Alaska O6"

Matt, Eileen, Jessica, and I packed up all our camping gear, piled into the Ruters minivan, and headed off to Omaha to catch our flight to Anchorage in June. On the flight we took a little detour and flew over mt Logan (19,950 ft) the highest point in Canada. The plane was only about 10 thousand feet above the mountain on a clear day, so the view was astounding. The first thing we saw when we walked into the airport was the world record grizzly that was about five times the size of me. A lady from church picked us up, drove home, and gave us the van to take up to camp about 2 1/2 hours away. We got to camp and slept hard. The next morning we met the other camp leaders Matthew, Lesslie, Bridget, and the Camp director Duane. We also got some time to walk around camp and get a feel for the beauty and ruggedness of the area. I moved into a pop-up camper next to a serine lake surrounded by mountaines. The other leaders lived in fifth wheels next to my "bachelor pad". EagleCrest ministries is on a hill about a mile up from our campers which were in the guest section of Victory Bible Camp. (vbc is a huge camp for Alaskan kids with lots of fun activies like horsback riding, watersports, hiking, and other outdoors things).

It took two days to comprehend our surroundings then Jessica, Bridget, and I took off for Fairbanks in "Red" (Eaglecrests 92' dodge fullsize van) to pick up "blue" the 94 dodge fullsize. The crazy roads (and crazy driving by me) caused us to hit our heads on the ceiling a few times, but we made it up to camp Li Wa (living water) in about 8 hours. We decided we could drive back through the night so we left Fairbanks at 10:00 at night (of course it was still light out..so it didn't feel that late). However, when the battery of blue decided to start acting up we experienced many problems. Our first problem stop (and Jump Start from an Alaskan) was the gas station right in fairbanks. Then I drove blue to North Pole, however she died there too. Soo..we decided to rest in red at the local groecery store. The only problem with this was the killer population of gigantic mesquitos who snuck in through the vents. We experienced hell for about 2 hours then decided that we needed to get out of North Pole (it was not nearly as awesome as I pictured it as a kid)..............to be continued.