Making the Weight

This past weekend we planned a major road trip: 5 days, over 1000 miles and 24 total hours of driving. We must be nuts. It all started when we received news last month that we won the Denali road trip lottery. Every year the Denali National Park holds a lottery, for a fee anyone can enter, they pick 400 people to drive their own private vehicle into the park. 100 people per day, over 4 days. You can go as far back into the park as you like, even farther than the park sponsored tours, stop whenever you want and for as long as you want. Its pretty cool....this was our 4th visit to the park (2 bus tours and our 2nd time driving in). So, about a month ago we learned that we won our first choice, Saturday - Yeah!

In planning the trip, we decided that since we were so close to Fairbanks we might as well make the journey farther north. Many of our Fairbanks friends had never met Jillian and this just wouldn't do. Our 2 day trip became 4 days.

One of my sisters (Allison) is working at a lodge on the Kenai. This was their last weekend for the season and she called to say that she got us a cabin for Thursday night. Awesome. Whats one more day and a couple hours in the opposite direction?

We figured that with all the upcoming driving we should take Jillian in to the pediatrician's office on our way out of town. Our little girl is a tiny thing, she doesn't even weigh enough to make it on the chart for national averages. This means that at 18 months she was still rear-facing in the car seat. We fed her a HUGE breakfast before her weight check and prayed for 20 pounds. The resulting weight was just under, but he said that it was close enouth for us to flip the seat around. Sweet! Jillian really needed that, facing forward helped dramatically improve her attitude in the car. The weekend was still going to be long, but now it was going to be bearable.

We took about 280 pictures....the next few blogs will chronicle our trip.