Ok, after spending nearly an hour writing a blog entry only for the site to expire, you're now gonna get the edited version!!

After arriving in Alaska, we quickly realised how bloody heavy our bags were when we had to carry them to the taxi...may have to get rid of some stuff!! Spent the 1st night at Jason's Youth Hostel, £15pppn but included free internet and a huge breakfast with as much tea and coffee as u want!! :) Full use was of course made of this facility lol! At just after 2pm our 1st couchsurfing host, Sheli, came to meet and pick us up to take to her home. Sheli, is lovely!! She has given us our own room and full use of her whole house...which is beautiful with a gorgeous back garden including local wildlife and a hammock!! :) As she was showing us round we looked through the window and saw a MOOSE!!!!!!! Just strolling down the road through the houses with its baby, quite unconcerned about its surroundings!! Sheli was quite amused as to how excited we were and said to keep an eye on the back woods for more and possibly the local black bear!! I mean OMG...a MOOSE!!!

We then went to our first Salsa party and made the classic mistake of turning up on time, we had to wait 15 mins for the doors to open, but fortunatly the Snow Goose restaurant where the party was held had an upstairs balcony when we could look at the wonderfull view of Sea and mountains. After the doors opened we then entered and all took our seats waiting for the evenings performance to start,and to our suprise out trotted a 7 year old Darth Vader an 6 princess Leias. They were apparantly performing a ch cha show for us, with the oldest member of the group about 11 and the youngtest 4. After running around on stage for a mercifully short cha cha song they recieved a warm round of applause whilst we tried not to laugh!! After this the dancing began, the music at the party was interesting with an almost 50/50 mix af salsa and bachata with the occational cha cha and merengue thrown in, kizomba does not seem to have reached Anchorage yet so we attempted to Semba to a merengue track instead... The party ended at Midnight and since it was still fairly light we decided to walk home, which is about 3 miles away and took an hour, evreything here is so spread out Anchorage has about the population of Peterborough in the area of Birmingham!