New Blog to ring in a New Year

You may notice a change to our site. Yes, the old entries are gone. The new entries are forthcoming. As I sit in the basement of my in-law's home, I'm reminded of what a year it has been for us. Besides a major move from the country's coldest/most dry state to arguably the most humid/hottest state, we shared pain and loss with several close friends, joy and surprise with others, purchased our first minivan, faced a monumental task at home in raising a three year old and at work in navigating a basewide inspection, and of course, defeating financial debt once and for all in our home. 2006 has been one for the books in this family. Just like this website, the year has brought on changes and 2007 promises just as many challenges and joys. Please drop us a line and let us know how you and your family are doing. I'll log on again and describe the three days of Christmas as well as our plans for this site over the years once we get settled back in to our new home in Alabama. Until then, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may God bless you and your family now and forever!


May His wonders never cease!

Welcome to Montgomery, Alabama

Well, we are here at our new duty location in lovely, Montgomery, Alabama! Yes, it's hot. Yes, we got a ton of rain the last day or so. No, we don't have a house yet, though we will be accepting one on Monday. Yes, you can still call us on our cell phone. No, the room we are staying in is NOT big enough! Yes, all of our stuff is still loaded on the boat and in our cars, however that will change once we move in. I went to my office and started my "House-hunting" leave, so I technically don't have to be at work for about a week. However, that does not mean that I didn't spend most of today in uniform getting situated with finance and the clinic. Hopefully we will get paid soon for the move. We have already started planning the decorating of our home. We are trying to do a good job, for once, of getting wallpaper and painting out of the way before we actually start putting our furniture in place - please pray for us as we attempt to do this! I had a great time in GA with my family and got to see almost everyone. The highlight was easily spending a couple hours sailing on a Catalina 250 with my dad on Lake Lanier. I can't wait to get my boat ready for the spring! I hope everyone is doing well! God Bless you all! - David

Boundary Waters with my sibs

10/11/06 - 8 Days in the wilderness and 36-hours later, I'm back at my parent's house in Gainesville, GA. Rachel and the kids are still visiting with her grandparents and we should be meeting up again this weekend to make the final push, as a family, to our new home. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) was unbelievable! We truly "roughed it" for the entire time. I think we saw about 5 other canoes the entire time out and experienced black bears on our island, wolves howling through the night, beavers, otters, and all sorts of weather! At times, we were forced to make landfall much earlier than planned and wait out winds that caused two-foot waves in lakes that are normally completely placid. It was well worth the journey, and we all learned a lot and had a great time! I've included a few pics from the trip to the right. They hardly do justice to the grandeur of this somewhat obscure wilderness area. God Bless you all! - David

BWCAW - here we come!

10/2/06 - Today we leave for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. We are outfitted, packed, and ready to go. . . we hope. The food here is awesome and we shared a little discussion about skipping the canoeing and just sitting around Ely and eating the whole time. . . You know, take a few pics on the water to prove our trip and then spend the rest of the time in the great eateries around here. This morning was a stuffed hashbrown - really something you need to someday experience! Rachel and the kids are about to move out of the cabin and back into the Rensch's house for their last few days in Rapid. Please pray for all of us as we continue in our separate paths - utimately meeting up again in a couple weeks. The weather is awesome and we are all ready for an adventure. I'm looking forward to sharing it once we get back. God Bless you all! - David

The BIG plan

The trend was meant to be broken. Sorry for the lapse; a lot has happened, but I don't have much time - Rachel is driving around the Rapid City Public Library to keep from parking our 40-ft rig in five metered spots! Anyway, as you can assume, we are safely in South Dakota for the first solace of the trip. I will leave in a few hours to meet my brothers and sister to canoe the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota and Canada for two weeks - a dream of 10 years fulfilled! Rachel and the kids will stay here a few days and then move on to her grandparents house for a week of relaxation. We will all meet up together at our new duty assignment just before I have to report for duty. It has been an awesome trip and if I could load the pictures I've taken, you would see antelope in Wyoming, the Governer's Suite at the Billings, MT Crowne Plaza that we got "bumped" into when we showed up and they failed to produce a non-smoking room for our confirmed reservation, and you would also see Andrew riding a horse for the first time! Thank you, Jim and Linda for your wonderful hospitality during our stayover in Rapid. Well, I don't know when I'll get another note posted, so please pray for our family as we continue our journey to a new home. We continue to thank Him for the wonderful experiences we've encountered and we look forward to seeing you all in person to hear about your lives as well. God Bless you all! - David

Idaho and Holiday Inn

Wow - 3 Days in a row! Not to mention while traveling along one of the least explored coasts in the country! I'm pretty impressed, you should be too! As you can see, I've re-sorted the list - most recent up top - that way, the pics will line up with the most current news and you won't have to browse to the bottom every time! Ain't I a jeanyus! Anyway, we are in a Coer d'Alene, Idaho, in a really nice, really new, Holiday Inn, Express - I'm totally thrilled over the accomodations - as is the rest of the fam - especially Andrew - one look at the cookies waiting for us in the lobby and the indoor 24-hour pool and he was hooked! We will stay as long as we can, before we press on to our next destination. For your viewing pleasure, I've added some pics of days past that I could not upload due to inferior computers. Until later - God bless you all! - David

