Being outdoorsy is hard for some people.
After selling most of our stuff, packing up the station wagon and hauling ourselves to a new life in Alaska I’m, well, over it.
I’m outdoorsed out. I want to sit in this recliner and do nothing but watch Netflix and drink coffee for the rest of my life.
It’s probably my own fault that this happened. Why I thought you could rip a typical indoor girl out of her house, parade her across the country on a one month on-again, off-again tent camping excursion and then drop her in Alaska to sleep in an empty house on a camping cot for three weeks with exactly zero ramifications I do not know.
But you can’t do that. You’ll rip the outdoor desires right out of her and replace them with pajama pants and this chair.
If you spend more than 45 seconds in Alaska in the summer, you’ll hear someone note how crazy busy everyone here is during this season.
People here embrace summer like it’s the last time they’ll see the sun for months …. because it is. Every single day starting in mid-June the Anchorage area loses just over four minutes of daylight. That means that although it’s basically light for 24 hours in June, by late August the sun sets at 9:30 p.m. and comes up at about 6:30 a.m. By September 30, the sunsets at 7:30 p.m. and comes up at 8 a.m.
On the shortest day of the year, you’re looking at just over five hours between sunrise and sunset. Five. Hours.
This guy? He’s talking about Alaska.
So yeah, Alaskans have a fire lit under their rears in the summer to soak up every single daylight moment outside. And nobody is even a little impressed that you camped your way across the U.S. and Canada (minus those tiny Motel bad weather incidents). They think you’re crazy that you’re not taking an evening hike after work every single night of the week.
And still here I sit.
I feel like I need an outdoor reintegration plan, something to push me back into the great outdoors before it’s too late and my choices are being very cold or sitting in this chair.
So today? Today we are going hiking — rain or shine. Today we are going outside the gym, away from my comfy road running and into something more wild that will require bear spray (but really).
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