Now she's the Republican vice presidential candidate, with U.S. Coast Guard boats parked in the middle of Lucille Lake watching her nearby home and state troopers guarding the access road leading to her property.
Harrell thought Palin would stop in Friday anyway to order her regular - a skinny white chocolate mocha. She's still Sarah, after all, even if her life has been turned upside down by Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign.
"You'll never see another Sarah Palin. It's just who she is," said Harrell, 56, who has owned the coffee house for 15 years. "She'll be coming in. I can almost guarantee it."
Palin's return this week to Alaska has brought the reality of her national campaign with McCain for the White House home to the people who know her best.
To some, she is the same tough political fighter they've watched for more than a decade, a woman prepared for any adventure. And that makes her a true Alaskan in their eyes.
This is the state after all that Palin herself said this week has a special distinction
- "Alaska: where men are men and women win the Iditarod," she told supporters at a welcome rally.
"People in the lower 48 have to know how we live up here, what makes her who she is," said Nikki Shanigan, a 55-year-old oil field worker from Wasilla. "It takes a lot to live up here. If you're not born into it, the cold and the dark, you can't handle it. It takes a strong person."
To others, Palin is the same ambitious, untested candidate who's served less than two years as governor, a woman mostly eager to find an audience. And that makes her a true politician in their eyes.
"I'm embarrassed to be from Alaska right now," said Lindsay Solie, a 22-year-old waitress in Fairbanks. "It's really not just political rhetoric that she could be a heartbeat away from being president. This person just really doesn't have the experience, the formal education."
There's been a lot written and said about Palin outside of Alaska since her selection as McCain's running mate shoved her onto the national stage last month. Ralph Nelson, a 63-year-old retired truck driver from Wasilla, has watched it all unfold with amusement.
"She's a showboater. She loves the attention," said Nelson, a self-described hard-core Democrat who supports Sen. Barack Obama, and a rare find in this mostly Republican state. It's no wonder Palin received glowing reviews for her GOP convention speech, he said.
It reminds Nelson of the time she made a high-profile trip to Iraq shortly after becoming governor in December 2006. "She was elected to go to Juneau, not Iraq," Nelson said. "But she got a lot of attention with that."
That's the Sarah Palin that Nelson has watched as she has soared in political office since being elected to the Wasilla town council in 1992, then Wasilla mayor in 1996 and Alaska governor in 2006.
True, Nelson said, Palin seems an unlikely vice president because she lacks foreign policy experience and hasn't tackled national issues. But she knows how to give a speech, and she's an attractive, plain-speaking politician unafraid of controversy, he said.
