Thankful for Northern Lights!

Fun with long exposures and glow sticks at the cabin

We've had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend and had the chance to take some pictures that really must be posted.  

The extent of our Thanksgiving "activities"

We had plans to have some friends over for dinner on Thanksgiving, but since I've been having lots of contractions, which are exacerbated when I stand up for a while, we decided to cancel and just have a quiet holiday by ourselves.  This picture pretty much sums up our day.

 

We also decided to take advantage of our last weekend sans newborn to get out.  We found a nice little cabin available not too far from home at Quartz Lake.  It's the first time we've been “camping” since Josh's leg has recovered and he really enjoyed poking into all the corners of the cabin and running around like crazy.  He wasn't thrilled about the -20 temperatures during our walk on the frozen lake, but we busted out the glow sticks when we got back and had ourselves a party!  It was a delightful evening and I'm glad we went even though I was close to throwing up a fair amount of the time and was having contractions semi-regularly.  May I also mention that it seriously SUCKS to be a girl while camping in -20 temps?  Especially since this girl is 39 weeks pregnant and had to pee more times than she'd care to remember in the middle of the night!  Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Looks like a crazy neon reindeer or something, but it's actually just Josh + glow sticks + 15 second exposure.

The up side of being awake and venturing outside frequently in the middle of the night in Alaska on a clear night is I was able to catch a decent showing of the northern lights, and with enough time to actually set up the camera and get some fun pictures!  It was quite a memorable experience to watch the green waves dance across the sky by myself at 4am.  It was, as previously mentioned, -20 something and I was in my pajamas, so the parking lot in the foreground is unfortunate, but I was unwilling to carry my camera out onto the lake at that particular point in time.  Maybe next time I'll make the effort to heat the car and drive out to a better vista.  I was also worried the lights would disappear before I could get out there and get set up since last time we saw them they went away too quickly to photograph.  That was probably the right decision this time as they only lasted about 20 minutes.  I waited another hour for them to come back, but that was all I got.  

Driving on the lake

The next morning we explored the frozen lake from the comfort of our heated car instead of on foot.  

Mario also got to try out Jed's new cross country skis for a little while.

On our way home, we noticed some strange rainbows on the horizon and got some fun pictures.  I'm no expert (and if you know what these are, I'd love to know!), but it seemed like they were part of a halo around the sun that was visible as a rainbow when it hit the mist near the ground.  By the way, these pictures were taken at 12:30pm, so the sun is at its peak here.  It wasn't actually this dark, though - that's due to the camera settings I was using to bring out the rainbows more.

A close-up of the "rainbow"