We accepted an invitation to help Anchorage, Alaska, celebrate the fourth of July.  In the course of planning for this trip, we made contact with the Hawaiian community in Anchorage to arrange for some workshops and concerts in addition to that which we were doing for the City of Anchorage.  By doing this, we helped ourselves ease the burden of paying for the trip.  We did fund this trip with PMF dollars which is a good way of showing donors we are responsible in exercising in-kind funding.  We believe our dollars spent will indeed return tenfold, at least.  We discovered Alaska has developed quite a reputation for sponsoring great folk festivals.  They do this in the winter also as a means of providing their citizenry some brightness in dealing with the long, dark and very cold winters (though winter in Alaska is absolutely beautiful and serene).  So we absolutely filled the calabash with cultural exchange not only with the Alaskan natives, who definitely have a noticeable kinship to Hawaii, but also with the Hawaiian community who so appreciated having "Hawaiianess" come to them.  Alaska loved our music (we've been invited back and they definitely want Lo'ea to return) and the workshops we did were VERY WELL RECEIVED.  We learned a lot about facilitating workshops and even got to be on Alaskan television (we had a brief on-air jam with the weather forecaster).  Most importantly, we think we know what people enjoy most about attending these workshops and plan to fill our training heavily with these lessons-learned.  For PMF membership, we also discovered that doing these workshops is extremely rewarding, at least as rewarding as it is to play good music.  We have been invited back and are planning to take more examples of Hawaiian culture with us.  Traveling to effect cultural exchange is now and will continue to be a very bright light in PMF's quiver of fun, exciting and meaningful things to do.  Come join us!!!