Weeeee! let the games begin!!

Theres no wireless connection at our place, so i gotta walk up to the chalet and upload 2 days worth of bloggin! Woot!

i've heard of a nature hike, but a 7-hour nature bus ride??

Woke up at 4am to the pitter patter of the rain. It's began sprinkling here n there, now it's raining constantly. Last minute before leaving for Alaska i decided to bring my gore-tex jacket instead of my nifty blue superlight jacket. I'm glad the gore-tex came along!
So our 5:30am venture is a 7-hour bus ride in and out of the only road in the Denali National Park. Why am i up at 4am? i have a mission to do. Go to the 24-hour subway, which has a sign saying 'open early.' How early is early for a 24-hour operation? These guys are our lifesavers, it's either a 6$ 6-inch sub or a 12$ 'Snack pack' sold by the tour center. Oh and this center with the tour bus is partially owned and run by Aramark Parks divison! Aramark owns all!
Aramark took the contact from the National Park to tour people in and out of the park. The park is 6 million acres big, and with only one road thats pretty good. The first 15 miles private vehicles can enter, the remaning 80 miles is reserved to permitted private vehicles and these tour and shuttle buses.
The place is vast and huge, but it's all green. Parts of Alaska is stuck on permafrost, permanently frozen ground, where there are more freezing days than thawing days. This limits the amount of nutrients for the plants to grown. The result are these sickly looking trees that look like sticks. At this park is also the treeline, the point in which trees no longer live north of the equator. This park of Alaska has a higher than average treeline compared to Canada and Syberia. What grows north of that is just shrubbery, bushes and moss n iddy-biddy things.
Ok i blabber, so within this 7-hours the goal was to see the 4 biggest mamals in the area. We happen to do that and exceed, we saw: Grizzly bear and her kid (cutecute!), Moose and her kid, Dall sheep (like mountain goat but mountain sheep), and Caribou . We also saw Snowshoed Hare, a bald eagle (!), some little fuzzies like artic squirrel and some other things.
The funny part was that if we saw an animal we yell out to stop the bus and to describe and direct the people to look for whatever they saw. The bus was a little better than the standard yellow-school bus. But when someone saw something the bus stopped, and everybody crammed to one side peering all over the palce to find whatever it was to find. Then you break out the camera and snap like no other. Kinda goofy, but hey if you wanna see, then you gotta look. We got to pit stop about 4 times down the park and 3 back each lasting 10 minutes and the bus driver was adamant on being on time. She asks "whats the difference between a tourist and a hitch hiker? ... 30 seconds." We had one guy almost become one and she got kinda ticked to the fact that we're now 2 minutes delayed and the bus behind us is now in front, Oooo! At the turn around point, 53 miles (in 4 hours!) in we got to hang out for longer and play with some discarded Antlers n what not, those things are kinda heavy! Can you imagine 20-30 pounds popping out of your head every year?
So we roam back and get back home at 1pm and fluffielady and i zoink out till 5pm. While the rest went to check out the parks visitor center till 3pm, now they're back zoinked out as i scribble this. It's 6pm. I dunno where we're going to eat, maybe the Princess Line Hotel next door with their pizza joint is something to do.
But for now i gotta do my laundry! Tommorrow it's not that bad, sorta. Wake up and put your bags out by 9am and a 8-hour train ride (same train as the one from fairbanks) to Anchorage!
This tour is kinda odd, fluffielady and i don't like the fact that all we do is sit and look. Yesterday when we arrived i had to go move around, walk somewhere, breath some outdoor air. Isn't this what we're supposed to do?