The downside with “watching” a well is that it is very similar to babysitting. At some points in the drilling, you have to be “on-call” to decided when the well should stop drilling for a casing point. Unfortunately the joke amongst geologists that casing point always needs to be called in the middle of the night, weekends and holidays is not an exaggeration.
The first one probably didn’t need as close of an eye as I put on it, but since it was my first well, I didn’t want to mess it up. So our weekend plans turned into Matt and his parents being on their own without their fabulous tour guide - ha!
Matt decided to take them North to Talkeetna via Hatcher Pass. We sent them to Denali earlier in the week on the train and they had a quick stop in Talkeetna. It wasn’t a long enough stop to get off the train, but they both thought the town looked cute. So back north it was!
The weekend was a bit overcast, but a little blue sky managed to peek through the clouds. You can see that fall is in full swing up here, the leaves have gone yellow on most of the trees. One good windstorm and most of these leaves will be gone - boo!
The obligatory Talkeetna sign photo! It’s so hard to get photos of my mother-in-law because she always hides behind her cute grandkids. But I had a specific request to get a photo of the parents from Matt’s sister, so he managed to convince them to both pose. Of course, a grandkid still ended up in a few of the photos… :)
Thomas also wanted to pose with his own sign. Unfortunately for him, he’s still a little small for the particular one he chose!
He did manage to find this old snowmobile though! Like I said - this boy loves machinery! Matt actually sent me a photo while they were there and I couldn’t figure out what it was…
Matt is going to have to be in charge of machinery names. I’m trying to learn all the construction ones so I can point them out while driving, but I only really know dump truck, front end loader and bulldozers. I obviously need to study more!
And of course, my two boys were distracted by the float plane on the way out of town. Most of the flight seeing tours of Denali take off from Talkeetna, so there are a ton of planes. But this bright red one sitting on the lake obviously caught their eye. I have to say, the hubby is becoming quite the photographer! :)