You know you are on vacation with your best friends when you spend two weeks bickering and it’s still the best vacation or your life. This would be two weeks in Alaska celebrating the summer solstice at the Arctic circle. As we sweated through a California summer solstice earlier in the week I was taken back to a summer in Alaska; bug bites, Alaskan Amber beer, bald eagle sightings and good times with the best of friends.
Alaska; where else could you have a snow ball fight on top of a glacier?
Or watch bald eagles soar above the tree tops?
Or wrestle with a giant twenty pound King salmon, actually being pulled into a glacier fed river.
This was Alaska in 2002; one of the most gorgeous places on this earth I have ever set foot.
Alaska, a land so vast some towns you must fly into. It’s a world where you look out-of-place if you don’t wear sweatpants to Fred Meyers. This was in a time before smart phones and gluten-free everything and way before Donald Trump tried to worm his way into the White House.
It was a simpler time. I mean, for God’s sake, we bought Cds at Fred Meyers! As the sounds of Anna Nalick, The Gorillaz and Michael Buble filled our bug splattered rental car (That we drove illegally up the Haul Road like the 21-year-old bad asses that we were) we enjoyed one of if not the best road trip of my life.
We escaped the bugs, black flies and official state bird of Alaska, I mean mosquito to enjoy a snow ball fight on top of Ruth Glacier.
It was totally worth being smashed into a seven-seater tiny tin plane next to a smelly hippy. ( Every where we went in Alaska we were the odd men out… Just because we showered and didn’t wear sweat pants to Fred Meyers)
Of course this was years before Snap Chat. I think back now that we are so spoiled with technology and I think, wow all my real amazing memories happened way before Instagram and Twitter and this crazy digital world we live in today. Alaska was truly one of the most amazing, crazy adventures I have ever lived through.