Giving Thanks

We have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving Day!  We have truly been blessed during our first two weeks here in Juneau.  We have been warmly welcomed into this tight-knit community and have made wonderful new friends already. 

The truck arrived without any problems and we’ve made good use of the four-wheel drive as it hasn’t stopped snowing since we arrived.

 We found a place to live!  After a short search we were put in touch with a friend of a friend (the word-of-mouth network here is a great resource) who is moving south and was looking for renters for her condo.  It will be a perfect arrangement and we were all grateful to have found each other.  It’s a beautiful place on Douglas Island.  Douglas Island is directly west of Juneau, across the Gastineau Channel.  The two communities are connected by a bridge.  This is the view from the front window of our new home.  It is a view of downtown Juneau, looking east from the eastern shore of Douglas Island.  We won’t be able to move in until December 17^th, but we will simply extend our stay at the Juneau Hotel, which is more than adequate and more like a small apartment than a hotel room.

 I successfully cooked my first turkey and made gravy (with a little over-the-phone coaching from my grandma) and we had a simple, but delicious Thanksgiving dinner here at the hotel. 

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and have found much to be grateful for as well!

First Impressions

We arrived safely in Juneau Saturday night.  Our flights from Minneapolis to Seattle and then from Seattle to Juneau, with a brief stop in Ketchikan, were long, but uneventful.  Our arrival has coincided with a winter storm!  It snowed all last night and off and on during the day today for a total of 15 inches and it is expected to snow another 10 inches tonight.  Here are a few snapshots from our first two days in Juneau.  There will be more soon as we settle in and begin to fully absorb our new surroundings!

A co-worker of Pierre’s gave us a warm welcome and a tour of Juneau yesterday afternoon.  She has lived in Juneau for 25 years and is a wealth of information.  She patiently answered all of our many questions and we learned a lot about the area – everything from the best place to buy Xtra Tuff boots to which neighborhood sits directly under an avalanche-prone mountainside.  This photo was taken at Mendenhall Glacier.  It’s just barely visible in the background…

A photo of our hotel.  It’s a great place for an extended stay!… 

Shots around town during the snowstorm…

This is a photo of the bridge that connects Juneau (which is on the mainland) with Douglas Island, home to the town of Douglas…

The large building in the background of this photo is the Federal Building where Pierre’s office is located…

Looking south from very near our hotel…

Our ‘Stuff’ Departs

Pierre and I have moved five times in four years of marriage, despite the fact that we hate moving.  We’ve gone from a large apartment to a smaller apartment to an even smaller apartment, to False Pass, Alaska and back again.  And now we’re tackling a move to Juneau, Alaska.  Because of all of the moving we’ve done we have managed to whittle our belongings down.  Nevertheless, the ‘stuff’ accumulates.  When we moved to False Pass we stored all of our belongings at Pierre’s parents’ house, adding them to a pile that was already here because of our increasingly smaller apartments.  The past couple of weeks I have been going through all of the piles, unpacking boxes, repacking boxes, deciding what goes and what stays and fighting the ever-present urge (triggered when faced with a pile of stuff to be sorted) to simply lie facedown on the floor, or, alternately, to find a snack.  It never fails that when I’m up to my eyeballs in crumpled-up newspaper and mismatched coffee mugs or in the middle of trying to stuff the last ‘kitchen’ item into the last ‘kitchen’ box and it simply will not fit that I absolutely must stop and go find some Triscuits.  Right now.  While I have been doing a lot of sorting and organizing, this time around we have had the luxury of movers.  And I found out just in time that they would be doing most of the packing for us.  Hurrah!  Because of the nature of the move, it is considered ‘International,’ which means the moving company has to go through every box for security reasons.  The movers, two nice guys, came yesterday.  We had piles here and there.  We showed them where everything was, and then they started packing and moving.  How strange!  I have only ever packed and moved myself so it was very different to stand back and let someone else do it.  I felt like I should be helping.  Or explaining myself, “Oh yes, ha ha, that small log with three holes drilled in it, it’s a centerpiece, you see, from our wedding.”  Thankfully, my aunt drove out to visit with us yesterday which effectively distracted me from hovering awkwardly near the movers, wringing my hands.  Not because I was concerned about any items of great value, but because I felt like I should be doing something.  Within a few hours it was all packed and loaded onto the moving truck.  No couch-wrestling, awkwardly-sized box-wrestling, back injuries or swear words for us!  How luxurious!  They took all of our ‘stuff’ by moving truck to their main facility where it will then be loaded into shipping containers, driven to Seattle, and then loaded onto a freighter bound for Juneau.  Quite a fuss for our humble hodge podge!

The Truck Departs

Our truck left for Juneau yesterday afternoon!  It will be traveling by transport to Seattle and then by freighter to Juneau.  It left Buffalo, MN (where we are staying with Pierre’s parents) on a flatbed truck.  Despite the fact that I’ve been sorting and packing, it made this move finally feel REAL.  One of our belongings is actually on its way to Juneau!…

Hello Friends!

Welcome to our new blog!  This is where we will chronicle our move from Minnesota to Juneau, AK and our new lives and adventures once we get there.  Thanks for reading!…