Two years later, Hunter and her good friend and fellow WASP, Ginny Hill Wood, decided that they would get to Fairbanks on their own, just to see what their male colleagues had been talking about. They made a deal with an Alaskan pilot, who was in Seattle, to fly two of his planes to Fairbanks. It took 27 days to fly from Seattle to Fairbanks, even though the total flying time added up to only 30 hours. Wood's plane had unairworthy fabric and no heat. The two women nicknamed it "Li'l Igloo." Before leaving for Fairbanks, Hunter and Wood spent a semester at school in Sweden, then spent 10 months bicycling throughout Europe, which was still suffering the devastation inflicted by the war. To get back to the United States, they hitchhiked across the Atlantic Ocean on a tanker.