Eye candy

Check this out! These are pictures we took back in November 2006, when we visited Kenai for the 2nd time. These were taken at the beach in Kenai. That morning it was -19 below 0 with a wind chill (chill is an understatement) of -27 below 0. To give you an idea, well dressed...and I mean layered, you are fine for about 4 minutes. Then you start to feel your face freeze....in my case I had ice forming on my beard...no joke. I had to hang it up and head in after about 9 minutes of exposure when my throat started to get numb from breathing in the icey air (my true fear was like you read in the books, when you just colapse from exhaustion and become a 3 course meal for some hungry....ahh you get the point :o ). What was neat that morning out there was that we kept hearing these cries off in the distance. We found out later that it was hundreds of eagles feeding at the mouth of the Kenai river on unsuspecting salmon. Aparently the eagles go on a feeding frenzy in the fall as they don't feed through the winter. Was a very spiritual sound, more so after we found out what it was. The tides in Alaska can be in variance of 40 feet. The white speckles you see in the sand are ice, and in fact the sand there in 2nd photo that looks wet.....its just plain frozen, man! I tried to kick a rock out of the sand...I tried. The other photo is looking out over the Cook Inlet at Mt Redoubt. If you sail off to the left of the photo you end up in the gulf of Alaska....if you sail to the right you will find yourself in Anchorage....if you didn't turn into a friggin popsicle first! ;) Happy days, we are getting excited. Yes Sandy, lots of faith. The whole thing is an incredible leap of faith. We will get by...we will survive.