Road Trippin'

Good evening to everyone out there! I'm coming to you from beautiful and sunny Fairbanks tonight (by no means since it is sunny is it necessarily warm). I just finished up with my second day of Social Studies Curriculum work, and I'm now ready for our district wide in-service that gets fired up at 8:30 tomorrow morning. I'm looking forward to seeing all of the other teachers and getting a chance to learn some more strategies to help me improve on my instruction.

So last week I informed you of the massive amount of travel that I'm going to be doing this month; I'm happy to say that the first leg of the journey (the road trip with the basketball team) went off without a hitch. It started off with our trip to town on Wednesday to play Effie Kokrine that night. The game went pretty well, but we ended up losing by ten. Our only senior player was sick and couldn't come on this trip, him not playing was not the reason we lost this game, but his court leadership was definitely missed. We stayed at the Effie Kokrine School that night and played the next night against the Lathrop School JV. They were a very solid team and they ended up beating us by 21 points. That game just got out of hand fast, our guys were tired from staying up the night before (they didn't go to sleep before 3:00 am any night, which means that I didn't go to sleep until 3:30 am any night) and they just didn't have it that game. Friday, we woke up and messed around in town for awhile before taking off for the two hour drive south to Delta Junction. The drive was spectacular (I haven't ridden in a car for more than ten minutes since August, so the van time was good for me). Here's a couple of pictures of the beginning of the ride.



The ride got better with the further south we traveled; in no time at all, we could see Denali Park off in the distance, and it was every bit of spectacular. Here's one of the better photos that I got of it. I put up a full size of this one below because it's awesome. A huge thanks to the Finnish Warrior for driving the van so I had an opportunity to take this photo.

I also got to see my first moose that wasn't viewed from the air; it was monstrous, and my players informed me that there are even bigger ones that have horn like things sticking out of their heads (hardy har har...little smart alecks). We lost to the Delta Junction JV by nine points on Friday night and were fully ready for them again on Saturday night. We achieved an astounding one point victory on Saturday night that could best be summed up as a barn burner (yeah, I'm from South Dakota). After the game on Saturday night, we went out to eat and then tried to get the kids to go to sleep at a decent hour (tried...being the key word there). We had to be up at five and on the road by six to make the check-in time for the first plane. Pete and I finally got to sleep around 4:00 am which made for a real intersesting drive home two hours later. We were functional, but I couldn't say the same for the players. They were all sleeping like babies within minutes of the van ride; this was the perfect time for the Finnish Warrior and I's sweet revenge. Since they had kept us up for four nights in a row, we decided to rock some country music and sing along with it whether we knew the words or not. The tactic worked fantastically, and we heard complaints for a solid 20 minutes.....victory. After that, we let them sleep and we got treated by being able to see our first wolf. It was a gigantic grayish colored wolf that stood stoically by the side of the road.

We arrived in Fairbanks with plenty of time to spare and got all of the kiddies on their planes to go home with no problems. We then checked into our hotel and took a much needed snooze for about four hours.

Not much has happened since then; we've just been working on Social Studies Curriculum at the office and getting ourselves ready for three days of in-service. The road trip was a great experience and a whole lot of fun. I will try to take a lot of pictures this week and I'm sure I 'll have some exciting things to report about by the time the weekend rolls around. Everyone be good and take care.

Peace and Love,
Nicholas

I wanted to make a quick shout out to my friend Abbey, who is a spectacular law student at USD in Vermillion, SD. If anyone needs a lawyer in three years or so, make sure to look her up. She's real connoving (hahahaha) and I'm sure she will make a terrific lawyer some day.