A Night of Dreams and Memories

    It's time for Flashback Friday again. This time some family memories that I will share

Dreams and Memories

    Several years ago, yeah I can actually say several, my mom and dad came to visit us in Alaska. They stayed for a whole month. I rarely get to see my family nowadays, so this was something special to me. 

    We ventured out into the wilderness of Alaska, but one of the greatest memories I have during their time in Alaska is the trip down south. We went by Denali, Palmer and all the way down to Homer, but I'll share that story later. We managed to time the trip down south with the State Fair in Palmer, and our chance to see Avett Brothers. Well, mom and dad stayed at a motel across the grounds and did not attend the concert, but they could hear it. 

    I have never even been star struck, I mean never! But with Avett Brothers, wow, I was in heaven and I will always always remember it.

    Have you ever been starstruck? Or met any of your favorite artists? 

    I will always remember my parents first trip to visit me, so many places to show and so many feelings to share, of one of the dear places to my heart. I think they learned why I fell in love with the place. Stay tuned for more stories under Flashback Friday. As I have mentioned earlier there are a lot of memories and photos of my life in Alaska.

Wilder

Flashback Friday

There are more women than men in Alaska, and the saying goes:

"The odds are good, but the goods are odd"

Wilder

    About five years ago I moved into a dry cabin for the very first time in my life. Across the driveway lived this guy from Montana, a bearded man with a love for ecology and kombucha. Our very first interaction was when he came over to my cabin and offered me some homemade kombucha, and maybe you could say that the rest is history. So, I guess both the odds and the goods were good for me!

Match Made in Heaven?

    Both me and W are interested in fire ecology, mountains, adventure and everything else in between. We enjoy the outdoors, hate crowded places and need our precious adventurous cocktails and homemade 4 course dinners from time to time. W is a foodie, and I am too, so we try to find awesome restaurants as soon as we travel somewhere. We strive to make as much as we can from scratch, and I think we do a good job!

Traveling kind?

    We like to travel to our destinations off season, because we can't handle crowded places. When we drove from Alaska to Wisconsin, and stopped in Banff, we drove into the huge parking lot by Lake Louise. We stopped the car and looked at each other and said, no way, let's leave. We made a quick sandwich with our food and were on the road again within 5 minutes. People might call us crazy but that was just too much for us, we went to another parking lot, and hiked a short distance and had the whole world to ourselves. That is how most of the National Parks work, both in Canada and the US. Fewer people actually venture off the main road. I get that, people are busy, and really don't have time to go somewhere off  the main road, but we do!

How do you feel about crowded and touristy places?

Bad weather?

July 21:

    Ever since I got here it's been hot, like really hot. Ok, I know that a lot of people are used to temperatures up in the 90's and above combined with humidity up towards 90%, me? not so much. I am so happy that we bought an AC right when I got here, because I don't think I would have been able to survive otherwise. I like it cool, I love sweater weather, and this is everything but sweater weather. 

    We seem to have these high pressure storms, where the heat is always combined with some sort of rainstorm. Makes it hard to dress for hot temperatures and rain, I am definitely not used to that. W and I got a metrological weather station for Christmas that measures wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, rain accumulation and rate, and humidity and temperature of course. It's been really cool to have it now when we've had these rainstorms to see how much rain we get. Usually it says "it's raining cats and dogs". Madison is about the same latitude as southern France, so for someone who never lived more south than say the southern part of Canada (cause that is right about where the latitude of Cranfield in UK is, and of course, Stockholm Sweden which is approximately southern part of Alaska, and then of course, Fairbanks Alaska, Madison is far far south. Fairbanks do get hot in the summertime, I mean, we've had weather up in the 90's before, but generally that doesn't last very long, and it's usually very dry, so not the same type of heat that we experience here. I only had one pair of shorts when I moved here, yeah one pair, a climbing pair. Well, and one pair of running shorts. But as you can understand I went shopping for more after a few weeks in this heat. Best money spent in a long time, and I came home with 6 different pairs of shorts. 

    As I have mentioned earlier Madison lays in (on?) an Isthmus, and we have two lakes on either side, Monona and Mendota. We usually swim in Monona, and while it is definitely not clear, it has been semi OK. Yesterday I biked by the lake and eek what a smell, I was just thinking on the bike ride that it would be nice to maybe go for a swim. But that smell, not fresh lake smell, but yeah, algae. There were people over there swimming and having fun in the water, but I don't know, I am a little skeptic. The first three pictures below are of Lake Monona and the fourth one is Lake Mendota.