Alaska Adventures: Can- Opener Man

Over the summer I took a road trip with two of my girl friends from here (Los Angeles, California) all the way up to Fairbanks, Alaska.  Yep, we drove.  How far is it you ask?  About 10,000 miles!  The whole trip was about 2 months.  We met some of the best people on the trip, and also some of the weirdest.  Today, I would like to share the story of how we came to meet a man we call "Can-opener Man"

Here we are the night before we left on our adventure:

Starting from the Left: Me (hollllaaaa!), Kylie (She is from Australia, I met her through Cheryl) and Cheryl on the right (we met in college)

The Tale (yet completely true story) of Can-opener Man:

It was still early on in our trip, probably the second week in.  We were camping somewhere in Santa Rosa, California.  We had just come from San Francisco, where we did a bike ride to the bridge.

Just a bit of trouble trying to figure out when the timer was going to go off so we just kept jumping and jumping haha

We got a bit lost, or as we liked to say, "seeing everything"  before we finally made it to a campsite for the night.  We set up camp, and started cooking dinner.  As we were cooking dinner, two people from the campsite next to us came over and asked to use our can-opener.  There were two boys and one girl at the other campsite <remember this, it will be helpful later.

Not too long after that, a man comes up to us and says, 

"I found a can-opener for you guys."  

We told him that we hadn't asked for it, but the people next to us did, but they had used ours so they probably didn't need it anymore.  He said, 

"OK, I will go give this to them then." 

Queue to us giving each other weird looks.

Our campsite in Santa Rosa.  I believe we were having Journal Time. haha!

One of our less impressive meals of canned soup.

A little while later, we are siting around our poor excuse for a camp fire (we hadn't yet discovered lighter fluid or kindling), and the girl and guy from earlier approached us again.  The girl asked if we wanted to join them at their fire because Can-Opener Man was over at their camp, wouldn't leave them alone, and the girl was getting nervous.

We agreed due to the huge fire they had going and we were freezing!  When we got to their camp, it was apparent that Can-Opener Man was very...well... intoxicated.  The evidence that supported our hypothesis was when he said, 

"I'm going to sit down in this chair."

Queue to him falling over the chair and spilling his drink everywhere

Then saying,

"Who put that chair there??"

He eventually made his way back to his tent, but we could still hear him.  The girl starting freaking out saying things like, "I don't think he's really drunk.", "I don't want to stay here tonight." "He asked me where the other two girls are that I am with, but I am the only girl with these guys, then he said,

'I hate when girls go missing'

I'm really scared of this guy.", "I don't think he's really drunk, I saw the bottle and it is still full."

So, she's freaking us out in the meantime.  When we get back to the tent, Kylie looks at Cheryl and me and says that she has a padlock to lock the tent with.  This seemed like brilliant logic at the time.  Obviously, an attacker would see that we had locked the "door", know they were not invited in, and then go attack someone else! Cheryl slept with the marshmallow poker as a weapon.

Come morning time, we are laughing hysterically at the lock on the tent and Cheryl says, "I woke up in the middle of the night wondering why my hands were so cold.  Then I realized I was holding the marshmallow poker!  What was I planning on doing with that if someone were to attack us?!"

We laughed and laughed and laughed.  I'm still laughing. haha!

This is just one of the characters we met on the trip.  There's still unicorn man, pregnant man, Abraham Lincoln, and so many more.  But there were also some really fantastic and amazing people that we met on the trip.  So great. So many memories.

Don't forget to check out my giveaway!