Top of the World - Barrow, Alaska

Home now - first day of school has come and gone...

This narrative is from Saturday night 08-16-08

Today finds me in Barrow, Alaska (with our football team). Some of you may know that when I began looking for a job in Alaska that Barrow was the first place I applied. However, Mary made it abundantly clear that we would not than, now or ever live in Barrow (or any bush school for that matter). So the opportunity to travel with the team came up again this year I decided to make the journey.

What a journey - The school bus carrying our team and coaches left Seward at 7am on Friday morning for an 11am flight to Fairbanks. It is significant to note the the flight to Fairbanks is less than an hour. This put us to our layover destination at around noon - for a 5:50pm connecting flight to Barrow (arriving at 7:20pm).

...from time to time life doesn't go as planned and the journey north was an adventure. We boarded to the plane for Barrow Friday night as planned and we were have way to Barrow (1hr 20min flight) when the pilot announced that we were having a problem with a sensor on a wing flap requiring that we go back to Fairbanks for maintenance.

We arrived back in Fairbanks, disembarked and waited...about an 1 hour later the sensor was fixed and we boarded the plane only to wait 1/2hr while the thunder and lighting rain storm that began just after we finished loading passed over us. Finally we were cleared for take-off - the engines were fired up...2 minutes later they were powered down and the pilot announced that our flight had been canceled! (and no one seems to know why).

So...along with everyone else on the "full" plane - 3 coaches, 17 high school football players and I headed downstairs to claim our luggage, rebook our fight for the morning and get hotel reservations (and transportation) for the airlines. The good news is that the airline got a bigger plane for the morning to accommodate us all and gave us enough hotels rooms to give everyone there out bed. The not so good is that we had been in the airport since noon and need to feed very hungry teenage boys and get them to bed. Thank you for Pizza Hut and a very nice lady from the place who offered to help me - she took me to Pizza Hut to get 10 pizza's (and a salad for me) and took me to my hotel before she went home so she could also get up for the morning flight to Barrow. It was 12:30am when I closed my eyes...5:30am came sooo quickly.

The problem is that Barrow has two flights out of Fairbanks - 9:30am and 5:50pm...we had to be on the morning flight in order to play football that afternoon. I would like to say that we arrived at the airport and got on our flight at the scheduled time...but no such luck. We arrived at the airport only to discover that our flight had been delayed because we could not land in DeadHorse due to fog - you see the morning flight is not a direct flight to Barrow....so at 9:30am when we finally we cleared for take-off...we arrived in Barrow at 11:30am...game at 3:30pm - big loss 54-8 - go figure after the last 24 hours.

I did hear that we missed an 11 foot Polar Bear at the end of town last night. Hoping to see one tonight while out and about with a teacher from Barrow.

We head home tomorrow - keep your fingers crossed. (By the way - we were delayed two hours leaving Barrow due to weather 08-21-08)

The view down the road as you leave the "airport"

Whale skulls on the beach by the football field

Visitors bleachers - Watch your step :-)

Artic Ocean - What a view!

Tundra on the "Top of the World"