Weeeee! let the games begin!!

There he goes again..

Da train da train!
Happy Summer Solstice!
Daylight: 21hrs 49minutes!!

Waking time: 5:30am
Yesterday the gang woke up at 6:30am to do the riverboat ride and gold panning. Today we gotta get up 5:30am to get onto a 7:45am train to the Denali National Park. Tommorrow we gotta get up at 4:30am to get to a 5:30 bus ride. This is silly, talk about gogogo!.
So we ventured on a 4hr train ride 130 or so miles. Pretty senic, nothing but trees until the last 10 miles where the rail goes next to a meandering river valley. Arrived at 1pm and stuck with chingching lunch, reindeer burgers! Man am i killing these things or what! So reindeer is the domesticated (?) version of the Caribou. Whats a domesticated deer? i never did find out, it's not like a pet or something you have in the house i don't think. But they were domesticated so that the Eskimos can have a better food source.
We're at the border of the Park and it's got 3 hotels owned by 3 different tour lines a row of tourist junk shops and 2 restraunts. Thats it, it's like being stuck at pier 39 and the only restraunts are a 24-hour Subwway and a rinky dink Salmon Bake restraunt.
These tour guides are going crazy in trying to get us to do 'optional excursions.' Some sound good but cost an arm per person! Also the timing of these excursions is whacked! For example, we arrive 1pm. Say you wanna do a 139$ per person 4x4 jeep ride. Which starts at 2pm, so you gotta eat like a savage, get to wherever people are meeting up. Do the thing be done around 5pm and then theres another excursion dinner show at 52$ a person at 5:30pm. If you can't make that, then you can catch the 8:30pm dinner and show. But wait, tommorrow we got a 7-hour bus ride (?!) through the Denali National Park starting at 5:30am(!!!). And then they want you to book something after?! These guys are machines!
I wish there were two excursions that existed:
1) Go Zap a 4-legged animal.
2) Helicopter to the top of Mt Mckinley and snowboard down it.
i'd pay for that!

i forgot to mention the housing, at Fairbanks our tour group was split between 2 hotels. The one we went to is the newer of the hotels, so when the tour bus got into our parking lot the people who were put in the other hotel wanted to know how it was. They didn't like their housing situation, and that it was a shanty of a place.
Here in Denali everybody got the newest of lodges in the place, it's pretty fancy woodsy cabin feel. Pretty comfy kinda like 10-7M's place, but no stuffed beaver to hang out with. =(
Cabin Hotel at Denali 2nd floor. Chess Anyone??

So the only thing that sucks is everywhere we go it feels like 6pm! Perpetual twilight, when we got off the train it felt like 6pm, when we got out of dinner at 9pm(!?) it felt like 6pm. Goodness! For dinner went to the rinky-dink salmon bake, and i had a salmon chowder, pretty good! I don't feel hungry, maybe it's the 6pm feel.