Cold vs. Cold, Smelly Dogs And Why Flying Sucks

And so it begins....

This is a picture of the Ceremonial Start. I'll be adding more pictures of the teams once I get film developed. This is a shot of "The Chute" from which each team is "launched" at two minute intervals. This was taken by someone else, a number of my shots are at street levels as they made the first turn to head out of town.

The reason there is a second sled tethered to the first sled is to give it ballast while the musher's sled is carrying it's Idita-rider. The auction winning bidder of the "Idita-rider" is sitting in the sled basket of the musher they bid on.

I can't say with complete certainty about this year, but four time champ Jeff King generally has a Make-A-Wish child as his Idita-rider. I'm sure his sponsors pay big bucks to provide this, but publicity and all that happy hoo-ha aside... there's something very special, providing a potential terminally ill child the opportunity to experience a dream come true.

Zoya's idita-rider was Adventure Girl, Stephanie Michaels. Because of the qualifying troubles Zoya encountered, Steph was paired with Wisconsin Rookie, Donald Smidt.

This musher is trying something different for his first Iditarod, that being his team is completely comprised of Siberian Huskies. These dogs tend to be slower as they are much larger than the Alaskan Huskies tend to be. It will be interesting to see how they fare as the race continues. As a rookie, just finishing is a huge accomplishment.

Okay, back to my adventure! When I knew for sure I would be going to Alaska, my first thought was warm enough clothes. Rather than purchase warm, expensive gear I would probably not use here at home... I set out for "borrowing" clothes from everyone I knew.

This led to the wearing of my brother's blaze orange hunting bibs, along with numerous "layers". Then came my first concern of being prepared for the "cold"... I know it gets cold here, I've dressed for cold weather before. I mean I grew up in the Not-So-Great-White-North... how bad could it really be?

The first taste of Alaskan cold vs my type of cold?

That can best be summed up with an occurrence I now know as "nasal closing". Yup... as in, "Dear God, my nose hair has frozen to the inside of my nostrils!"

Ya' know how the phrase, "It's a dry heat!" is used to refer to hot climates in places like the U.S. Southwest? Well, Alaska's should be, "It'll freeze your boogers."

Cripes.

So anyway... I had a black leather, wool-lined parka so I didn't have to borrow my brother's blaze orange jacket too. However, getting ready to leave the house for the start in Anchorage, I fielded comments such as, Wow! That's bright!" & "Well, you'll be easy to find in a crowd!"

Ha-ha.

I had been led to believe this wouldn't stir up a fuss in Alaska.

Wrong.

Once downtown for the Ceremonial Start, even complete strangers commented on my fashion nonsense. (pun intended)

When I discovered my musher girl's hubby had said, "I've always wondered who bought those bright orange clothes... now I know!" I wasn't sure if I should take offense or what...

So... thanks John!

In my defense... where we live, if you didn't wear blaze orange during hunting season, chances are you wouldn't see the end of hunting season!

Because of a serious family emergency, those of us visiting didn't have a great deal of time with John and Zoya. Perfectly understandable and it didn't stop us from having fun and seeing the sights anyway.

One of the clearest days however, Zoya took us to Eureka where we saw the Matanuska Glacier on the way, which is also known as the Mat-Su area. Although the glacier is snow covered this time of year, the incredible blue color of the glaciers is because the million plus age of glacial ice absorbs all colors except blue!

Because the ice won't absorb it, it scatters back giving the glacier its beautiful icy blue hue! Cool, eh? I can hardly wait to see the glacier ice when I return for my summer visit!

On our trip to Eureka, we brought along one of our favorite pooches, Chuckie. He is so sweet and loving and man... smelly doesn't begin to cover it! (I wonder how the rental car people felt about this particular bouquet of "doggier-than-your-average-rental-car return scent?) Hey... she was goin' to the Iditarod afterall!

Chuckie mouthing off!

In Chuckie's defense, it was canine athlete smelly, not, "OH! Good God! What is that smell!?!" smelly. Although we did find ourselves singing, "Smelly dog, smelly dog, what are they feeding you?"

Suddenly the time sadly came when I had to smash everything back into my suitcases and head for home. With every trip I've ever taken, this ranks right up there to putting a Rubik's cube back together.

Just a quick side note... I bought stickers of all the colors on the cube and applied them over the cube to return it to it's original configuration of color schemes.

Worked for me.

Finally I had everything jammed back in, praying TSA would forgo inspection, because there was no way the stuff was ever going to get jammed back in there the second time! On that point, I scored.

Leaving the airport that night, however wasn't in the cards. When they made the first delay announcment, everyone figured (much as I had) that it was a, "Hey-my-vacuum-cleaner-isn't-running-the-right-way-so it'll-be-a-few-minutes before I'm done."

Then as the waiting continued, during one of the follow up announcements a slip-up occured and we all discovered (All means the 187 of us waiting to board) it was a maintenance engine problem!

So getting out on time seemed to be slipping away faster than we had hoped for. Then they told us that they were begging other airlines to see if they had the part we needed. If someone did, we'd be on our way in perhaps two hours.

You can imagine the level of joy this brought to us.

Then came the announcement that floored us all. They told us they were trying to determine if we could make it to Minneapolis and replace the part upon arrival there!

For a split second, we all stood mute. Then pretty much everyone there basically said at the same time, that there was no flipping way we would board under those conditions. Although the actual words used by many passengers were not quite that polite.

Within minutes the final word rained down. We weren't leaving. This was a 2:00a.m. Talk about a "Not a happy camper" moment! I heard words that I am assuming were foreign language versions of the "go-intercourse-yourself" statements I heard earlier.

I was smart in one aspect... while they were being abusive, rude and nasty towards the poor flight agent that had to deal with those people, I was on my cell phone getting on another flight.

I never told anyone else around me I was good to go about five minutes after the announcement. While I made my plane changes however, others made hotel accommodations.

This turned out to be a horse apiece situation. I could have easily returned to where I had been staying but as it was already after two, I wasn't about to throw the household into a tailspin with a late night call. Mainly because of the seriousness of a family member in the ICU. No way was I making a call that would freak them all out.

Then I overheard that the hotel vouchers were for $50 and the cheapest rooms started in the $80's. I quickly scoped out a set of chairs with no armrests, staked my claim, put my head on my carry-on, my legs over my camera case, set my cell phone alarm and quickly crashed.

Mainly because I had taken my evening medications foolishly thinking, "All right! I'll take these and sleep on the plane!"

The next morning, even with all the trials and tribulations of the night before fresh in my mind, (along with a sore neck and a cruddy morning mouth) I was touched when I discovered that during my sleep, someone had taken the time to cover me with a blanket.

Whether it was out of kindness or fear that I sounded like a chainsaw with my snoring I'll never be sure.

Of course the trip gods weren't quite done with me yet.

My flight was delayed two hours, I managed to still make my connection and I finally arrived home after spending more than 24 hours at either an airport or aboard a plane only to discover my luggage had not made the same connections.

My luggage did however, make it to my final destination many hours after I did.

They even delivered it to me promptly.

At 4:30 a.m.

As I slammed the door and stumbled back to bed I muttered some of my newly learned intercourse-thyself phrases in a foreign language....

That was when I smashed my toe into the bed frame.