Anchorage

We made it to Anchorage safe and sound! After arriving at the Seattle airport on Sunday night, we got a nice surprise of an offer to bump our tickets to a later flight (40 minutes later) in exchange for two free Alaska Airlines tickets. We gladly took the offer. Our flight arrived in Anchorage around 12:30am on Monday morning; we got our rental car and headed straight to the hostel and jumped in bed.

After a few hours of sleep, we headed out on Monday for the longest day of shopping that either of us had ever endured. We spent a couple hours at Fred Meyer buying our food for 4 months, which added up to two entire grocery carts full! Fred Meyer ships food for a small fee, and they take care of all of the perishables; we decided to go this route because we felt the fee was worth it for all of the time (and stress) that we would have to take boxing everything ourselves. After getting our food, we took a short lunch break, and headed back to Freddy's for Round 2: household items. Being that we are so used to the convenience of having a Target right down the road, it was quite the adventure racking our brains for anything we are going to need in the next 4 months. After a small escapade with our credit card company (a block was put on our account because we had spent so much money in such a short period of time!), we concluded our first day of shopping. We made a quick trip to the 24-hour post office to send off our household items, and then decided to call it a day.

That evening, we had a great FREE dinner of Alaskan King Salmon; the man who runs our hostel just happened to have 75 pounds of freshly caught salmon in his freezer, so he offered us some for dinner. Then, we headed out to TGI Friday's for a glass of wine. After a couple of drinks, we headed back to the hostel at 10:30pm; although, you would have thought it was 5pm because it was still broad daylight outside!

Tuesday we devoted to finding a television (that wasn't too heavy to ship), a DVD player, and the last few food and household items that we forget to get on Monday. We mailed off our last couple of boxes, and then started jumping for joy because we were DONE shopping! 12 hours of shopping in two days is a little much for anyone. But, we managed to do it happily, together, without even a single disagreement... now that's pretty amazing. We are now spending our last couple of hours in this beautiful city at a coffee shop, trying to predict what our new life is going to be like; of course, we both have butterflies fluttering in our stomachs. We are off to Kotzebue in a few hours!