I made a mistake. I blame it on being tired and partially on my general increasing forgetfulness.

After quite a pleasant drive from Tok to Glenallen despite the general achiness and stiffness of long drives, I arrived in Glenallen with a serious need for coffee and a pitstop. Took care of business, got in my car, and headed back out into the evening dusk.

It wasn’t until Gakona that I looked at my gas tank and realized something very stupid. I forgot to gas up in Glenallen!

I debated about heading back to fill up the tank but felt I was far enough away from Glenallen that I thought I better keep going. I put in a call while I had momentary cell signal to my husband and asked him to figure out the next gas station between Gakona and Tok.

He called back to say Gakona was the next one. Of course, I had already passed Gakona and noted a big red “X” through the gas pump symbol on the sign of services along the highway.

“Where’s the next one?”

He asked his buddy who makes the Tok/Anchorage drive pretty often.

“I don’t think there is another one until Mentasta Lake,” he told me.

“I don’t think I can make it to Mentasta Lake on about 1/4th of a tank,” I told him. “But I could swear I saw at least one other gas station past Mentasta and before Glenallen.”

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Well, I’ve been officially in Tok now for 28 days, and I’ve already caused a stir. And not just locally.

Since the Day to Day interview, I’ve heard that my video of me driving to the Tok General Store has been shown on a Chicago news station; then a Kansas TV station just did a Mommy Monday segment about the cold in Tok and showed some of my videos. I’ve spoken to a radio station in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and I slept through a live phone interview with a Toronto station (I still feel bad about that).

Also, as many of you know, NOAA has inquired into the -80 and -71 readings from the Davis weather station at my husband’s office. One of the guys is even coming down to check out the computer data from the station and analyze the positioning of the station monitor later this week. I’ll be sitting down with him over a cup of coffee and will interview him for this blog.

In the meanwhile, just about everyone I meet in Tok has heard about and is now reading this blog (Hi Tokites!). I know some people are probably wondering “why is she getting all this attention – she just moved here!” Well, it wasn’t my intention to draw so much attention so quickly, and it was just an odd confluence of events that started everything rolling.

But I did want to explain the reason I created this blog and the real purpose of the Living in Tok blog – something that may not be clear yet because all of this attention came far before I really got started.

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