Saturday May 6

This was a tough morning to wake up to, so I gave my body and soul the chance to adapt to the morning before getting any movement out of it. After taking a shath (we made up a new word for the combination of a shower & bath) I was able to become slightly more active.

Everyone who knows me pretty well, realizes that my day would even start more perfectly with a cup of coffee. Therefore Andrew took me to Kaladi coffee shop so I could enjoy a delightful cup of dirty chai latte. He hadn't seen his grandparents for a while so wanted to visit them eagerly. I remember meeting his grandmother the previous year so I loved to join him. Indubitably, we needed to bring something nice for them so went by a fast food drive through for ice cream. After feeling like a total fool we arrived at this cute kinda typical Alaskan home where Ila & Gerrit Dijkstra live. Yes I can hear you think, thats soo Dutch, and yes it is! Gerrit was talking about how his grandparents are Dutch and he even tried to say some Dutch words which went pretty well. He asked me how I would spell his name, as over here they call him Gareth and would also write his name this way. As a Dutchie I figured out it would be 'Gerrit' and now it is kinda weird to say it in the American way. We had a lovely time over there and got invited to the Sunday Church where there would be lots of food to eat, obviously we would not turn that down. 

Now it was time to move on to the Wallmart and Sportsman Warehouse again to see if they had some proper camping gear which could be used during the fishing trip of the coming weekend. Lincoln was finished with work so he joined us during the final stage of this shopping occasion.

The first plan for the evening was to jump in a lake and warm up in the sauna afterwards, however unfortunately the house of Lincoln, in which the sauna is located, was already totally occupied with heaps of people. So this plan got ditched and we moved on with a new plan, which was go karting and laser tag at the Extreme Center just across the Wallmart. Last year Andrew and I went karting and I beat his ass big time, which as a paralympic world champion, he did not like at all. He did not say it in the specific words but I definitely noticed that he wanted revenge for sure. Just for all sake, I will tell you that before going into the center there was lots of police standing outside and we were told that they were there because of a just finished big drunk fight. Anyway thats that. We started with a game of kart, in the first lap I did some pirouettes, which with dancing would be very lovely but in a little kart it is not really sufficient. The guy needed to pull me back from the wall when I finally finished turning around, now it was time to get back on the track and making sure that the guys would not win this race. There was a girl in a kart kinda in the way, so I sort of accidentally bumped into her, which made her go into a wall. You do need to realize that those walls are not high and it does not hurt or anything when you bump into it, just to testify why it was not a big deal. I knew I was racing pretty well after that as I overtook quite some people and got closer and closer to my friends. The race was already finished before I was able to overtake them too. On the results sign, which I of course took a picture off, shows that due to the crash I had, I still had the best lap round of everyone.

Understandable Andrew did not believe a thing of that I could have won again including crashing, so he asked the guys who had the better time on the total laps. You could guess it indeed, he did. We both had done something better than the other this race, but we can all obviously imagine me not crashing and winning both categories. 


Lots and lots of fun it was, but it was not over yet. We went on to the laser tag area where some other people were already waiting to play. There were two teams of five players and the three of us were in a team with two strangers, of which one we already had a talk to before the game started. She was learning some more sign language of a friend of her, who has a 2 year old daughter who is deaf. This really triggered my interest to start learning English Sign Language. Anyway, we started the game and just needed to get as many points as possible to make sure we beat the other team. The picture shows that the red team was definitely better but my shooting was kinda OK.

We went back home and ate some paste with tomato sauce while watching the animated movie Atlantis before going to bed.