Adventure..is out there!!!

As many of you know from Facebook, we had ourselves a little adventure the last couple of days. I had taken off this week for a trip I was going to take down to Kansas to see the A&M game on Tuesday night. Well things fell through so we decided to have a stay-cation...make the most of the time off and make some memories here in Alaska.

So I started thinking about cabins that we could go stay and remembered Ben and Lisa found this nice little cabin up north before they moved. I called and sure enough, they were available. The cabin is located near Talkeetna...which is a little over a 2 hour drive to the north. When it's clear out (which it was), it is BEAUTIFUL!! The only problem is that we've been under high pressure so long that it's starting to get a little hazy so Denali wasn't completely unobstructed.

Anyway, the cabin!




Our view...an amazing panoramic that included Denali and Foraker. That first night was really hazy and some mid/high level clouds were hanging around the peaks making it hard to see. Still...

The girls showing our beds upstairs. It was definitely a tiny cabin. We actually had a hard time all squeezing in on the 2 beds!

The owners were SO nice! They had several dogs running around that were very kid friendly. This was the girls favorite.

View of our cabin from the outside.

From the front porch, we had a fire pit (that we didn't take advantage of) and a heck of a view.


I took a lot of pictures of birds. This was the best...very clear picture.

Getting ready to take a walk, Katy showing her sassiness.

Alyssa getting ready.


Time for a walk.

Sign for our cabin.


We were walking on a snow-machine track that had crusted over. I kept telling the girls to stay on the trail and they kept asking "why?" So I decided to show them how deep the snow was off the trail.

Great picture of Alyssa.

Getting ready for dinner.

Another one of Alyssa. She had fallen off the sled and rubbed her cheek on the snow so it was a little red.




Sunset. I took 20 or so pictures. Here are a few that turned out pretty good.



Spaghetti at the cabin!

After dinner, the ladies settled in to watch a movie while I got all dressed up to go outside and wait for the Northern Lights to show up.

While I was waiting, I started experimenting to dial in on the right settings...and managed to get some good photos too. This is looking next to our cabin at the owners incredible home. Check out Orion in the picture!!

Our cabin under the stars. The glow from inside the cabin is the girls watching tv.

Me goofing off with the flash. Notice you can still see the stars up above me.

A couple hours later...the Aurora got GREAT!!!



It's a long story but the battery died early in the evening. So I had to keep coming inside to warm up the battery then go back outside so I could take a couple of pictures...repeat. I think I missed a lot of great pictures in the process. But still, happy with what I got. This last one was taken from the couch inside the cabin. I woke up at 3am-ish and went downstairs to see how it was going outside. It was an amazing phenomena where the entire sky was a faint green and it was pulsating. It was moving so fast from north to south that it looked like low clouds screaming past me. So I set up the tri-pod and took a few pictures and managed to capture the aurora from inside. Such a cool experience.

I'm really happy with how everything came out but to fit everything on the blog, I had to cut the resolution by 50%. Hopefully they are still decent when viewing on here. If not, you'll just have to trust me! We looked at them in full size on our tv and they look GREAT!!!

So that ends day 1! I'll be back tomorrow with more pictures.