To Alaska and Back

Earlier this summer, DD#2 and I made plans to go to Alaska to visit her sister in August. I left last Wednesday—in desperate need of a road trip—and tried something a bit different. Rather than drive all the way to Seattle in one day or stay in Spokane overnight, I drove to Ellensburg, WA and spent the night in a hotel there. I was able to use hotel points instead of shelling out $300 for a room in Seattle. Our flight to Ketchikan didn’t leave until after lunch on Thursday, which gave me plenty of time to drive the two hours from Ellensburg to Seattle, pick up DD#2 and her boyfriend, and get us to the airport.

I don’t have many pictures from our trip. This is my fourth visit to Ketchikan so I spent the entire time enjoying being with my kids. DD#1 is an occupational therapist but was able to adjust her schedule to be off work. We did some shopping—dodging thousands of cruise ship tourists—walked around Ward Lake, and went to the lumberjack show. Our SIL is the dentist at the Coast Guard station in Ketchikan, so he took us to the mess hall on base for breakfast Saturday morning and showed us the clinic. We also played a board game called Wingspan, which I need to get so Sarah and I can play it.

We saw a bear, from a respectful distance, although one later walked through the yard on the way to the beach for a salmon dinner:

DD#1 has the most amazing African violets:

She has the perfect window spot for them.

Ketchikan has a small yarn store, which I did not visit on this trip. There is a quilt store called the Whale’s Tail, which I am pretty sure has been there at least since 2009 when JC Briar and I did our Alaskan knitting cruise. When I visited the store in May of 2021, their stock was severely depleted due to supply chain issues. Goods are expensive to ship to Alaska in any case, and a global pandemic and loss of cruise ship business hurt a lot of the stores in Ketchikan. Unfortunately, even though the store hours showed the store as being open the days we were there, it was closed.

Fabulous Fiber Arts and More, however, was open. This is a small combination yarn and fabric store with a well-curated selection of products. I bought some fabric:

Barbara Lavellee is an Alaskan artist who moved to Sitka in 1970 to teach at a boarding school. She now lives in Anchorage.

While we were at the lumberjack show on Saturday, DSIL happened to look at the weather on his phone and noted that a big storm system was coming in. Sure enough, it hit overnight, with lots of wind and more rain than I’ve seen in a long time. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get back to Seattle, but those pilots that fly in and out of Alaska have nerves of steel. We left shortly after noon, on the bumpiest flight I’ve ever taken, and landed in sunny Seattle 90 minutes later. I dropped off the kids and headed back to Ellensburg for the night, and that was when DD#1 texted me about the landslide. Their house is at the south end of the island, about 20 minutes from downtown. They weren’t directly affected, although they both stayed home from work yesterday.

Now I am back in Montana and feel—like I always do at the end of August—as though I am at the end of a marathon. The garden is beginning to look that way, too. I was out there getting lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers for a salad for dinner and had a good look around. I think that some of the pumpkin vines may have gotten a touch of frost; they are in a low swale in the garden and I wouldn’t be surprised if the air was cold enough in that spot overnight.

I am teaching my thread class at the quilt store this afternoon, but I’ll need to devote some energy to the garden this week and next. It’s time to start cleaning up for winter.