Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Life in Tyonek

When we first arrived in Tyonek, we did not know what the future would hold. We especially did not know what I (Bethany) would do with all of my time. Well, as it turns out, I am overly busy instead of overly bored. I signed up for classes online to start my Master's of Special Education degree. I also started working fulltime as a Title 1 Tutor and a reading teacher. Tuesday nights, I runs an after school program for the kids. It has been extremely busy. Now, for the spring semester, I have doubled up on classes. Granger stays busy with tutoring after school and teaching guitar lessons once a week. He also opens the gym for the community on Wednesday nights.

Most nights consists of me writting papers or doing homework while Granger plays Madden '08 on the WII! We try to get out and ice-skate or cross country ski. We also like to take our gun to the dump and practice shooting at targets!

One of Granger's students has given us 3 rabbits that he shot. I am going to try and make mittens out of the fur! We need one more rabbit so we can both have a pair. Granger's learning different ways to prepare rabbit for us to eat!

Other than that, we like the rare occasion of flying out into a bigger city. We have enjoyed spending time together and building our marriage. However, we are ready to have a bigger community around us of friends and a church.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Drive to Alaska

Drive to Alaska

Our trip "across America to the great north" was incredible. We highly recommend driving to Alaska once in your life! We had many great stops along the way. First, we went to Canada with the Nyboer's. It was a great time. We fished, played games and enjoyed hanging out together. The we made our way to Northwestern Iowa, Sioux Center, to see Kristin and Tanner's new house. They have a great place! We celebrated Granger's 24th birthday there and continued our travels westward. We stopped as we pleased along the way, like the Geographical center of North America, someplace in North Dakota I believe. (Not as cool as it sounds!) We have tons of pictures posted on our picasa website that you can look at. It is http://www.picasaweb.google.com/grangernyboer. There are many pictures from our adventures so far. We stopped at Glacier National Park in Montana, which was a blast. We did an overnight back country camping. We hiked in and spent the night. We caught some beautiful trout with our fly rods!

We headed up through Canada and stayed with Granger's relatives for a few days. We stopped in Banff, Canada, which was very pretty. We headed to Lake Louise and stopped for a horse back ride! It was a beautiful spot, despite the pouring rain and freezing temperatures! As we drove our way through Canada we camped at campsites, or on the side of the road.

Once we hit Alaska, we had cold and cloudy weather. We came through the Northern most land border, which was a tiny building. It was Poker, AK. It only had one house and there was a sign that Welcome to Poker, AK population: 2. We tried to go to Fairbanks, but the weather was so poor there wasn't much to do. We decided to go to some hot springs!

We headed to Denali, but the weather was still bad, so we took a picture by the sign and started heading south. We arrived in Anchorage and stayed with Jan and Bernie Nyboer (Granger's relatives). They have been so great to us. We stayed at their cabin in Girdwood, called the Hobbit house. It is an amazing little cabin near Alyaska ski resort.

We continued south to Kenai and stayed with Donny and Andi Joachim. They let us crash and hang out with them for a week. We were able to make it down to Seward and climbed Marathon Mountain! It was a great time.

Finally, we arrived at Kenai Aviation to head to Tyonek. Our little trailer awaited us. Amazingly, we got everything over to the village. It took a few planes because you can't take that much stuff at a time.

Home, sweet, home. Settled in and the adventure started!