Ice Festival

Short video of the ice slide with a special segment of me in an ice bucket at the end.

Arriving May 25th

It's beggining to....

We got our tree up!

How Cold?

From the Fairbanks newspaper - and North Pole temps are always colder than Fairbanks.

And this was the headline from the Nov. 23rd paper. One line in the article reads, "...which went down as one of the coldest weeks in November in more than 100 years in Fairbanks." I'm so glad we were here to experience it.

Anchorage

Over Thanksgiving we headed down to Anchorage (7-8 hour drive) to check out the coast and mountains. We were rewarded with some great views of Denali and a little warmer weather (zero degrees instead of -40). It still felt pretty cold.
We stopped at this bakery for some breakfast and then watched the sun start to light up the mountians as we ate our cracked pepper & parmesan bagle and raspberry roll.

Two of the many highlights on the trip was seeing this bald eagle and visiting the Anchorage temple.

We traveld through the longest tunnel through a mountain in North America. It is a working train tunnel so there are only certain times you are allowed to drive through it.

Start Of A Great Day!

I have been waiting for weeks to treat myself to a pomegranate on my Birthday and Steve woke me up this morning -as he headed out to work- to surprise me with a bag of beautiful mandarins for me to enjoy today. What an awesome husband. What an awesome day!

Frosty

At 10am this morning it was -38 degrees. Burrr. I guess that explains the failure of our weather stripping around the door this morning. Looks like we need to try something else here.

Winter-Proofing

Shrink wraping our windows to keep the cold out and the warm in!

Curtains

I finally finished the curtains for our front room and yes, that is sunshine coming through the window today. Nice!

Snow Fall

We are having a beautiful snow fall right now. The snow here is always small, slow and delecate. It is a little hard to see the snow once I uploaded the video but I will keep it posted anyway.

No chance of melting until spring...

This afternoon there were some guys creating ice sculptures at one of the North Pole roundabouts. COOL.

Keeping Warm

Heating oil was delivered today so we can keep warm for another few months. Steve also installed a battery warmer on my Jeep last night so hopefully I can now get it started.

Halloween

Halloween is not too popular in Fairbanks due to the extra cold weather. We bought some candy just in case but didn't see a single trick-or-treater. We spent the evening at home, eating fajitas and cream puffs. Good times.

Visitors

I thought maybe a moose had visited our house based on these tracks I found just outside our door, but Steve said it was more likely one of these little guys. Okay. I'll take him too.

Winter...already?

We woke up to snow this morning. I guess winter really is here already.

It is a good thing we got in one more hike yesterday before the snow fell. We went for an 11 mile hike through some crazy mountains that made me feel like I was walking through a Dr. Seuss book.

Crazy trees.

I'm sure this guy was a character in some book.

I don't even know what this is.

Beautiful views from the top of the Mountain.