Ketchikan, Alaska

We made it to Ketchikan - a small community in SE Alaska - just north of Annette Island and the southernmost town in Alaska in our journey. This is where we say goodbye to Alaska for a while, anyway and welcome back the Lower 48 into our life. The trip overnight was more eventful than we were aware - somewhere between Petersberg (our first stop overnight) and Wrangell, the bow thruster on the ferry went out - so we got the assistance of a tug boat as we came into Ketchikan harbor. That was pretty cool, especially when the tug is right outside our stateroom window! We watched the tug get tied off to the boat and push us up against the pilings - one more unique experience for the chart! The family is still holding up fairly well and we are enjoying making meals in our room, walking around the boat and taking in the SE AK scenery - what a place! I can't wait to come back and experience it all for myself, at my own pace someday. Well, we are off to the grocer to get some more food for the long 1.5 days left until Bellingham, WA - our destination port. God Bless you all! - David

Juneau, Alaska

We've made it to Juneau! A 4.5 hour trip down Lynn Canal and we are safely in port at Auke Bay, just 12 miles north of the most inaccessible state capital. The northernmost point of the Inside Passage is so amazing! I'll write about my journey last summer sometime. Rachel spotted the first whales - too far away to identify, but definitely a pod of large marine mammals - we expect to se more as we trek further south. We are situated nicely in a spatious 4-berth cabin with a small table and four chairs as well as plenty of space for the pack-n-play. Andrew is pretty excited to be on the boat and Rachel and I are just relieved to be skipping the entire ALCAN - a highway that is really fun to drive - once. Our boat and Jeep are tucked away in the bowels of the M/V Malaspina, along with other trucks, cars, R/Vs, and kayaks. Our layover in Juneau is pretty short, but long enough to get ashore and post this message. I'm sorry I have no pictures this time, as the terminal I'm working from is pretty limited. Anyway, I'll go now - next stop is Ketchikan, sometime tomorrow. I'll try to post another message from there! God Bless you all! - David

Towed to go

As you can see, the boat is hitched up and we are on our way down the road! We'll try to keep you all informed - but we will at least let you know when we get to our new home - 6,000 miles away. God Bless - David

The only way to fly

"I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth. . . put out my hand and touched the face of God!" Words cannot describe the intensity or the feeling or the experience of what I did this morning. I will try to convey to you just exactly what went down, but I will surely fail. No doubt you have a formulated opinion as to the life of a fighter pilot/rockstar. Well, I've had the very unique privilege since being in AK of sharing first hand both lives (ironically). The rockstar was the band "Third Day," arguably the "BIGGEST" name in modern Christian music. Someday, I'll come back to that subject, but today, I will discuss the fighter pilot, my boss. Besides being a great friend and mentor, he is a strong supporter of his troops and worked tirelessly to get me in the cockpit of the two-seater, F-16D aircraft that is used for incentive flights up here. After three months of wondering and waiting, the day finally came and I spent a little over an hour this morning flying high and extremely low, over this great final frontier. The prep was certainly unique - I had to be cleared medically by a flight doc as well as an aerospace physiologist. I then had to receive "egress training", basically "how to get out of the cockpit fast, on the ground or in the air". I also had to receive "hanging harness" training, for when I got stuck in the trees after "punching." Thankfully, I did not have to use any of the information learned from those classes much, but it was good to know. Once the request was signed by the base commander, I was on "go" status. This morning we had to go in to mission plan and determine our route for the trip, make some airspace agreements, and get briefed on the weather and restrictions. (just leaving the squadron building or "stepping" to the aircraft, pilots have to remember more and prepare for more than most of us face in an entire month of planning. The pictures on the right are progressive: 1. We received permission for an "unrestricted climb" to 15,0000 ft - basically, fly down the runway as fast as possible, then pull the aircraft on its tail and go straight up for 15,000 feet at 500 knots feeling 6-g's (basically, my body's weight was multiplied six times) - "wow" was all could think - I certainly couldn't speak for a while! Then we turned south to begin the "Low Level of Justice" - a route through the Alaska range that took us past tundra hilltops, snow-capped peaks, glacial valleys, mountains streams, and shear cliffs - most of the scenery was above and off to the side - we were that low! Pretty incredible. Then we saw some range targets and performed a few acrobatics and bombing maneuvers. This plane can turn on a dime! The closest turn we did was a 7-g turn (we did a few) and that was pretty fanatastic. Then we returned to base and I got to take the stick for a few seconds to feel the aircraft. After a few patterns, we touched down and called it a day. Rachel got some video of us "stepping" and of course, of the return to terra-firma! I can't wait to share these with everyone, but know that it was pretty incredible! Thank you, Marco for the ride of a lifetime, and thank you AMU for making the aircraft ready for launch - I have never felt safer in an airplane, ironically enough! God Bless - David

