Backtracking to The Beginning

After ten months in Kotzebue and several of our friends inquiring about a blog (some more than others...Inger), we have decide to start a blog! I guess we should start at the beginning?

Paige graduated with her Doctorate in Dental Surgery May of 2012 and accepted a job in Kotzebue, Alaska. After Paige's graduation, Brenden's marathon and wisdom teeth extraction, we decided to travel from Denver, Colorado to Missoula, Montana to visit family along the way. We traveled in our brand new 2012 Jeep Compass pulling a U-haul trailer. From Missoula we traveled to Seattle where we stayed with a good friend and dropped all of our belongings, including our car, on a barge to spend the next month traveling to Kotzebue, Alaska at the expense of Paige's new employer. We continued our summer journey down to Brookings, Oregon where we stayed with the other half of the family. It was an incredible summer of travel that led us to Medford, Oregon where we had one way tickets to Kotzebue, Alaska!

Kotzebue, named after a Russian explorer, is a small town of only 3200 people located north of the arctic circle. As the largest city in the Northwest Arctic Borough (Boroughs are the equivalent of a county only much larger) it is the hub for ten other villages. Most of the population of Kotzebue and the villages are natives, many of which speak Inupiaq.

When we landed in Kotzebue July of 2012 we were met by weather in the mid-50s and sun that never set. We also found out what our housing looked like. First, we should mention that as Paige is a dentist she is eligible to receive housing from the hospital which happens to be very nice and fully furnished. Unfortunately there wasn't an opening and we were put in the "29-Unit." We can't find any pictures of this place but lets just say it was less than appealing and neither one of our mothers would have approved.

There were no curtains of any kind in the 29-unit, most of our stuff was still on the barge and the store was closed, so we did the only thing we could do. We used tape from the few boxes we had with us on our plane trip up and used it to tape up our only blanket just so we could block out the sun. We blew up the air mattress we brought up on the plane and slept. That was night one of our adventure.

The following week we waited for Paige's licenses to go through before she started work. We also adjusted to the 24 hours of sun. We would be sitting in our "living room" thinking it was late evening only to look at our cell phones and find out it is 2 in the morning. Needless to say, the sun can be misleading up here.

The rest of the summer was spent getting to know people, the area and adjusting to our new way of life in a "foreign land."Oh and we caught hundreds of fish!