I left you with quite the cliff hanger last time... Has the suspense gotten to you yet?! So we were standing in a circle and Leslie was doing our closing ceremonies. Up pulls a taxi can and suddenly there is chaos as people get excited and start pulling out their cameras. I turn around and there are two really good looking guys. I was like "uh, cool, I guess." Turns out they are the twin brothers from the Property Brothers show on HGTV. Their names are Drew and Jonathan. They talked with us for a bit and were really appreciative of the work we'd done for Habitat (which was one of their favorite charities). They left soon after and we got back to the festivities.
The next surprise was John and Garrett putting on a spoof about all of the people on the worksite and all the things that happened over the week. It was hilarious.
We received our official polar plunge certificates. Leslie wouldn't give me mine until I would agree to lead a build. They don't call her the velvet steamroller for nothing! 
Tuesday night we went back to the church and scrounged for food for dinner. We packed up our belongings and the first group of people started to leave for the airport. It was sad to see them go but I also was feeling relieved. Having 23 people around all the time has been really challenging. 6 people left that evening.
The next morning we slept in. Nope, still not true. We were up at 5:30am to finish packing, take down air mattresses, vacuum the church, clean bathrooms, put the rooms back together with tables and chairs, scrub the fridges out, etc. it was a frenzied morning! Two people left for the airport at. 7:15. We loaded up the vans at 8:30 and went to the habitat affiliate to drop off the habitat 15 seater vans. Cassandra and Laura volunteered to go pick up the rental vans for us to start our journey down to Homer, Alaska. Leslie (the host) lives in Homer and agreed to drive down at the same time so that we could follow her. Little did we know what a lead door she has!!! When it was my turn to drive (there were 2 of the 11 passenger vans and two drivers per van... I volunteered to be one of the four drivers) I could barely keep up with her. Let me digress a moment here... Who reading this thinks I am a slow driver? Who here thinks I have a lead food? Yep, it's a little known fact that while I am a very good driver, I also tend to like to drive a teensy bit over the speed limit. So while I was following Leslie, eventually I just gave up and didn't worry since there is only one road to Homer and it's only one lane. Eventually we would catch up! Our first stop was at a beautiful waterfall/rushing river. It was a beautiful blue/light gray/clear color. It's a glacially fed river (which most up here are) so they have this really pretty slate color due to the silt from the glacier. Leslie even showed us the first Eskimo disposable diaper... Moss! They would carry the babies on their backs. And before they would put them in, they'd set some moss /clump of dirt right beneath the babies bum. Once it becomes saturated, they'd throw it to the side and grab another clump. Ta-da!!
From there we stopped in this little town of Ninilchik. It's a Russian orthodox neighborhood on the coast of the Kenai Peninsula. There are maybe 120 people that love there. They still attend the small Russian Orthodox Church set high on the hillside. The church was built back in the 1800's and was very quaintly decorated with Russian orthodox decorations.
Ok, I'll try to update more later!
No comments:
Post a Comment