The Buckets by Greg Cravens for August 12, 2015

And this is why nearly everyone in Alaska is an alcoholic. :-)

What are those bubbles around Dad and Eddie’s heads in the first panel?

Must be June or July in Buckets-verse. I think by now the sun is setting before 11 pm in Anchorage.

Doesn’t the cartoonist have it mixed up. He apparently thinks it is later in Alaska than in the Eastern US. If the kids thought it was lunch time, it would really be time for an early breakfast in Anchorage.

It doesn’t look like night in the first two panels!

Good grief, this brings back memories! One June evening I was working on my car and my wife came out to ask me if I was coming to bed. I said “In a little while.” She told me it was after 2 AM. I looked up from the wiring to see that the sun had risen! I dropped everything and went to bed.

BTW, we lived in Delta Junction, about 100 miles SE of Fairbanks.

Everything I know about Alaska I learned from watching Northern Exposure.

And so it begins ………….

Yep. We really visited in late June/early July. The sun never really went down at all, by my standards. It was sorta twilight for a few hours and then, boom, day again. Very weird. And yes, the bubbles are jet lag or road-buzz. Good call. We were brain-damaged after a long day of travel. And for Robert Pittman- the guess at ‘lunch time’ comes from the fact that it’s light outside. I’ve never said where The Buckets live, particularly, but it’s a place where the sun isn’t up at eleven at “Night”. And it was in Alaska. I have a really fun photo of the dashboard clock the evening we arrived and drove away from the airport. Midnight, and the sky is still bright.

When I went to AK as a kid on the night we drove as far north as you could at the time (’72) I stayed up until midnight to take some pictures of the “midnight sun”. We were north of Fairbanks near, I believe, Circle, on the banks of the Yukon.3 months in a bus converted to an RV with the grandparents. My best childhood memories, by far.

You can buy shirts up there that say “I spent my summer in Alaska and enjoyed both days of it”. I laughed at it but then found out how true it was. Two days of 80 degree days and the rest were in the 50s and drizzly.

Apparently Larry and Sarah never told their sons that Alaska is the “land of the midnight sun.”