Anchorage FINALLY

After our day "off" in Whitehorse, which was spent napping and walking around to stretch our legs, we had a rather unsettling night in our tent. Around 1am I got up and made my way to the toilets, leaving Leigh behind to sleep. While I was gone we both heard a man screaming very loudly, dogs barking, etc. Just a lot of ruckus. The entire region of Whitehorse where we were was filled with camping, open road, and woods. Not exactly the great outdoors, but not exactly civilized either. This was pretty nerve-wracking. We knew we were safe, but had no idea why we had heard screaming (which sounded like he was saying "he's standing up, he's standing up! Get him!" amongst other unintelligible things). I tried to dial 911 from a pay phone at our campsite but lost the connection on the line. Leigh and I decided to hop in the car and drive a mile or so South to see if we could figure out what was happening. There wasn't a peep from the surrounding area- not even a police car coming through to check things out. Weird.

Anyway, on the way back to camp I told Leigh I'd had about enough of car traveling and just wanted to drive straight through to Anchorage. The end result was a very, very long day of driving with just a quick stop off in Tok for dinner. It was too short of notice to find a place to crash with any acquaintances in Anchorage and by the time we made it to Mat-Su area the fog was too thick to drive safely, so we pulled over and slept in the car. Safe but uncomfortable, and Juneau the Cat had had just about enough of us by this point.

We drove into Anchorage around 8am, stopped to grab some necessities at a grocery store and then found our new apartment complex with great ease. The leasing office was just opening when we arrived and within an hour we were hauling our stuff upstairs (to the third floor) from our car. Juneau the Cat found a sleeping nook on top of the cabinets and stayed there for most of the day. I guess she needed some personal space!

For the next few days we trolled Craigslist for furniture, did LOTS of shopping for housewares and slept on the floor. Luckily our new place has a built-in table top so at least we had somewhere to eat. Now it's four days later and we have successfully purchased our living room furniture, dining chairs, a new TV, a mattress and box spring set and countless odds and ends like a rice/slow cooker Leigh fell in love with at Costco and new lamps. All we really need now is a bed frame and some dressers, but that can wait until the right opportunity comes along. Today four of the nine boxes of housewares we shipped to ourselves (from Virginia and Seattle, respectively) arrived. We eagerly await the boxes containing our hangers and cooking tools.

Pictures of new apartment to come when it's all set up!

Another thing we purchased recently were new phones. While living in France I had a crappy prepaid phone, which served me well, and since coming back to the US I've used a hand-me-down prepaid phone. Today I received a Blackberry Bold, which I've decided I'm not really thrilled with. It's kind of hard to use, doesn't have a touch screen and I just feel like I fumble around with it a lot. After four years of devoting myself to Apple products I think I'll make the switch to an Iphone as soon as possible. Phones should be fun, not a source of headaches!

So we're mostly settled in and I start my job on Thursday. I'm not terribly nervous because there seems to be a lot of training involved in the transitional period between last year's clerk and myself. I expect there will be a lot of "hand-holding" the first few days, which is good. I'm even getting a Westlaw training session, which a year ago I would have scoffed at because I used to use Westlaw all day, everyday. After my "gap year" in France I will really appreciate a reintroduction to this vital online tool.