THEY DID IT!

I'm sitting on the floor of the nearly lifeless Iditarod HQ in Nome; Tim and Colleen are prepping the dogs and cages for the flight to Anchorage this evening, God willing, and we'll all be on the plane together (some sort of combo cargo/passenger plane).

HOW ABOUT THAT TEAM?!?!?!?!??!?! A lonesome fire siren blows off twice when any team is 2 miles out from the finish, so when we heard that I almost threw up; outside a crowd was gathering and before we knew it a squad car flipped it's lights and escorted the team as they turned up onto Front Street from the Bering Sea! I couldn't get NEAR Tim once they stopped under the arch but muscled my way to the dogs and they were rolling on their backs, digging their noses in the snow....talk about a flood of tears...and the whole event illuminated by hundreds of big, colored Christmas lights strung across Front Street from utility pole to utility pole, those too at the mercy of the vicious arctic wind. It was grand.

I haven't asked Tim about his underwear; I noticed he was wearing someone else's long johns when he got to the business of peeling off later that morning, and when inquiries were made regarding such he could offer no explanation. He also told me he smelled creamed corn on the trail and that I should measure my teeth and go to sleep. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

The "dog water" here in Nome is in a very humid, very hot building with huge concrete sinks and valves and pulleys and rollers everywhere - and also the building where the locals bring their "honey buckets" for disposal. I pull my neck warmer over my mouth and nose every time I go in there, but the stench has taken hold, imagined or not. Yech. Tim, on the other hand, can't smell anything in there, and I wonder if he "burnt" something, olfactory wise, on the trail because he says he can't taste anything, either. Maybe a self-preservation/survival mechanism kicked in somewhere along the way, given the pickled muktuc and stink seal flipper offered in the villages and the perfume of his own wardrobe.

By the way, you will never get a whiff of a woodstove or campfire up here; there is no wood to burn. But you will see an alarming amount of crematoriums and houses on stilts - the ground is frozen solid year-round.

More later - we need to get going.