What is Your Favorite Destination?

Like many, we sit at home dreaming of places we have been and places yet to explore. But with the world seemingly at a standstill, that is all we can do. Dream. So as the temperatures drop and snow covers the landscape we find ourselves thinking of some of our favorite places. The top of that list for us is Alaska. The scenery and sense of adventure is second to none. It has been 4 years since we have been there and as many of you know that was to be our destination last summer but sadly that was not to be.

The start of our Alaskan adventure in 2016

I would classify each of our favorite destinations into three categories; the scenery, the people and the adventure. Alaska checked all three boxes. We were expecting the scenery and the adventure, what we were not expecting is to make friends that we hope will last a lifetime. We knew and were looking forward to seeing Barb’s cousin Lori and her husband Jim in Fairbanks. Barb does not have many blood relations left and Lori is very special to us. Our two unexpected encounters and people we consider special friends include Rich & Susan and Rod & Denise. Both encounters were totally random which made them that much more magical. You can read about both here.

Our favorite scenery is hard to pin down to one location. The numerous glaciers were breathtaking and the drive to Skagway will forever be etched into our memories.

Daisy overlooking one of the many glaciers

A sample of the landscape on our drive to Skagway

As will our glacier cruise in Valdez...

But as I think of these I cannot help but think of our Root Glacier walk in McCarthy and another chance encounter when we crossed paths with one of Barb’s former co-workers Melinda while on a walk way there. What are the odds of that?!?!?!

Barb and I on the Root Glacier

The more I think about it there are too many scenery thoughts flowing back to mention so I will just leave it with these first few that came to me.

The adventure category is easy, it has to be the fishing. Having never been to the area, we had no idea where or what to fish with but we figured it out catching countless salmon, Dolly Varden, halibut, rainbow trout and grayling.  The grayling have almost been a mythical fish to me with their long sweeping dorsal fins and I could not wait to try and catch one. Little did I know that this species would be the easiest and most abundant. 

The grayling were plentiful and fairly easy to catch

Barb releasing one of many Dolly's we caught in Haines

Our favorite has to be the salmon. There is nothing like hooking into one of these silver bullets with a flyrod!

Fishing the Kenai 

But for now, all we can do is think back to the past and look forward to the future. We have dreams of pointing our truck to the northwest again this summer but only time will tell if we will be able to make that journey.

In the meantime we have plenty to do to keep us busy right here in South Dakota. The fireplace is now grouted, cleaned and ready for the hearthstone.

But the big news of the week are the kitchen cabinets. We had them designed and the order placed with Don’s Custom Cabinets in Rapid City back in September. We were nowhere ready for them at the time but we were anticipating that we would be ready sometime in December when the cabinets were scheduled to be done. Then a couple of weeks ago we received word that they would not be done until January. Imagine our surprise when we received a call late last week saying they were ready for pickup!

Kevin and I spent one day on the kitchen and another day on the laundry room. Barb is like a little kid in the kitchen, putting things away, organizing and reorganizing. I suspect that she is nowhere close to done but she is having fun! (Update...I went in there while she was putting her spices away and she was putting them in the spice cabinet in alphabetical order!)

Still waiting on the new appliances

Kitchen Island

The laundry room

Friday the countertop people came out to measure the kitchen for the countertops. That process was pretty interesting. They put labels with different sized dots on the wall throughout the kitchen then put another sheet with dots on the surface of the base cabinets and took about 50 pictures. The guys said he inputs all the pictures into his software and it designs the cabinets to 1/16th of an inch. Beats measuring by hand! It will be a week or two before they are ready.

I spent some time over at Kevin and Cheryl’s working on their fireplace. It too is now all done! They have made some great progress as well which Cheryl has been documenting on their 7 Bulls Facebook page.

Speaking of Kevin, he and I went on of an adventure of our own this week when we went pheasant hunting about 3 hours east of here on the Rosebud. Some friends of his from Wisconsin met us out there. I would love to say that the birds were plentiful and we never missed a shot but both would be lies. We did see some beautiful country and had a good time taking a break from our projects though!

The landscape seemed to go on forever

One of our many pheasant drives

With less than a week until Christmas, our goal is to finish trimming the upper windows and get that scaffolding down in the next few days. Once that is done we can start to take a serious look at flooring!

Next week I will reveal more of our favorite destinations as we look outside at the snowy landscape at our furry friends and think of adventures past and future. In the meantime, we will carry on here day by day, project to project and dream to dream.

A foggy gray day had the several new bucks exploring our property

This little guy came to the window to see what we were doing