This nice lady with the green pointed hat was visiting Meyer's Chuck from nearby Ketchikan, but she fit right in. You can tell Alaska residents, by the way, because most of them wear Xtra-Tuffs and Grundens whether it's rain or shine.

Meyer's Chuck is a beautiful little community about halfway between Wrangell and Ketchikan. It is in a well-protected bay with a float, a post office, and a community of about 30 or 40 homes inhabited by hearty individualists.

Moorage is free, no rules -- stay as long as you want. Everyone makes their own electricity. The water comes from a neighboring lake, and is piped to all the houses. There is a post office, which is open on tuesday mornings. This is a true community, where people support each other.

Every morning at 7:30 a woman comes down with a red package of sticky buns to sell to the boats on the dock. Boats come from all around to get sticky buns from the sticky bun lady at Meyer's chuck. Molly wanted to stay an extra day just to get another batch of the sticky buns.

While we were enjoying our stay in Meyer's chuck, the weather forecast was turning ugly -- a storm was blowing in and crossing Clarence Straight to Ketchikan was not something we were looking forward to. We needed to get Laura to Ketchikan by tuesday because she had a flight back to Seattle, and then to Minnesota for a conference.

By asking around, we found that Cassie, who was the town's only licensed postal worker, was also the travel agent who arranged float planes. She scheduled a plane to come pick up Laura and take her directly to the Ketchikan Airport, so that Garth and the kids could stay and wait until the storm blew over.

When Tuesday arrived, the storm had grown strong enough that the float planes weren't flying either. So, Laura missed her flight out anyway. We ended up visiting the post office that morning, and Cassie let the kids cancel their own postcards.

While we were at the post office, we got invited to a potluck on the beach tuesday evening. It started pouring rain about an hour before the potluck, and we were debating whether to go, but decided to go anyway. It was great -- the whole community turned out.

Wednesday came around and the weather still hadn't improved that much. The float planes weren't expecting to be able to get in until noon at the earliest, which might have been too late for Laura to get her last-chance flight. We weren't excited about going down Clarence Strait, and we weren't excited about Laura missing her last chance to fly to her conference, either.

In the end, we decided to head down on our big boat, and ride out the seas. Things got uncomfortable as we were tossed and rolled by the 4-6 foot seas, but the seas subsided as we neared Ketchikan and in the end the only real problem was that our metal coffee thermos flew out of the coffeemaker and all over the counter during one big roll. We had a bit of a challenge docking in Ketchikan in the high winds, but after 2 attempts we got there in time for Laura to make her flight.

Once Laura was off, Garth and the kids vegged out and watched a DVD's in the rain, relaxing and enjoying not being underway in rough windy weather. There are no pictures of the rough water, sorry. We were a bit preoccupied.

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