Travel Blog

Sue:

We are bad bloggers. We know. Phil's dad reminded us too. He said he hadn't checked our site for weeks because we never write anything new. Boy, it's a good thing Phil cut his hand so we had something to write about.

But there's still not much to tell, except that Phil did get some new sections online last night. They're about our animals, and they can be found under the "RVing with Pets" tab. It's like our old site where we sent you to Dogster and Catster, only now we have a page for our pets that we do ourselves.

Today was the first day in about a week and a half that was rain-free. It's not supposed to last long, though, so we're not going to get used to it. We just have to dry a few things out so we can pack them up and get ready to float out of here in 29 days.

I don't know if I've kept you all apprised of our exit strategy yet, but we're taking the ferry from Skagway to Bellingham, WA. The trip takes about four days, and we'll get to see all the towns in Alaska that our customers have been telling us about. I'm excited to get a glimpse of Sitka and Ketchikan. I'm not sure how long we'll be in port, but we'll get some pictures at least, even if we have to take them from the ferry railing.

From Washington, we're motoring back to Coffeyville, KS, to work at Amazon.com again. We won't be lonely this year. About 15 people we've worked with in Skagway in the past will be there this year. I guess that doesn't guarantee we'll see them (it's a big warehouse), but it will be nice to get together with them when we all have time off.

After Christmas, we're really not sure what's going to happen, but we want to try for a campground job that runs from January through April, and then we hope to spend the summer working near Mount Rushmore. It's time to get our driver's licenses renewed in South Dakota, so we figured we'd just try to get a job there.

So we're sorry we've bored our faithful readers for the past two years doing repeat stuff. Stick with us and we promise new and exciting places to blog about (maybe not so exciting as the sugar beet harvest, but we'll do our best).

Among things not to do at work is to catch falling knives. But after three years here, I still have not mastered dulling that reflex not to reach out, and yesterday it cost me a trip to the clinic.

I had just sold a knife and was getting it all packaged up for the guy when it slipped out of its sheath. Naturally I grabbed at it, but caught the blade with my pinky. The cut was barely half an inch long, but it was deep enough to need a stitch or two to close it up. After telling our boss, I drove myself to the only medical facilities within 150 miles, the Skagway Clinic.

When I got there it was empty, so I went up to the check in window and the lady there told me to hold on. So I held on to the bandage around my finger until she finally looked up and asked me what I needed. I just showed her the cut and she exclaimed, “Oh, you don’t have to wait if you are bleeding!” Now she tells me.

Because it was a worker’s comp issue there were a couple of pages of forms to fill out, but she helped me out and soon enough I was waiting again, reading Sports Illustrated in the waiting room. Then I was hustled though getting my vitals. The only one I balked at was when the nurse measured my height and said I was 5’10”. I told him they may need to check for osteoporosis since that meant I was two inches shorter than I was two years ago. “You’re right, you are 6’.” Yeah, that made me feel like I was in good hands.

In Skagway, we don’t have doctors, but we do have a good Nurse Practitioner who handles the cases they don’t turf to Juneau. She had a look at the wound and decided it needed three stitches, so we had another relocate to the treatment room. Fortunately she is an accomplished quilter, so she sewed me up, gave me a tetanus shot, and I was on my way back to work.

But then I had to clean the ulu case….

Sue:

Yesterday a woman asked us if we had a mirror. She was trying on rings.

If you have read our blogs of the past three summers, you know we get a lot of strange questions. I don’t know if this falls into that category, but it was certainly funny.

Last Sunday a guy asked if we have a Home Depot in town. I said no and before I could point him to the hardware store he went on to explain what a Home Depot was. Kathleen and I were so amazed by his blanket assumption that we would have no comprehension of a Home Depot that we let him go on for a few minutes only saying, “Wow, that sounds nice.”

Sue:

At work yesterday, I heard the following conversation take place between a husband and wife while the woman was trying to choose some earrings among many, many earrings on the display:

Woman: "What do you think of these ones?"

Man: "Anything you buy in the next ten seconds is great! After that, they all suck."

I gave them the locals discount just for making me laugh.