Phew! What a week it has been.

Here’s what I’ve been up to the past week:

traveling 15 hours by plane from Alaska to North Carolina –> driving nearly 24 hours from North Carolina to Minnesota –> getting a big surprise from my parents and husband –> driving north across the state of Minnesota to Duluth, MN –> running a marathon

So, let’s start at the beginning. . .

Friday, June 8

Kristy (my sister) and I left Anchorage, Alaska and spent 15 hours traveling to Raleigh, North Carolina.

We left at 11 p.m. (which is when this picture was taken), had a layover in Denver, then flew to Chicago where we had another hour layover before we finally arrived in Raleigh at about 5 p.m. on Saturday. (I do like red-eye flights because I can never sleep.)

Kristy spent the past year living in North Carolina for her dietetics internship. She came up to Alaska to finish her internship, and then we were going to fly back to North Carolina to move her home to Minnesota.

When we finally arrived in Raleigh Saturday early evening, we made sure to enjoy every minute of the sunshine and warm weather. 

We went shopping, running, and tried a new restaurant called Irregardless Café, which was amazing!!

I had a Garden Tofu Scramble, which was made with tofu and nutritional yeast and literally looked like scrambled eggs. It was very delicious, and I love how vegan food can taste so good!

I would highly recommend this restaurant if you are in the area!

 

We also walked to the farmer’s market and bought some delicious strawberries and peaches. Oh, they were so good!

 

One afternoon we attempted to go swimming but got rained out.

After 3 shorts days in Raleigh, it was time to depart. . . . .we had to get back to Minnesota for a wedding (for my sister to attend) and a marathon to run (me!).

On Tuesday, June 12, we left Raleigh at 4 p.m. and drove north to begin our trek to Minnesota.

I packed up Kristy’s little Honda Civic to the brim. I declared myself the world’s greatest packer for fitting everything in. There was a lot of stuff in there!

We were sad to leave North Carolina! We would have liked to spend more time there.

That evening we drove until 10 p.m., crossing into Virginia and then into West Virginia where we stayed for the night.

It was a very pretty drive along the way.

 

We went through mountains and tunnels.

And then it was time to call it a night. We ended up staying in a very sleazy and scary motel. (I’m blaming it on my sister because she was being too cheap.)

Don’t let this seemingly okay picture deceive you.

The vanity was made out of cheap plywood that was painted a dingy off-white color.

The bathroom door had holes in it.

It was also falling apart.

The dresser had holes in it.

And what really grossed me out was this wet/oily stain on the sheets. I refused to sleep in this bed!

There was a whole bunch of other problems with the room, so were kind of freaking out about the whole ordeal. (It was half funny, half scary, but we did get a good laugh out of the whole thing.)

I love this picture with Kristy in the background.

We were so paranoid that Kristy decided to set up a booby trap, which really wasn’t a booby trap but more like a make-shift alarm.

She ended up setting the garbage can on top of the chair so that if someone opened the door, we would hear the garbage can fall and then the intruder would have trouble pushing the door open with the chair if front (not!), which would give us a few extra seconds to “escape.”

I think we both slept with one eye open that night and left as soon as possible the next morning.

We stayed in Charleston, WV and saw the capital the next morning as the sun was rising.

We needed to fit a run in that morning, so we drove to some random (safe-looking) neighborhood and went for a lovely 3 mile run before we were on our way again. 

Then we crossed into Indiana,

then Illinois,

and then into Iowa.

We stopped at Boondocks USA (in Iowa somewhere) to fill up on gas, which was quite the place!

Finally, we reached Minnesota!

We got home around 11 p.m. that night, and I was exhausted after 18 hours in the car!

I promptly went to bed, but then about an hour later, when I was fast asleep, my sister, mom, and dad came knocking on my door with a surprise!

Craig had flown from Anchorage to surprise me for the marathon!! I couldn’t believe it and thought I was dreaming since I had been sleeping. I was SO excited and happy to see him. It was actually my parents idea and they flew him out to MN for the weekend. What an awesome surprise!!