The Red Lantern is in.

It’s all over. Iditarod has come and gone. I watched mushers come in at 2 a.m. I cheered for wet boobs and buns. I did irreparable damage to my liver. In sum, I experienced Iditarod. My last post concluded on Wednesday. In an effort to save time, here is what happened in the remaining days: I drank. Wednesday I drank green St. Patty’s day beer. Thursday I partied at my neighbors and avoided the bars. Friday and Saturday I hit up the town with a couple of couchsurfers from Anchorage. Sunday was the banquet at the Rec Center complete with a giant spread of food and $3 beers.

Now I am recovering. A week of late nights and smoky bars has destroyed my immune system so that I am writing this with some weird cold or flu. My body aches and I spent most of last night waking up every 20 minutes in a cold sweat. Lovely.

Aside from turning my usually healthy liver into a shrunken, yellow mess of dying cells, Iditarod finally made me feel like a real resident of Nome. Despite my lack of snowmachine riding and muskox hunting and general introverted apartment dwelling art making, I have made enough acquaintances that I always knew somebody out on the town. Also, with the two couchsurfers staying with me, I got to be a tour guide for the weekend. It is fun to be a “local” and show people the cool, not in the tourbook, things to do such as hikes up Anvil Mountain to see the White Alice antennae and muskox herds and then get live crab from Norton Sound Seafood for dinner.

Let me take the time to endorse couchsurfing.org for any readers who do not know of the website. It is a social networking site with the sole purpose of providing free places to sleep to poor vagabonds like me who don’t mind sleeping on a couch or a mattress in the corner of the room. You join and make a profile with pictures of all your travels and descriptions of your accommodations. Other users can then search in a town or geographic areas for other members. Exchange a few emails to make sure the person is available and not an ax murderer and just like that you saved yourself $120 on a hotel room. It is self-regulating so people who have stayed with you can leave comments about you and you can leave comments about them (If I have learned anything during my 30 years on this Earth it is that pictures of you on top of a mountain or biking across the United States usually means you a decent person). The best part is that you get to stay with a friendly local who can give you advice and show you things that a hotel concierge never could. It actually uses social networking in a communal and productive way instead of just updating former high school classmates with fishing for sympathy status updates.

I have used the site quite a few times now. When I drove across the country from San Francisco back to law school with my buddy, we stayed with three different people, all great experiences. I hosted a group of guys in Anchorage and now have hosted in Nome. You might think that such a website would draw mostly a dreadlocked hippie crowd, but it is quite diverse. Through the site I have met a plethora of people from military guys to oil rig workers to dreadlocked hippies to college “dudes.” All were great people who love traveling, meeting people, sharing their own experiences and wanting a more authentic experience of wherever they visit. I highly recommend trying it on your next trip.

Getting back to Iditarod, I have to say that being here for the entire week was unforgettable (The amazing weather the tourists brought helped as well.). Seeing the town swell with people in celebration makes you excited and happy. It is a weeklong good-time feedback loop in a town where depression and melancholy can easily set in. It was tough Monday morning not hearing sirens go off and the loud speakers in town giving race updates. When the initial idea to move to Alaska was presented to me on the back porch of Crossroads Bar & Grill in South Royalton, Vermont sometime in March of 2009, I was hesitant until I quickly realized that the idea was so crazy I had to do it. I figured that the worst possible outcome is that I end up leaving the Great White North with some good stories to tell. Well, witnessing the full onslaught of Iditarod in Nome, Alaska is definitely a hell of a story to tell. Thank you Nome and thank you Iditarod.