiak. The work is hard, but we don’t really remember that so much. We do remember how awesome Alaska is and how much we like it here. It doesn’t matter how far away we go, Alaska seems to always call us home.
