Posts tagged #Cabin Life
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?
Adventuring:
Driving in Alaska
When I moved here I didn't even have a drivers license, so I didn't know how to drive. After a couple of years I started thinking more and more about learning how to drive, and W was about to move out of state, and living in a dry cabin without a drivers license can be....tricky. So, I went to the DMV, picked up one of their tiny books on rules etc, and went back after a few weeks and took the written test. Passed, and got the permit. Then I went driving with a friend of mine, in his truck, and compared to Sweden most cars here are automatic, so driving that truck was pretty easy. I practiced with him, maybe 3-5 times.
Then W was going to teach me how to drive his car, that I later bought when he moved. Well, his (now mine) is a manual, and I remember up at my summer house in northern Sweden when my dad tried to teach me, for fun, on one of the back roads how to drive....that just did not work for me. Driving with W didn't really work that great either, and I stalled out almost every time I got to a stop. Then W moved, and I asked another friend of mine to drive me to the driving school because I booked a session (which is way cheaper here compared to Sweden). The car I was driving there was an automatic, I don't even think they have manuals at the driving school. At the end of the session my teacher said:
-well to bad you didn't sign up for the drivers test because I think you would have passed!
He went on to his next customer and I tried to schedule a new appointment for the test. But that was tricky, my schedule didn't quite align and by the time we were almost done with everything the teacher came back and said that he had some extra time if I wanted to take test. So I did, and I passed and then I had a drivers license, and a manual car that I didn't quite know how to drive.
I taught myself how to drive the manual by doing my errands very very early in the morning, or late in the evening, and today I have no issues driving any car!
When you go out in the field you drive a truck, so next step was getting used to drive a truck. Driving the field truck turned out to be really easy, and fun, also this truck is super old! Every time we go out in the field we also use ATVs to get around from one end of the watershed to another, and these can be tricky to drive in uneven terrain if you have a lot of stuff on them.
However, today I had to go out into the field and the truck I was given is a real "monster" truck, a "spaceship" it's literally taller than me. It's scary to be near other cars in it, I mean in the parking lot, backing up and turning because it's hard to see where the rear end is. In the end though it's just another vehicle and once you get used to it, it's like riding a bike.
