ALASKA!

I spent the last 10 days on my annual summer trip to Anchorage. The main focus of the trip was riding the 200 mile Fireweed road bike race, but I had lots of fun in the week leading up to it too! I stayed with my friends Pam and Carl and their 16 month old Walker which was quite entertaining. Walker can't actually walk yet (I blame his name) but has an incredible vocabulary and for the most part is very energetic and happy. I spent a lot of time just hanging out at the house with him. I was also lucky enough to overlap the first few days of my trip with the last few days of my friend Charis' visit home. She and her husband live in Norway and I hadn't seen her in more than a year. She is one of my best friends and I miss hiking and running and skiing with her so it was really fun to get out and hike Flattop with her.

My aunt was visiting at the same time as me, and she and my mom and I went on a boat tour of Kenai Fjords last Monday and then on Tuesday went kayaking in Blackstone Bay, in Prince William Sound. We had a great time on the boat tour. I've been on that trip several times with other visitors and have never seen as many whales. We probably saw 20 humpbacks. It was spectacular.

We took most of our kayaking pictures on disposable cameras, but I used my zoom on my digital to get a good picture of these little guys. They were playing like crazy as we kayaked up to them and as we got closer they just popped up and looked at us.
It was great to get out of Anchorage and do some very "Alaskan" stuff while I was home!

Pam and I decided after doing the 200 mile relay (each riding 100 miles) for the past two years that we wanted to actually ride together, and this year signed up for the 200 solo in the Fireweed. I didn't feel like my training had gone as well as I would have liked, and we were both very nervous the morning of the race, but we got on our bikes and rode off....and we made it! I definitely had a point just after 110 miles where I started to bonk, and didn't know if I was going to make it or not, but I drafted off of Pam for a while and stocked up on food and got through it. We struggled into a horrible headwind up and over Thompson Pass, and even after that thought that the worst part of the race was the last 10 miles, which felt like they were going to go on forever! We finished in just over 14 hours, and tied for 4th place, with 7 women in the race. Check here for some good pictures of the scenery going over Thompson Pass. Despite the headwind it was the sunniest we've ever had it for the race.

This is a picture of Pam putting dried mango under her shorts to eat while riding. This provided much hilarity later in the race when we were a bit loopy anyways and the mangos kept sticking to her legs. And here we are on the ferry from Valdez to Whittier on Sunday...happy to be done and still standing!