Juneau

Well, as many of you know Wyatt and I just took a trip to Juneau to get to know his new speech therapist. Our meetings with her were really successful and we came away with some great exercises to do with Wyatt home. She also agreed to make the trip to Petersburg a few times over the next 6 months. So, needless to say we are really excited and feeling very optimistic at this point. Our trip was scheduled to be about 24 hours which was just barely enough time to do some shopping and eat a good meal after our appointments. To our surprise, we ended up on a plane with mechanical problems 2 days in a row - yes - we were on the exact same plane, with the same mechanical problem 2 days in a row. The first day we opted to stay in Juneau where we explored the historic down town area (very cool - every one should see it), saw the capitol, eat a great dinner, and took Wyatt to play group. We loved downtown Juneau, it's literally built right into the mountain side between the mountains and the water. It reminded me of San Francisco with the really steep & curvy one way streets, old houses, and cool little shops. There is already quite a bit of snow in the mountains there, so we know it will be coming to Petersburg soon.

After the second day of cancelled flights, we opted to fly to Ketchikan in order to beat a fierce storm on the way with 100mph winds forcasted in Juneau. Ketchikan was supposed to be better with only 70mph winds - we had no idea what to expect for Petersburg. Let me tell you about Ketchikan. The airport is not on the same island as the town, so you have to take a ferry or a water taxi from the airport to town. In our case, AK Air provided us with a water taxi. Now imagine, I have a 2 year old, luggage, and a car seat - and I'm running from the airport to the dock in 70mph winds and rain. YIKES!! There was a nice man who helped us, but it was still miserable.

Now on to Petersburg...As many of you probably don't realize, our airport is so tiny that it cannot accommodate any amount of wind, fog, dense snow, etc. The moons really have to align to land here. So after a night in Ketchikan we set off for Petersburg, stopping first in Wrangell which is only 12 minutes (by air) from Petersburg. Things looked great there and the pilots got the "okay" to try Petersburg. Unfortunately for us, the fog and wind had moved in that short 12 minutes. I've never been on such a rough flight. The plane was silent, people just stared out the foggy windows hoping we could safely land. Wyatt fell asleep sitting up like a big boy in his very own seat. I had to keep my hand across his chest so that he wouldn't flop around with all the turbulence. Luckily for us our pilots were patient and decided to circle around for a second try at Petersburg. They were able to land but it was scary. Turns out they were more interested in landing because they needed fuel since they expected to fly direct to Anchorage bypassing the scheduled stop in Juneau where there really bad weather sat.

Long story short, we made it home 3 days over due - but - safe, sound, and very thankful !