My first post from Alaska

Greetings from North Pole!!

We are all safely here in Alaska and beginning our adventures. I already have stories and comments that I need to catch up on for this blog, but I suppose that is to be expected when I've been trying so hard to get settled in our new place that I've barely taken a moment for anything else.

By the way, if this is the first news you are getting of our move, please don't be offended. This all happened lightning-quick. I only visited Alaska for the first time like 2 months ago, and it has been a whirlwind ever since.

Kelly had the first big adventure for our family. He drove up here with his nephew, Parker, and Ariana and Kiara. (I flew up here with the three youngest kids.) As he crossed the border into Canada, he declared his hunting rifles, as he had been instructed to do. You see, he called border patrol ahead of time to find out all the details for transporting guns across Canada. He didn't want any nasty surprises. He found out that handguns require a bunch of special letters, etc., so he sent his handgun with me in my checked baggage, but took the hunting rifles since he only had to declare them at the border. Or so he thought.

Upon declaring them, the agent told him he had to have the guns out and to write their serial numbers down. Kelly was speechless. The guns were packed away somewhere in the midst of all our stuff (and we have a TON of stuff. I mean, a TON... or maybe two.) He told the agent the situation, explained what he had been told when he called, tried to relate how huge of a project it would be the find the guns, tried to reason with him, all to no avail. Rules are rules, after all, and we must follow the rules. Never mind the fact that he could have just not declared his guns in the first place if he wanted to do something illegal. Who needs common sense when we have bureaucracy?

So Kelly had to turn around, drive back into the nearest town and find a place where he could unload the truck that it had taken him TWO WHOLE DAYS to load. I was able to describe to him the dimensions of the box that had the hunting rifles, but neither of us had any idea where they were on the truck. It took him hours to get through this whole ordeal, but he finally found what he needed and got over the border.

That was not a happy day of travel. They didn't travel as far as they had hoped, they got in later than they hoped, and they still had almost a full week of driving ahead of them. And it was all due to a circumstance Kelly had tried to plan for and avoid in the first place.

But I'm sure this will be something that he will laugh about someday... in the future... perhaps very, verrrry far in the future.

For now, let's just keep this between us.