Saturday, June 20: Day 8

Today was the longest day of the year, the blessed summer solstice! There were a lot of great things going on to celebrate all the sunlight we get up here in AK. One of them was a marathon:

Okay, so I wanted to lead you on a bit and make you think we actually ran a marathon....truth be told, we ran 5.6 miles. I'm not ashamed of that...I'd just like to be a little bit tougher and say I ran a marathon. Someday. It was a beautiful run that went along the coast and we got some great food at the end: Great Harvest bread and cookies, watermelon (which I never eat up here because it's so dang expensive), and maybe other stuff I didn't get to because I got stuck at the watermelon.

Then we went to the down town market where there are all sorts of goodies to be had. But that's for another day's blog. Too much to write! We also went to eat at Moose's Tooth. You may recall our enthusiasm for Moose's Tooth on the other blog Matthias and I have. If you aren't aware of it, click this link:

http://matthiasandmichellecicotte.blogspot.com/2008/09/mooses-tooth.html

Maybe my favorite part of the day was going to the Glacier Pilots' (Anchorage's semi-pro baseball team) baseball game at 10:30 p.m. At midnight we took a few photos of the sky and such:

This was a fun little ditty they did in-between innings. The guy in red won. It was pretty funny to watch them bounce as they fell and not be able to get up on their own. Not sure why it was so amusing. Anyway, you can see the mascot below is appropriately a moose.

The Pilot's finally won around 1:30 a.m. When we got home, this is what the microwave clock said:

And this is what the sky looked like.

So you can see the sun does go down where we are, but it is dusky the whole night, never getting completely dark. The sun rises at 4:21 a.m. and sets at 11:42 p.m. making 19 hours and 21 minutes of daylight (compared to 5 hours and 28 minutes of daylight in the winter). Up further North in Barrow, for example, the sun is up 85 days from May 10 to Aug. 2, without ever setting at all! If you're curious about other parts of Alaska, here's a good site to go to: http://www.alaska.com/about/weather/story/1920.html

Anyway, it was pretty amazing to be at the baseball game and then to look down at your watch thinking it was maybe 8:30 or 9:00 and seeing it was 12:30 a.m. Probably even crazier was when the game finally ended and we saw it was 1:30 a.m. but it felt more like 10:00 p.m. If you ever get a chance to come to Alaska, making your visit fall on the summer solstice would be my best advice. We are thinking of celebrating next year's solstice further north in Fairbanks, so if you're feeling adventurous...