Home at last.
Usually at the end of a trip this long, I'm longing to get home. When I first saw how few clothes I had packed into that backpack, I was sure that at the end of two weeks I would want nothing more than to be home in a clean pair of shorts.
Not the case with this trip. I wanted more. I wanted to go back to Denali and camp deep in the park. I wanted to see more cities, more glaciers, more wildlife.
But alas, real life returns. I spent an hour tonight going through all my email. There are bills to be paid.
Most people our age that we met along the way were in a sort of extended vacation or "break." Many had finished school, but were avoiding starting work. Some spend their summers in Alaska as a Kayak guide and then move on somewhere warmer to do some other macho-fun outdoors kind of job. Some on some kind of holy-grail quest as they travel all across North America. I did become thankful for a job and a family that I would return too. Experiences like these that we've had are great. But they become even more powerful when there is a different context in which they continue to live. Jen's first student ministry lesson of the school year on the creation story will be radically shaped by our experiences. Even my gray cubicle wall software job won't be the same after this trip. I'm not sure yet, but I think that developing software is a lot like the way a glacier moves through a valley.
Well you should hear a bit about our last day in Anchorage. There were a couple of Native Heritage center / museum things that we did. There were educational and a little interesting. We did a walking tour of downtown, seeing all the corners of Anchorage. There is quite a lot of interesting history surrounding the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake that wiped out a good part of the city and many surrounding towns. In that I did see the resilience. Events like these don't get taught in schools across the country, but looking at what south-central Alaska recovered from in 1964 give me hope about places like New Orleans and the other gulf coast towns devastated last year. We have been through such things in the past and we will continue to deal with them.
I'll post some pictures or links in the next couple of days as we sort through all of out pictures. Thanks for traveling along with us!
Usually at the end of a trip this long, I'm longing to get home. When I first saw how few clothes I had packed into that backpack, I was sure that at the end of two weeks I would want nothing more than to be home in a clean pair of shorts.
Not the case with this trip. I wanted more. I wanted to go back to Denali and camp deep in the park. I wanted to see more cities, more glaciers, more wildlife.
But alas, real life returns. I spent an hour tonight going through all my email. There are bills to be paid.
Most people our age that we met along the way were in a sort of extended vacation or "break." Many had finished school, but were avoiding starting work. Some spend their summers in Alaska as a Kayak guide and then move on somewhere warmer to do some other macho-fun outdoors kind of job. Some on some kind of holy-grail quest as they travel all across North America. I did become thankful for a job and a family that I would return too. Experiences like these that we've had are great. But they become even more powerful when there is a different context in which they continue to live. Jen's first student ministry lesson of the school year on the creation story will be radically shaped by our experiences. Even my gray cubicle wall software job won't be the same after this trip. I'm not sure yet, but I think that developing software is a lot like the way a glacier moves through a valley.
Well you should hear a bit about our last day in Anchorage. There were a couple of Native Heritage center / museum things that we did. There were educational and a little interesting. We did a walking tour of downtown, seeing all the corners of Anchorage. There is quite a lot of interesting history surrounding the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake that wiped out a good part of the city and many surrounding towns. In that I did see the resilience. Events like these don't get taught in schools across the country, but looking at what south-central Alaska recovered from in 1964 give me hope about places like New Orleans and the other gulf coast towns devastated last year. We have been through such things in the past and we will continue to deal with them.
I'll post some pictures or links in the next couple of days as we sort through all of out pictures. Thanks for traveling along with us!
posted by Doug at
7:18 PM
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