Day 2

After posting my first blog entry yesterday, I decided to email our friend who lives in Soldotna, Alaska... "Wild Bill".  For those of you who do not know Alaska ..Soldotna is located on the Kenai Peninsula, about 3 hours south and west of Anchorage. It is a small typical Alaskan town, one main street, a Fred Meyers, a Safeway, a big fishing, hunting hardware type store.. ( which by the way, has an unfinished wood plank floor completely covered in tiny nail size holes from all the "studded" boot covers people wear in winter to prevent slipping on the ice). Soldotna also has a McDonalds, a subway and numerous little shops to poke around in. In the summer the tourists stream into Soldotna to fish the famous Kenai River that weaves its way thru town.  In the winter, it is a quiet little town with just the locals .. quiet streets and closed up gift shops, and a frozen river. But it is a beautiful little town, surrounded by hundreds...or perhaps it's thousands ... of little lakes. Turnagain Arm and huge mountain volcanos like Illiamna and Mt. Redoubt run up the north side of the peninsula, the Chugah mountains run along the south east side and to the south is Homer...famous for its awesome Halibut fishing. All in all, it really is paradise.
Our friend Bill has a wonderful little log cabin on one of the many little lakes and when we stayed up there 6 years ago...we named his place camp run-a-muk. We spent alot of hours with our camper parked in his driveway and had so much fun. Two years after our summer visit, we flew up and spent 2 weeks with Bill in early March, in the cold and snow, and saw another side of Alaska's beauty. No wonder we are totally hooked.
OK, so.... I have totally wandered off the subject of todays blog entry, my email to Bill.....
I sent Bill a message, saying .. guess what... we are coming north in the summer of 2013 !!! He replied almost instantly with a " Glad you are coming ....Camp-Run-a-Muck is always open". That was great news. We now knew we had a place to spend a lot of our summer...a base to call home.
But...then a second email from Bill arrived.. " Hey, do you want to house sit during the winter...rent free". Wow !!! So, it turns out that for the winter of 2013/14, he plans on wintering south and has offered to let us live rent free in his cabin. Our only cost would be the utilities which he says run him about $150 a month thru the winter. Hmmmmmmmm ..... now that is an offer that is hard to turn down. A chance to stay longer, in a rent free comfy cabin...and get the True Alaska Experience.
There are definete down sides to this....such as a longer time away from the kids, a colder winter than we are used to, and just generally being so far away for  that long. But on the flip side....there is some pretty enticing things too...such as wintering in a cozy cabin, looking out at Mount Redoubt... watching the northern lights....seeing Moose in our driveway on a pretty regular basis...watching the eagles.... ice fishing..etc etc etc.....and the list goes on.
But...again....its a loooonnnnnng way from home.
At least we have 411 days to decided.