On The Road With The Rippers: Our Journey to Shishmaref

Two days after getting married we held our breath and held each others hands and leaped into the unknown. The unknown for us was moving. Not just moving, but moving to Alaska. Not just moving to Alaska, but moving to an island in Bush, Alaska. We now call Shishmaref, Alaska our home.

Before we could get to Shishmaref we had an overnight stay in Anchorage. In Anchorage we had one objective; that objective was to do our first grocery shopping as a married couple. Only our shopping experience was quite different. Functioning on little sleep and with about 12 hours of traveling under our belts we had the challenge of shopping for the the next four months at once, thus requiring us to buy non-perishable food in bulk. Also, since Shishmaref is a dry villiage we were not able to ship up anything that contains alcohol; this includes things such as Fabreeze, and certain mouthwashes and medicines. While we were shopping people would comment on the amount of food we were buying and knew we were headed to the Bush. Five shopping carts later we were ready to retire from our Bush shopping experience. We left our carts at the back of the store in what is called the "Bush Department" where they will check out our carts, package our goods, and ship them to us. They have up to 30 days to ship the groceries and we will pay for it when it gets here so we do not know when to expect our goods or what the damage will be cost wise.

Bright and early (6AM) the next morning we headed back to the airport for our flight to Nome and then to Shishmaref. With our three hour layover in Nome we ventured into town where we bought a snack of granola bars and bananas and then went to GCI where we purchased our phone since Verizon does not work in our villiage. When it came time to board our plane we walked onto the runway to climb into our ten person plane to Shishmaref! We experienced our first weather delay due to rain but we both slept through it because of our lack of sleep. The flight itself was uneventful (again due to sleep) and about an hour after take off we were happy to land in our new home, Shishmaref, Alaska.