Road Trip

In addition to being unemployed (or "fun-employed" as we've come to call it) we are now officially homeless.  We loaded up everything that was left in our apartmnt and made the 830 mile drive from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Allison, Colorado in grandiose style - by towing our 28 foot boat trailer.

   

Although it made for a long and stressful drive we now get to spend some quality time with my family before heading down to lake Powell for the houseboat trip.  We'll probably do some wake boarding on Navajo lake while we're in town...

Denali

Our trip to Denali was a huge success. We saw all of the big five (bear, moose, wolf, caribou, dall sheep) and had some great hikes. The weather held out and the mountain stayed visible for the entire day that we took the bus ride.  We also got to test out our new tent in a rainstorm (luckily only 1) and it passed with flying colors.  Having temps in the 50's and 60's was perfect for hiking.  If you've never tried peanut butter cup s'mores, go to the store and get some peanut butter cups, giant marshmallows and graham crackers....how did I not know of these earlier. What a great way to spend our first week "fun-employed"!










Highlights:

1. Seeing Denali (aka Mt McKinley) unobstructed by clouds
 

2. Have a moose and her two calves walk into our campsite

3. Eating giant marshmallow peanut butter cup s'mores

4. Becoming Denali Junior Rangers

5. Hiking with no trail

6. Watching an entire pack of wolves run (I promise if you look really hard they are there)  Not bad for a point and shoot camera.

7. Summiting Mt Healy

8. The awesome, never ending mountains

9. Adam seeing a bear cross the river (I was busy packing up all his stuff, go figure)

10. Moving our tent the last night to insure the "flooding rains" predicted by the camp host didn't show up

And We're Off

So we've made it to the first stop on our journey, ALASKA!!! I'm so glad we decided to add it to the front of the trip. Tomorrow we head out to Denali to camp and hike for 4 days, I can't wait to be back up there.

We made it to "Retirement"...

So we made it to June 1st and are now officially "retired", it sounds better than unemployed. I wonder how long it will take to kick in that we are actually doing this. The house is sold, our jobs are gone and the only stuff we have left in Tulsa is what we are taking to Alaska and Lake Powell. My car is headed to San Francisco and we are counting down hours until our flight to Alaska.

The first part of our international journey is beginning to come together, tickets to Iceland are booked, we have a hostel reserved for Oktoberfest (thanks to waking up at 4:30 this morning). There seems to be a never ending list of things to get booked and organized, slowly but surely it will all come together.