YaYa's Visit

My mom came to visit at the end of September. It was wonderful to see her and it was also a great excuse to do some fun stuff.

Public use cabin near Chena Hot Springs

Inside the cabin

We got lucky and found one of Alaska's numerous public use cabins the first weekend she was here near Chena Hot Springs. I got photos of the cabin, but unfortunately not of the hot springs. You can take a look here at their website to see just how cool this place is. It was a rainy/snowy and dreary day, so the little hike we tried to take was a very short-lived affair, but it was a perfect day to sit in a huge, hot swimming pool in the snow.

Our short walk in the rain/snow

The first evening Mom spent at our house was the night Josh's leg broke, which put a big dent in our activities for the week, but we still had fun.

The next weekend we went to a different natural hot springs called Manley, which is about three hours into the bush outside of Fairbanks. The town of Manley is pretty much a village and has only one business that rents cabins.  We called the week before to make sure they were still going to be open when we wanted to come as the town basically closes down in the winter. They said they would be, but when we arrived, we found the Manley Roadhouse, which rents the cabins, all closed up. Luckily we were traveling with Jed and Crystal, which is great because Crystal is resourceful and personable and she politely poked around until she found someone who knew someone who knew what was going on and could open up the place for us.

Manley Hot Springs is a privately-owned

Some of the flora at Manley Hot Springs

 natural hot spring and is probably the most unique place I've seen here. The actual spring is up a hill and the owners have piped it down into a large greenhouse where they have built four huge water basins that are all different 

Two of the hot spring basins

temperatures. The greenhouse is completely full of plants, from hibiscus to eggplant. It was a wonderful place. The remnants of the hot spring that aren't piped out for use in the bathing pools flow down the hill as a little stream that is delightfully warm and the kids (and grandma!) had fun putting their feet in the water.

Very cool place

Josh wasn't a fan of pumpkin guts

Cider donuts

We took advantage of having Grandma here to carve pumpkins for the kids, which brought back memories of Halloweens past when Grandma (then just Mom) would make fresh raised donuts from scratch. That put us in the mood for donuts, which Mom obligingly made for us.  They were delicious and I think we all ate ourselves fairly sick. That got me thinking, though, of apple cider donuts, so I found a promising-looking recipe and gave it a whirl. It didn't really work out. They tasted great, but cooked very poorly and either ended up soaked in grease, burned, or doughy. Very sad.

It was a great visit and we were all sad to see her go!

 

I don't know why Josh is compelled to do this with every light that comes into his hands