First Days in Alaska

Our first days in Alaska were pretty bumpy. On the one hand, we were so incredibly relieved to finally be at our long-awaited destination and have the monotonous travel days behind us. But on the other hand, the house-hunting got off to a very rough start & temporary living got old fast. As I mentioned in a previous post, we have always house-hunted a few weeks/a couple months prior to our PCS {with Grammy & Grampy watching our kids} and had our house secured/ready for an immediate move-in upon our arrival. So this was all uncharted territory for us. We had a realtor that we were working with ahead of the move; however, upon our arrival, he was being less than helpful to say the least. So we were kind of scrambling on our own. We went days before even being able to coordinate a viewing with a realtor or listing agent. It was unlike anything we'd ever experienced before. Our first Airbnb that we were staying in was in Palmer, which is about 45ish minutes outside of Anchorage. Prior to arriving here, we had considered living in Palmer, which was part of the reason we wanted to stay in this part of town. {The other reason is it's extremely hard to find a nice, reasonably-priced Airbnb in Alaska in peak tourist season on short notice.} We quickly discovered we did not want to live in Palmer, so every time we wanted to go on base or go looking at houses, we had a 30 minute minimum drive ahead of us. Under normal circumstances, that probably wouldn't seem like a big deal. But after 16 long days in the car, the daily drive {sometimes more than once!} back and forth between Palmer & Anchorage was about to put me over the edge. Not to mention, there is absolutely nothing between the two cities. Oh, I almost forgot to mention this fun detail! We put our names on the wait list for base housing as soon as we got orders just to keep all of our options open--buying, renting, or living on base. We were told we would probably get offered a home on base before even arriving in Alaska. Well, of course when things went hay-wire with our search to buy or rent a home, we found out that--surprise!--there actually wasn't anything available on base for us & they couldn't even estimate how long the wait would be. Super fun turn of events. ;)

The picture above & below were taken at a small park/playground in the neighborhood where our Airbnb was located. The weather for our first few days in Alaska was sunny with a high of 72, we didn't realize how good we had it!

{We didn't know how long we'd have to wait for our HHG to arrive in Alaska, so we toted Shelby's keyboard with us all 4,000 miles so she'd have it as soon as we got here!}

While Derek was busy with in-processing on base, I did my best to make our days feel "normal" with visits to Palmer parks & the library. The kids were in heaven walking into a library for the first time in weeks!

{Cold Stone!}

The pictures below were from our first trip to the Alaska Zoo. It seemed so irresponsible of us to spend our first Saturday in Alaska at the zoo when we still didn't have a house {or any promising prospects!} yet. Not to mention, we wouldn't even have our Airbnb in Palmer for much longer. We initially only booked it for 5 nights not knowing how long the house-hunting process would take, and it wasn't available for us to extend it. But going to the zoo was just what we needed to keep our sanity intact.

We also visited a reindeer farm in Palmer, that we LOVED! It was such a cool experience.

After a few days {although it seemed like an eternity at the time!}, we finally got some traction going in the house-hunt. We were killing some time before meeting with a listing agent to see a couple of rentals, so we popped into Wal-Mart. Leaving with new books in hand made these three very happy!

We had a very gourmet dinner at McDonald's after looking at two rental houses. Of course, it was the slowest McDonald's in the history of the world, but thankfully they had new books to entertain them.

Other random things we learned those first few days in Alaska...store shelves are never well stocked, everything is more expensive! (even fast-food restaurants), and you can't find Nature's Own bread. We were bummed at first because finding "our" sandwich bread is a thing for us almost every single time we PCS. Usually, it is so frustrating because all we want is a "normal" tasting sandwich, but we can't find "our" bread. But we stumbled upon Franz bread on our very first grocery run in Palmer, which is baked locally in Alaska. And I think it is our favorite sandwich bread ever!