Fur-Idita-Rondy-Rod

This past Saturday, we braved the cold and snowy roads and went to check out the Fur Rondy activities, as well as some of the Iditarod. Fur Rondy (Fur Rendezvous) is a week (or so) long festival thing leading up to the Iditarod. Each day there were different game competitions and a little carnival and shows and food and all kinds of fun. We were originally going to head down to check it out Friday afternoon, but it snowed a bunch Friday, and since Josh said we were going on Saturday for the Iditarod no matter what the weather, and since the few things we actually were interested in checking out were open on Saturday as well, we opted to just make one big morning out of it all.

We got to Anchorage about an hour before the Iditarod actually started, so we started off with some Fur Rondy fun.

And by Fur Rondy fun, I mean we checked out what was left of the snow sculpture contest. It was really the only thing I was interested in seeing. Sadly, it was pretty warm a few days that week so a bunch of the sculptures melted/broke apart/got pretty dirty. There were a few that were still in pretty good shape though, and the boys had fun naming the ones they could still figure out. Like the frogs:

After making our way around the snow sculptures we figured we should start making our way up to where the race was starting. This entailed many, many stairs, not much fun when you're 30 weeks pregnant. But we all made it to the top and found a pretty decent spot to watch the dogs and sleds and they made their way to the starting line.

The boys lost interest in the dogs shortly after arriving. In Zeke's defense, he knew there were trains somewhere and that's what he wanted to see. In Deacon's defense, he was cold and tired and could only see if he was on one of our shoulders (which he did enjoy immensely). But after Josh and the boys shared a reindeer dog (a hotdog made of reindeer meat), and after the boys and I had some chips and hot chocolate, we made our way to what Zeke had been waiting all morning to go see:

Whoo! Whoo! I haven't seen Zeke as thrilled as he was when we walked into the train station in some time. He ran right to one of the back windows so he could see the above train a little better. This train, by the way, is sort of a celebrity to our boys as we have a book about this train. But when they realized there were model trains going all over the place, it was all even better. They even had a bunch of Thomas trains and cars set up in a siding on one of the rails.

So, after spending two hours in the cold, enjoying some of Alaska's biggest winter events, we got back in the car, drove home, had lunch, and took nice long naps. Well, the boys and I napped. Josh played his video game. All in all, a really fun day.

PS...I finally got all my pictures from this year up on Flickr. You can check out January and February here, and the rest of our Fur Rondy/Iditarod/handful of March pictures here. Maybe some day I'll get back to them and actual label/tag them. That's a big maybe though, so just enjoy them as they are, if you are so inclined that is.