Seward's Folly Days Whatever: I got bored of this

The rest of Alaska ranged from okay to badass. Anchorage was a shanty town as far as I could tell, but Seward, Alaska was fucking badass. My dad and I went to a salty old sailor bar full of drunk as heck old dudes, really homely women, and whale jaws and shit all over the walls. It was so legit it hurt.

We went on a wonky tourist cruise that I planned to have no fun on, but it turned out to be boss and, excuse me for sounding girly, inspirational. There's an island around the Seward area that was invaded by the Japanese in WWII, so there are abandoned cliffside army bases with machine gun nests all along the coast. We saw a humpback whale flipping around, going crazy and stuff. We saw sea lions barking up a storm and being all like lazy fat sea dogs. We saw otters a hair's breadth from having wild otter sex. We hiked through the rainforest to a glacier. The ocean is fucking rad.

That's an illustration of my final decision regarding Alaska. Sell everything above the red line to Canada or whatever. It's the right choice.

So now I'm done complaining about Alaska. Sorry if the past week was boorish and insulting.

Today we've added a new regularly contributing member of the GSS: Olivia. I went to middle school with Olivia and she probably beat the shit out of me because I sucked in middle school, but she's way cool and will most likely write much better and more illuminating things than Max ever could. Olivia has another blog that maybe you could check out????

Seward's Folly Days 4 and 5: All-Ass-Ka

I can't even really remember what all we did on day four, but about eight hours of it was spent driving from Healy to Soldotna which was a positive experience only in that I never have to be in Healy again.

There was maybe some really tall mountain or something we passed on the way, but I didn't see shit. But really, it's beautiful here for the most part and my only beef is that every town is a weird patchwork of strip malls and seedy gas stations. I'm not going to make any political statements or anything, but Wasilla is absolutely rank and vile and disgusting, so it's no wonder people who come from there are fucked-up crazy as shit.

Highlights:

-A bomb-dot-com bagel with lox

-Killing myself

Day 5 was a Soldotna extravaganza. I have literally nothing to say about Soldotna. I had high hopes because I assumed for some reason it was a quaint little tourist/fishing town, but it was a soulless strip mall town. Ugh.

Anchorage is good so far. Lots of trees I guess is the nicest thing I can say about it. I know for an almost-fact that there's cool stuff to do here so I'll try to make an effort to not be a shitty asshole and have fun.

Our hotel has this gnarly wallpaper that's telling me Alaska was purchased for 7 million bones and makes America like multibillion dollars a year, so the second nicest thing I can say about this place is that it was a damned thrifty purchase on America's part.

Seward's Folly Day 3: Sexual Healy-ing

So:

-Alaska is large. Too large? Yes, too large.

- Healy sucks ass. I can't even wrap my head around how much it is sucking right now.

- According to the "literature," you can only see Mt. McKinley 20% of the time, so way to fuck that up, Alaska. I don't even care to look up and see if that's true because I want it to be true so bad.

A treat for the Spider Fans: live video of my dad and me in Alaska.

Good day

Seward's Folly Day 2: The Quickening

We're in Fairbanks just in time for the World Famous Solstice Party, which means that three blocks of town are filled with tweens on fixies loitering in front of an impossibly large number of kettle corn booths. Also the sun never goes down or something?? I really haven't noticed.

that's some party, Alaska

Fairbanks, as far as I can tell, sucks big time. It's basically tar paper shacks out here. The town I come from looks like it's straight out of the Soviet Bloc, so it's not like I'm being extra picky, it's just not exactly picturesque up in here. It did stop raining a few hours ago and I can see some bomb-ass mountains a ways off. Maybe next time you guys need to build your town closer to the nice mountains, I guess.

this sums it up, pretty much

I know there are beautiful parts of Alaska. I have seen them in books and probably on HD television. However, it's starting to make sense to me why Northern Exposure, a gripping look at a civilized American man's attempt to live and maintain sanity in small-town Alaska, wasn't actually filmed in small-town Alaska. I just want to offer to paint everyone's house here. Like... someone has to do it, right?

PS- maybe I'm an idiot, but I can't find any bars here, either. I'd assume people here would want to drink all the time so they didn't have to dwell on the fact that they have to live in Fairbanks.

PPS- Despite the setting, Soapy Smith's is a pretty cool eatery... so it isn't all bad here (yes it is, it is all bad here.)

Seward's Folly Day 1

It's three in the morning and bright as heck out, so I guess get with the god-damned program, AK.

Number of people wearing airbrushed animal shirts count: astro-fucking-nomical.

I'll take pictures tomorrow because Fairbanks is really living up to my expectations.