Marathon Shopping

We are here! We made it back to the Arctic around 7:45pm last night, all safe and sound. But, that came after a LONG day of shopping. Here is a quick recap of our day:

Some of you probably remember last year when we headed up to Alaska for the first time; we spent a couple of nights in Anchorage and spend a couple of days doing our grocery shopping, etc. Well, this year, we decided we were experienced enough shoppers that we didn't need two days. In fact, we thought we could do it in 8 hours. Now, remember that we are shopping for about 3-4 months worth of food, plus all of our household items and toiletries, much of which will last us the whole year. Think about all of the time that you spend at the grocery store, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. in 4 months, and THAT is what we did in 8 hours!

Our flight left yesterday morning, August 1, from Seattle at 6:00am. We arrived in Anchorage at 8:40am (one hour time difference), and within 20 minutes we were in our rental car and on our way. We started at Fred Meyer, where we bought boxes to send our stuff in, and some other food and toiletries that we knew we couldn't get at Costco. After Fred Meyer, we went to Costco (round #1) for all of our frozen goods. At this point, the car was full, so we had to make our first trip to send it all off. We headed to Alaska Air Cargo, where we shipped off 130lbs of frozen goods. Then, we sent our first 2 boxes of dry goods from the Post Office.

Michael unloading our first cart at Fred Meyer:

From there, we took a short lunch break and then headed back to Costco (round #2) for the bulk of our shopping. This is about the point that we started to realize that we were going to be cutting it close time-wise to catch our flight at 5:50pm. We filled up 2 carts, and $800 later we were on our way to send off more boxes. After leaving the post office, we had about 1 hour to go to Fred Meyer to finish our shopping, get back to the post office, box everything else up, and send it off, before we had to return our rental car. We decided that we had about 15 minutes at Fred Meyer before we HAD to get leave, so we ran inside and started throwing stuff in the cart... it was earily similar to an episode of Super Market Sweep. We checked out, threw everything into our crammed trunk, flew back to the post office, boxed up 8 more boxes, and sent them off. We got to the airport about 30 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave, and thank goodness it was delayed 15 minutes. After checking in two totes full of food, we made it to our gate just as they were making the final boarding call. Now, if that's not experience, I don't know what is! All in all, here are the stats from our day:

8 hours of shopping
2 trips to Fred Meyer
2 trips to Costco
1 trip to Sportsman's Warehouse
1 trip to Home Depot
3 trips to the Post Office
1 trip to Alaska Air Cargo
12 boxes of food, etc. sent USPS
2 boxes of frozen food send Air Cargo
6 pieces of luggage- 3 of which weighed around 70 lbs

Although it was a crazy day, we don't have to go shopping again for quite awhile! Sorry we don't have more pictures from the day- we were in too much of a hurry to stop and take pictures!

We had a great summer with family and friends, but we are glad to be back at our home. We don't start in-service until August 11, so we have some time still to get settled back in.

On another note: I know many of you from the NW have felt like summer never really arrived. If it makes you feel any better, it it currently 42 degrees and rainy here in Kotzebue; August is usually about 60-70 degrees and sunny.