I finally have gotten back to my blog and decided to fill everyone in on the last month or so of hecticness... so, here it goes. I left Fairbanks in the middle of December to head home for the holidays. It felt a bit weird as I stepped on the plane wednesday morning, only ecause it was my first time going back to the bay area in over nine months. I had gotten into the swing of things in the Golden Heart city and didn't know what to expect when I was bombarded with thousands more people surrounding me at all times. As I stepped off the plane in San Francisco, I was immediately hit with a heat wave. Okay, not a heat wave for anyone in the bay area this winter, but going from twenty below to forty and fifty above was a nice change. For the week a nd a half that I was home, I realized that the quaint and silent town of Fairbanks had become much more appealing to me than I had thought it would. I am used to fifty five miles per hour speed limits on the expressways, no traffic what so ever, and snow piles everywhere along side the roads. One of the first nights I was in town, I was in downtown San Francisco and was completely enamored once again with how warm it felt even at forty degrees and how many people are around you at all times. We have just close to forty thousand people in Fairbanks, I am pretty sure I saw that many people just in Union Square. One nice thing that I discovered about the winters in Walnut Creek, was the ability to go outside at any point in the day and go for a run or just enjoy the pleasant outdoors, without freezing to death or worrying about cold exposure to the skin. As time inched closer to Christmas, I realized that it had felt so long since I had celebrated the holiday, due to the fact that, last year I had spent it in a hotel room by myself. This year it was nice to be around family and enjoy the holidays like they were meant to be. While my time came to a close back home, I was grateful to have spent the holidays with family and friends, get a fresh new breath of air before I headed back to the last frontier, but also realized that I was ready to head back to the far north and continue with my daily duties. It was good to be home, but I missed the secluded town of Fairbanks.
And although I missed Fairbanks, it didn't seem to miss me much, because as I hopped off the plane around ten o'clock (Alaska Standard Time), it was forty seven degrees below zero and the luggage door on the plane had been frozen shut. I waited about forty minutes to finally get my last piece of luggage back and was then contacted by my rommate that his car was having trouble starting and that I should take a cab home. Now, I know what most of you are thinking, how much did he have to pay for a cab from the airport?!?! It cost me less than twenty bucks including tip to get home, I know, pretty nice. Cabs start at the flat rate of only $1 here and are much cheaper than SF, and my house is only about ten minutes maximum from the house. Back to the weather... I thought forty seven below was bad for this time of year, but that was only the beginning. I picked up my girlfriend from the airport only two days later... fifty below zero... and we found that her heating pipes had frozen. This means that all the pipes along the floor boards used for heating had frozen... the furnace was broken beyond repair, all sinks and toilet bowls were practically ice cubes, and the internal temperature was around freezing and you could see your breath inside. At least someone else had a just as good welcome home present. That week became more hectic for some other reasons... but that's for later blogs. But what I can write about now is how after her pipes froze at her house... Rachelle moved into her grandpaents house that was all insulated up for Winter... because they will be gone until May. We called the house the bat cave, because you could not see outside at any point during the day... and it was deathly silent... to add to all the drama, her grandparents pipes froze as well within the week, making it just dandy. Throughout the first week of being home temperatures never got better than forty five below... and the Fairbanks citizens were caught a bit off guard. Although we are used to the cold... nobody was used to the idea of these temperatures staying so low for such a consistent amount of time... almost two weeks when it was all said and done and some record lows for this time of year, we still have February to look forward to.
After the freezing temperatures passed... we got a heat wave of about forty five degrees for five days and now we're starting to dip back down to below zero. Well, I hope this wasn't too long for everybody to keep up, and I shortened it quite a bit so it was easily readable in one sitting. I will be posting more frequently now and hope that everyone gets the chance to see. Stay warm and enjoy the new year!!!
