Oh Gee, It's Denali!

I've been getting requests to write more often. Unfortunately, I haven't been getting any monetary reimbursement for my efforts, so I don't write as much. What I'm trying to say is - money talks.

Since the Ice Museum, I've done some ish.

Like get my CDL license.

I can now legally drive a 45 ft. bus. With people on it. By myself. Maybe one day I'll detail what goes into driving a motor coach, but it sometimes hurts my head so not today.

When we're not driving buses and sitting through good employee training, we usually hang out at our place and stay up way too late. I tell you what, this sun staying in the sky all night really messes with you. Like right now, it's 10 p.m., and it looks like it's 5 p.m. How are you supposed to want to go to bed with the sun being all sorts of rebellious?

Remember our awesome car? Mitch named it Poc. For Piece of Crap. I told him to treat it kinder. But we had to get our CV axle replaced. Thankfully, we have a really good friend named Daniel who is quite handy with cars and he changed it for us. We had a car party (different from a dog party at the top of the tree) at a member's house.

Mitch was pretending to be a man and help out. The most he got out of the experience was a grease unibrow.

One day for work we got to go to multiple down town restaurants and sample their food so we can tell our guests the best places to go. We got paid for doing that.

Then yesterday was the best day ever. You could even say it was the day of great giving. We got to go to Denali National Park. And before you start freaking out at the awesomeness, we did not climb Denali.

I'm going to put on my tour hat now, so hold onto your socks. The famous mountain is legally named Mt. McKinley after a U.S. president who never even visited Alaska (rude, right?), but all the cool people call it Denali (meaning "the great one" in Athabascan).

It is 20,320 feet tall and is the tallest mountain in the world, but not the highest (because its summit elevation doesn't reach as high as Mt. Everest, but measured from base to peak it's the tallest. Comprende?). In fact, it's so tall it creates its own weather and is usually surrounding by clouds. And it's uber hard to climb, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say I probably won't be climbing it this summer. You have to be flown in to the base camp. This ain't no day hike.

Taking tour hat off now and back to our trip. We took a coach down while we got a tour (because this will be one of the tours we will be doing). It takes about 2.5 hours in a coach. We saw moosen and Dall sheep. I didn't get any pictures of the moosen because you speed by before you can get a good picture, but I promise one of these days I'll get a good moosen picture.

These are Dall Sheep. They were high on the cliff and far away and we were moving, so you should be pretty impressed by the shot I did get.

 These are what Dall Sheep look like up close: (courtesy the world wide web)

I know. I want to pet one as well.

We then went to the hotels where we will be picking up/dropping off guests. They're pretty shnazzy. This hotel is super high up and to get to it you have to drive 958 dirt road switch backs (only exaggerating a little bit). It has an awesome view, but thankfully we don't usually have to go there.

The funny thing is none of the hotels in the area have an actual view of Denali because the surrounding mountains are so tall. And I don't know the reason why they weren't built closer. I'll get back to you on that one.

For lunch we got to go to a dinner theater where we were served salmon, prime rib tips, red skinned mashed potatoes, succotash (corn, edamame, and red bell pepper), biscuits, salad and apple crisp for dessert.

Mitch and Hillary getting their grub on.

We were then entertained by a cute little musical about the climbing of Denali. Our table was the loudest and proudest, and this is us drinking it up to the 2012 motto of the season: "Get Some!" Its meaning is up to your own interpretation.

In the late afternoon we went to the train station to wait for our train ride back to Fairbanks.

This is a lot of the driver guides, minus me because I was taking the picture. See if you can spot Mitch.

Princess and Holland America have train cars that travel from Anchorage to Fairbanks hooked onto the Alaska train, hence why we got to experience train travel. I highly recommend it.

I should have gotten a better picture of what the inside of the train car looks like, but imagine a narrow moving restaurant with booths and awesome views and that's about it.

 

 I can't help myself posting a million pictures of the train. It's so pretty.

This is me going down the stairs to the outside platform. That's right, you can stand on the platform outside for the entire train ride. Bet you can't do that in a car.

You probably can't see me, but that's Max and me on the other side of the Princess car. Don't worry, no grizzly bears jumped on us.

It was such great scenery, so I invite you to bask and be bored in scenery pictures, which really don't do it justice.

That's the road I'll be driving on. This is also the road that connects Anchorage to Fairbanks. There are only about three highways in Alaska, and this is one of them. In other words, it's pretty hard to get off on the wrong freeway and suddenly end up in Compton (true story from my life).

The train from Denali to Fairbanks takes 4 hours, but you don't mind at all (well I can't speak for you but I'm speaking for me). We got dinner on the train, which was Butternut Squash Soup (delicious with a capital D), grilled chicken, baguette, salad and key lime cake or carrot cake. People, I got paid for this whole day. How often does part of your job description include getting paid to eat, enjoying a leisure ride on a scenic train and being in a famous national park? I didn't think so. 

These are my favorite pictures. I don't think I need to explain why.

This next week we start getting guests. I know, I'm freaking out a little. When I post a picture of me vomiting all over my first bus of guests you'll know things didn't go so well, but I'm hoping that Kodak moment won't happen.

Also, I've really been dying to show this great and totally embarrassing video of myself dancing with an old drunk cowboy at a bar, but we've been having technical difficulties getting it onto my computer. I promise it will come soon.