Last night I dreamed I had to free-hand draw a map of North America, and I was having the most trouble with the Great Lakes, but I did a good enough job to win the competition, and my prize was an all-expense-paid gold prospecting trip to Alaska. On the contest website, you could go and browse all the available locations to do this, and after looking through everything (the flash interface was pretty slick), I decided that, as I was going in the summer, I would visit the northernmost option.
The countryside was gorgeous. Vast green rolling plains shading up into slate-gray mountains in the low slanting gold of the sun. I arrived at my lodgings to find I had a quite comfortable private room and bath in a large log cabin that was furnished like an old family farmhouse. Everything was serviceable and cozy, and nothing matched anything else. I was sharing the cabin with a couple of men, a family of four, the caretaker, and, at least when I got there, two grizzly bear cubs. We were pretty concerned about evicting the cubs before mama showed up and decided we wanted to keep them.
After that was taken care of, I was given the goody bags to pass out, but the only representatives of the family of four that I could find were their two little boys, so I had to explain to the boys that they needed to *share* these bags with their family, and until their mom and dad came back, they could each have ONE candy. ONE. Fortunately they were very well behaved little boys. They went on their way and I started to collect a few extra blankets for my bed, in case I got cold overnight.
At this point, the cabin caretaker came into my room stoned and, while he completely ignored me, he was acting SUPER creepy, so I got one of the guys to come and help me shove him out (he was HUGE), and then help me remake the bed because he left a big old sweat stain from his drippy hair. Anyhow, we got all that taken care of, and set off in an antique train to the gold-mining site to start panning. And I'll never know if there was gold in them thar hills (though everyone kept saying exactly that), because then I woke up.
