My Southeast report

This is how you get from my cabin to Craig:
5:30 a.m.: Get up. Brush teeth, etc. and catch 6 a.m. flight to Ketchikan that stops at Anchorage, then Juneau, then Sitka en route. (This hopping around Southeast Alaska is known as the "milk run" flight.)
12:30 p.m.: Arrive in Ketchikan. Take ferry across channel from airport to town. This ride goes something like this:

Step 1: Board boat.


Step 2: Eight seconds later, boat has moved twenty feet* and hit the opposite shore. Gedunk!**


Step 3: Walk across boat.


Step 4: Continue walking.


Step 5: You're on the other side!


3:30 p.m.: Catch other ferry from Ketchikan to Hollis.

6:30 p.m.: Catch car ride from Hollis to Craig.

7:30 p.m.: Arrive in Craig.

Several notes for now:

1) Southeast is really beautiful. I mean, jaw-droppingly beautiful. They get about 150 inches of rainfall annually. That's enough to drown my cabin! So their landscapes are lush and green. Here is a photo of Juneau, from the plane:


And descending into Sitka:


And Sitka itself:


And Ketchikan, as we leave by ferry:


2) Southeasterners are very warm and friendly. On the airport ferry, I met a Tlingit man who gave city tours. He told me a local story about how a young girl had advised the community on how to plant trees for a wind break, and asked me what I was doing in town. I told him about the Alaska Wood Energy Conference, and he nodded. Imagine my surprise to find him speaking at the conference three days later. He said, "I learned about this conference from a young lady on the ferry, and so here I am." It turns out that he was a friend of the organizer, and so when he contacted her to ask if he could join, she invited him to speak on Tlingit culture. He was very warm and funny.

3) Southeasterners, like Anchorage residents, are quite wussy about cold! During a visit with a pellet boiler operator, we asked the man a question about cold weather performance. Well, he informed us, the thing had only been installed for one winter, but he'd find out the following week how it would go, as the temperature was expected to hit "40!" I blinked. "40, above zero?" "Yeah! Brrrr!!!"

Um.

Yeah.

4) Prince of Wales Island folks are very... locally-focused. A man was telling us a story about his local community of Thorne Bay, and made a reference to "all the way over in Craig". I was amused.

5) Artsy fartsy photo from my last dinner in Ketchikan:

I love the wisp of the pedestrian walking in the rain.

More photos forthcoming! Right now, I am on a plane with my teeny-tiny Notebook, so editing photos is a pain in the honker. Stay tuned!

*Slight exaggeration

**It doesn't really literally hit the opposite shore, either.