Thanksgiving 2017

Did you all have a nice Thanksgiving?  I hope so!!  We certainly do have a lot of blessings to be thankful for!!!!!

Our Thanksgiving weekend was......shall I say.............memorable?

We started out by going to our church Thanksgiving potluck.  Sorry I have NO pictures at all of that event.  I was planning on taking pictures of the talent show participants, but we had to leave before the talent show started because Chuck wasn't feeling good.  Maybe we should've taken that as a bad omen for the rest of the weekend.

We had plans to drive up to North Pole the next morning to see Stephanie again.  She and Alec are moving to Louisiana this weekend, so we wanted to see her one last time.  With Chuck being sick, we questioned whether or not we would go, but with lots of rest, the next morning he said he felt "good enough".  So we rose out of bed at 5:30, and were on the road by 7:30.

This highway might start to look familiar to you by now.

When we got up to Cantwell, things were really starting to look like a winter wonderland.  It was a very pretty drive.  But beauty comes with a price.  In this case, it cost us degrees in temperature.  The further north we got, the colder it got.

Steph said the weekend temperatures were expected to be around -13 or something like that, which is normal for them.  When we got there Friday night the temps were hanging around 0, which wasn't too bad.

We checked into this hotel, which is only a few blocks away from Steph's house.

It was very nice inside and the price was very reasonable.

PW stayed at Steph's house in their spare bedroom, which was nice because that gave them some "sister time" (I hope).

On Saturday we went snowshoeing.    Steph and Alec took us to a place called "Creamer's Field", which I guess used to be a pasture for a dairy farm.

We bundled up warm cuz it was COLD.  But once you get walking in the snow shoes, that helps warm you up.  Steph is so climatized to the frigid cold and didn't think much of it, but 

It. Was. Cold.

But we did have lots of fun!

I couldn't get any more pictures of this hiking adventure because my camera froze up.

Afterwards, we went to this little museum place.  By that time, my camera warmed up enough to get a couple photos.

The dioramas in there looked so warm and Summerish (is that a word?).

The rest of the day was spent mostly visiting, and Steph was purging out a bunch of stuff that she didn't want to take with her to Louisiana.  

Some things she gave to me, and some things she just wants us to hang on to for awhile.

That is why we took the truck up there with us this time, which brings me to our next adventure (or should I say "unfortunate event"?)

On Sunday morning we went to church in Fairbanks, and then met Steph and Alec for lunch, and then they loaded all their household goods onto our truck that we were supposed to take with us.

I was so anxious to get on the road and on the way home because Fairbanks was COLD, and I wanted to get closer to home where it was warmer.

But before we could get on the road, we had to stop for gas.  First delay.

Then we stopped for coffee.  Second delay.

At last we got on the highway exiting Fairbanks. By that time it was about 3:30.  We were gonna get home late, but that's okay - we would be HOME.  I was excited about getting out of the cold climate of the north, so I kept watching the temperature display in the truck.  It kept hovering around -18.  A couple miles down the road it was -16.

Yay, two degrees warmer! I was happily sipping on my coffee, anticipating getting warmer. And then...

About 5-10 miles out of Fairbanks, the truck suddenly stuttered, there was a loud noise, we violently spun around in circles, and then slid backwards into a shallow ditch.

Hm..   that was really weird.

We didn't know what had happened until Chuck got out and noticed a cable wire attached somewhere to the truck.  At the time, he thought it must've fell off someone else's truck.

People in Fairbanks are pretty good about stopping to help people on the road.  There were 3 or 4 cars that stopped to see how they could help.  One guy tried to pull us out, but we were too deep.  So another guy gave us all a lift back to Fairbanks.

Back to Fairbanks.  Ugh.  ("no, that's the wrong way!")

Chuck arranged to have a tow truck guy meet us at Lowe's, and also arranged Steph and Alec to take me and PW back to her house.

We waited to find out if the truck was able to take us back home.

It wasn't.

One of the rear shock mounts was completely ripped off, the emergency cable is gone, and that's what we know of so far.  It was dark out by the time the tow truck got there, and the underside was so full of snow so we couldn't see how much damage was done. We are still waiting for the full report from the body shop, but we do know that some of the cable is still tangled up in the rear axle.

When Chuck got there with the tow truck, some crewmen from the power company were there.

As it turned out, the cable wire was down and as we drove over it, it got tangled up around our rear axle and snagged us (like a fish!)  The other end of the cable was still attached at the top of the pole, so our truck yanked it right off the pole.  They were saying that we were lucky it didn't flip us over.

Anyhoo, we all came out of it unscathed, so we are grateful for that.  (A Thanksgiving blessing.)

The downside was that it meant another night in cold Fairbanks.

The upside was that we got to spent another evening visiting with Stephanie.  :-)

On Monday morning, I was eager to get back on the road again.  I just wanted to get home.

First delay:  Chuck spent a long time on the phone trying to find a rental vehicle to get us home, and that had a number of delays in itself.  Since we were carrying household goods, we needed a truck or a van, preferably one with a bench seat to accommodate three people.  We ended up with a 2-seater U-Haul van, and had to make a seat between the seats for PW to sit on.

Second delay:  When we got to the U-Haul place, the guy said he couldn't find the key, so they had to get another key from another U-Haul location.  So we sit and wait, and sit and wait.......

Finally Chuck and Alec were able to get everything transferred into the U-Haul van, and we were ready to go!

Just one more last little joke played on us:  When we tried to drive away in the U-Haul van, the uphill driveway leading to the road was icy, so the van just spinned its wheels and we couldn't get out.  

I was beginning to think that Someone didn't want us to get back home!

Finally, one of the U-Haul guys went up to the road to watch for oncoming traffic, so Chuck could back it up real far and get a good running momentum.

Ahhhhhhhh!  Home at last!

Our 20 degrees sure does feel warm!!

Blessings are everywhere!

Enjoy them!