Cousin Deirdre and Mike, On Snowmachines, and Traipsing Across the Kuskokwim River

Just how did we manage to get a baker and an accoustic engineer, both from Massachusetts, skating across the Kuskokwim River?

Cousin Deirdre and Mike arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. (Travelling with them on the afternoon jet were Jeff King and five other mushers, as well as their respective dog teams - oh! how I love the K-300 times!) It was a long trip for them - all the way from Massachusetts, with a few days layover in Seattle. They should have been tired. I should have been a good hostess, and offered them showers or naps. But, no....rather, J. took us home (and then returned to the airport to help Jeff King get his dog teams to his host family's residence) and I stood around rather helplessly as our dogs enthusiastically jumped in and squelched any chance they might have had for peace & quiet. (Puck, it seems, is madly infatuated with Deirdre and his own personal utopia undoubtedly includes endless opportunities to cuddle up on her lap; Clyde has tagged her as the best back-scratcher ev-ah.)

After a few hours of tossing balls for them, we took them out for a stroll along the river. And then we were jumping back in the pick-up (the truck-bed of which was filled with enough frozen lasagnas and cheesecakes to feed a crowd of 400 at the Musher's Banquet on Monday night), and rushing off to the Cultural Center to watch the much anticipated K-300 Benefit Concert: Kevin Morgan opened, followed by former Bethel resident Martha (Scott) Stey and her husband Jim, and highlighted by the arrival of Elias Venes on the stage.

And then, dear Cousin Deirdre and Mike, stayed around after the concert, standing by me as I handed out frozen lasagnas to all the gracious bakers that volunteered to bake them for the Musher's Banquet.

Suffice it to say, we were home late....and exhausted.

And though anyone would think they would be so exhausted from it all, I have to say that Cousin Deirdre and Mike were up before sunrise! I was in awe. We loaded up on coffee. We ate some toasted bread with apple butter and the blueberry jam that Genevieve and I made during her breeze through town at the end of summer. We bundled up. We warmed up the snowmachines.
And then we were out and about!

And that's how Cousin Deirdre and Mike came to be fearlessly traipsing back and forth across the frozen Kuskokwim River!