Eagle River Weather

Friday, May 30, 2008

Pictures from the Yurt Property

I received a couple of photos of the yurt property recently. When Nicki and I were there last summer the cloud ceiling was pretty low every time we visited, so these are new views for us too.

Here is a picture looking Southeast. You can see a bit of the construction of the garage going on. Evidently the foundation, walls and ceiling have all been framed now and the siding is just being put on.


Here is a view looking south. Shilo has graced us with her presence in the foreground.


These photographs have definitely made us even more excitemed about getting up there. I hope they also increase the chance that you come up and visit.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Driving Up to Alaska

After putting all of our stuff on the barge and giving Leo to his grand parents, Nicki, our dog Georgie, and I will be driving up to Alaska. Call it a little romantic get-a-way for the parents or a chance to regroup after the stresses of packing and before the stresses of unpacking. Either way it is going to be a lot of fun and the chance to check out a part of the world that neither of us have ever explored.

Here is the map of our proposed route. You can click on it if you want a larger view. The actual road is in red.



Here is how the basic rout will work
  • North on I-5 to Canada
  • North on I-1 (the Alaskan Highway) to Cache Creek
  • North on 97 to Prince George
  • East on 16 (the Yellowhead Highway) to Kitwanga
  • North on 37 (the Cassiar Highway) to Watson Lake
  • North again on I-1 to Alaska
  • North on 2 to Tok
  • South on 1 (Tok Cutoff) Glennallen
  • South on 1 (the Glenn Highway) to Eagle River

So, let's see that's 2,320 miles, divided by 60 miles per hour, divided by 8 hours of driving in a day..... That's about 5 days. Five days! (your welcome SOW) Oh, well. It'll be 5 days of fun and adventure. We plan on camping a lot and maybe staying in a few hotels. We have some hot springs we want to visit and we might even get a hike or two in. If you'd like to learn more about traveling (hint) or moving (hint, hint) up to Alaska check out this website: themilepost.com

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

New Floor Plan

Due to some drainage and frost heaving issues that may have occurred beneath the ground of the yurt and caused damage tot he deck, we have been required to make a new floor plan. Instead of the yurt being half on the ground and half on top of the garage the yurt will now be almost entirely on the garage. There are some pluses and minuses to this new set up.

Pluses
  • We will have an interior stairwell instead of an exterior one to get from the garage to the yurt, which means less construction.
  • We will be able to rotate the yurt so the windows are more south facing and facing out towards the valley instead of the hill.
  • Construction costs will be much less expensive

Minuses

  • The yurt is going to be much more exposed to the wind which means we will need to put some additional bracing in place inside the yurt.
  • We had to rethink and re-coordinate the position of all of our utility hook ups.

Although it has been a little stressful coming up with a new plan, we believe this set up is an improvement from the last one. Here is the latest floor plan.




Wednesday, May 21, 2008

IKEA Shopping

Nicki got off work early one day, so we set out to get our trailer for hauling our IKEA purchases home. The U-haul people found out the electronics for our hitch were not working and said they could fix it in about a half an hour. One hour later they said they could not fix it. *Sigh* So, we rented a truck and headed out to the store. By the time we got to IKEA it was already pretty late (almost Leo's bed time) so we took turns keeping Leo happy and finding the stuff we needed. One tired baby, two crabby parents, three friendly helpers, four hours, and five shopping carts of stuff later we were done and on our way home. We're glad that part of our IKEA adventure is over. The next one?...putting it all together. Luckily that can wait until Alaska.

A good portion of our furniture for the yurt will be coming from IKEA. Most notably will be our modular kitchen. This kitchen set up involves free-standing cabinets, kitchen sinks, and counter tops. The free-standing aspect will allow us to change the lay out of our kitchen if we need or want too. And, it will allow us to more easily move the entire kitchen when it comes time to relocate the yurt. We will also be purchasing our bathroom furniture, futons, curtains, and our lighting from IKEA.

Here are a few of the tings we bought:
Bookshelf
Bar Stools (Recognize these SOW?)
Bar Table (kind of)
Kitchen Cabinet
Track Lighting
Futon