Last Sunday at the Chapel and First Lottery in Denali

Our last Sunday at the chapel was of course emotional - receive the infamous "Chapel Tile", play the guitar and sing for the last time, and Andrew's frequent antics. I kind of decided to play last minute, so I didn't know what songs we were doing until I showed up, and I had to "wing it" for a few, but the Lord blessed this last minute decision in a way none of us expected - after months and months of praying for a replacement guitarist, a guy came up to the praise leader after the service and said he was interested in taking my place - wow! That was pretty cool to see how He works! I would've stayed around longer afterwards but we had a mission: Utilize our Denali National Park Road Lottery winner letter and make it to Wonder Lake, seven hours away, and back. Denali National Park has a 85-mile long road that is used to transport busses in and out of the park to view the wildlife and Mt. McKinley all throughout the summer. Every year in September, 1600 lucky lucky people are selected from the hoards of applications to drive the entire park road for a day, in your own vehicle. They select 400 vehicles a day, for a four-day weekend and we were lucky enough to win a pass this fall! So, we packed up the kids, a bunch of food and headed south to Denali, for the last time. The weather was OK - pretty overcast, so we couldn't see the mountain, but just fine for viewing wildlife and safely driving the road. It was definitely a long trip - but well worth it - we saw a sow grizzly bear (mom) with two cubs as well as a pack of wolves and we got some great footage of all of it. It was so much better being able to see the park at our own pace, rather than stopping at every caribou a quarter-mile away or every snow-shoe hare like the busses do. We tried to get a room in the small town of Denali on the way home, but at $179/night, it was a little out of our price range - so we pressed, and by 1:30 in the morning, we were snug in our beds back at Eielson. Just a few more days before we hit the road! - God Bless, David.

Last BBQ or Surprise Party!?

The last bar-b-cue of the season - my foot! Our friends invited us over to a nice quiet dinner with them and another couple tonight, and lo and behold, we arrived at the "get-together" to find a roomful of other friends there to surprise us with a full-out going-away party! What a true blessing! The food was plentiful, there were four cakes, gifts, and most of all - tons of love from some brothers and sisters we will sorely miss! Thanks to all who made it happen, it was really a wonderful event at a time when we really needed it! God Bless! - David

Wonder-Woman

Rachel has once again proven herself as the greatest wife of all time! As many of you know, I've been extremely busy fulfilling the obligation that forced our extension in Alaska at work. What you don't know is that Rachel basically cleaned the house single-handedly. Sure, I did a few menial tasks, but she is the one who got us through today's inspection! With flying colors I might add! Anyway, we spent four nights with some friends on base and have now settled into the Temporary Lodging Facility - where we will live until we depart! It is close quarters for a family of four, but it's better than an average hotel room, and it's within walking distance of my office - leaving the ability to get cars fixed, each after the other. The kids are a little stir crazy right now (rightfully so), but they should gradually settle into the new digs. I apologize if we don't get to e-mail quick enough; we have no computer in the room and the government machines will not allow access to webmail servers. God Bless! - David

Almost out of here

Three days of packing and our house is almost empty. All that is left are the essentials for our return trip as well as the time left in Alaska. I'm pleased with the move so far. There are always horror stories associated with military moves, however the team of 3 that packed and shipped our stuff was extremely thorough and careful with everything - even the boxes and boxes of memorabilia and "junk" from our past lives. Tonight we are staying the empty home of my boss and his family, just across the street. It's a real blessing to have such awesome friends, willing to support us in a time of no furniture! There is still a lot left to do before we hit the road, and we'll try to keep everyone up to date. God Bless! - David

Blog Leftovers

Here are the archives from when I first started Mediocre, Alaska until it was migrated from a plain website to an actual blog. Maybe some day I'll be bored enough to break these down into individual blog entries. Until then you are stuck searching through to see what the early years of Mediocrity were like. Entries are listed from most recent at the top to oldest at the bottom. Enjoy!

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The Sulhoffs are moving to Alabama to seek out a new life, a new job, gain new friends, and follow His will. The last three years spent in Alaska have been truly remarkable. Surely even a Mediocre Alaskan experience, such as their's, is more phenomenal than even the greatest experiences in any other state of the Union.


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We will be checking our e-mail as often as possible, while we are on the road - and we encourage you to send us your thoughts - we'll post those that warrant everyone's attention - anonymously, of course! Also, if you have our cell phone number, we will still be carrying that with us all the way to our next duty assignment - so feel free to make random calls and see where we are on our 6,000 mile journey - we could always use the visits!

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Follow our journey! - Note the change - Most recent now at top. . .