"What's that? Crying? There's no crying in baseball driving to Anchorage." Coach Tom Hanks

So, after traveling hours and hours and hours with an infant (The New Boy), a soon to be five-year-old, and a perfectly male husband, I imagine that The Mrs. wanted to gouge out her eyes with a spoon. You know, because it's dull, and would hurt more. But, she got the biggest bonus yet. She got to continue driving farther south than Anchorage. I know that most things (including all of the past, current, and future members of Van Halen) are farther south than Anchorage, but Anchorage might as well be Dixie if you live in Fairbanks.

We got to go to Girdwood, Alaska.

Just the name sounds uncomfortable. Gird. Like girth. Gird. Like girdle. Makes me think of William Shatner. Who'da thunk it was a pretty and nice town?

But, we couldn't see any of that. We got there at about 8:30. After driving through some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable, yet just dark enough that my camera would have produced pictures of what you might think were whales mating in some deep Pacific trench where fish don't have eyes.

But we got a bonus.

The New Boy decided he was hungry in Anchorage, and the decision was
a. feed him then and there or,
b. push on to the hotel.
The Mrs. made the call: push on. And we lived with the auditory results for the duration of our trip to the hotel. It really didn't stress me out. I'm a man, and a dad. That gives me a selective deafness that would allow me to sleep through a jet landing on our house, if it came ten minutes before my alarm for work went off. That doesn't bother me. The fact that The Mrs. was stressed did.

When The Mrs. ain't happy, nobody's happy. (I counted up the negatives, and I think I got that right). We got to the hotel, and The New Boy promptly decided that all people around him who were capable of holding a bottle to his mouth were either dead or incapacitated by avian flu, and became quiet as a mouse.

Now, you may be saying - "How dare you not feed a hungry baby? That could be bad or something."

You haven't seen this baby. He's huge. Not any fatter than a usual baby - he won't be featured in a paper anytime, but he gains about a pound a week. He eats about sixteen quarts of formula a day, and we're thinking of moving him up to ribeye steak flown in directly from some Japanese farm where they have a string quartet that serenades the cows as they feed them beer and massage them. Because that would be cheaper than the baby formula. He gained a pound in a week - 1/18th of his current mass - at four months' age. He may be big enough when fully grown to look down on Hulk Hogan. So, don't worry 'bout The New Boy.

And, drive the Seward Highway when you can. Wow. Pretty, even in dusk.

A buddy of mine suggested that we go and visit the Alyeska Prince Hotel(no relation to Artist Formerly Known as Prince Hotel). The Alyeska Prince Hotel (pictured above, I know it looks like a Stephen King novel hotel, but not a single person tried to disembowel me that night) caters to rich tourists that fought in the Spanish-American War and decided to cruise to Anchorage in the summer. In the winter, it caters to rich dotcom billionaires who want to go 'boarding in a state where weed is almost legal. For the fifteen minutes between 24-hour daylight and weather in a place a company puts you because you pissed them so much they don't want to fire you, but instead torture you with the ever-present thought of frostbite, the Alyeska Prince is a bargain. If you have an Alaska driver's license.

We got there. The Mrs. was again demanding that her now-tenuous relationship with the food chain be restored. I found a thriving convenience store in Old Girdwood (which I think most of just slid right into the ocean when the '64 Earthquake hit) that had sandwiches. And wine.

I bought some wine because I thought that might cap off a relatively stressful last leg of our trip. When I got back to the hotel, The Mrs. was working on putting The New Boy to bed.

About the Alyeska Prince: The hotel is nice. Head of State nice. In fact, when I was lurking in the parking lot, several vehicles with Alaska Legislature plates were hogging spaces. I waited for one state senator to move his ass out of the space so I could shimmy in. The beds were like sleeping on clouds, and customer service was great, even though I asked for two doubles, and they initially put us in a single king. (I love The Boy, but I'm not going to spend the night with his pointy elbows and knees pointed at me.)

The wine was good. The Mrs. was too exhausted to have any, so, in the interests of economy, I threw myself on her share. And went blissfully to sleep. Little did I know that the President of Taiwan was lurking, waiting to disrupt not this post, but probably the next one after this, or maybe the one after that.

Next: To Whittier and Beyond