Taking the ferry

Alaska is big. Like, BIG. Sometimes I forget this because I live in a small town and can't drive much longer than an hour in any direction before I run out of road. But even the island on which I live is one of the biggest in the country, and the town of Kodiak is really just a little pinpoint in one corner of this vast island.

One's sense of space and distance changes when one lives in a state with a relatively low population. When we lived in Powell, Wyoming, we joked that people would drive for four hours just to have lunch in Bozeman. Well, in Alaska, sometimes you have to take an airplane just to visit another town. Any town.

Or you might be able to take the ferry.

That's one of two ways to get to any other town or city from Kodiak, and I needed to get to either Anchorage (by plane) or Homer (by ferry) to take a national certification exam as part of completing my degree in speech-language pathology. I chose Homer because I could visit T's parents and give them a chance to spend a little bit of time with Rainbow.

T was already out of town for a conference, so alone with baby and her teddy bear stuffed into a baby carrier, I boarded the Tustumena last Saturday night. 

Did I mention that I hate boats and tend to get motion sick? And that I had to spend eight hours on the ferry?

Well, I got off the ferry in Homer the next morning with stomach contents and sanity intact, thinking to myself, "That wasn't so bad." I took my exam two days later, passed it by a good margin, and got back on the Tustumena in Homer that same night feeling pretty positive about the whole experience.

And then the things that had caused me to be apprehensive about taking the ferry in the first place happened. I boarded the ferry oblivious to the fact that bad weather was in the forecast, and also oblivious to the fact that the ferry crew already knew that the ferry would get into Kodiak four hours later than scheduled (making for a 14 hour ferry ride). 

I don't know if this will mean anything to you, readers, but that night we had 19 foot seas rocking and rolling that vessel. I found out the next morning--after a long, wakeful, and queasy night--about the arrival delay. No, I didn't vomit, but neither was I interested in eating or drinking much, so by the time we docked in Kodiak, poor Rainbow had a sleep-deprived, dehydrated, low-blood-sugar mama on her hands. 

She, of course, handled it all quite well. She's a great traveler. Dare I say that she actually enjoys it. I, on the other hand, found myself swearing that I'll not set foot off dry land again for quite a while.