Bleary Eyed Travellers

Joe in the Domed McKinley Explorer Train
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Whoever decided that one must have their luggage ready for a 6am pick-up should be shot. Getting up at 5:15am is not good when you are still awake at midnight!!! So this morning I woke up with very red eyes and very tired. Our tranfer to the train was scheduled for 7am, and after waiting 25min for the stragglers, we proceeded the 300m to the train station! I could have slept an extra hour and walked there myself!!

We boarded the train and located our seats in the domed carriage. Here we were afforded spectacular views of the countryside. All in all this was a fairly ordinary train trip - 8hrs of looking at more or less the same thing. Let's just face it, its not the Canadian Rockies like we saw last year. The highlight of the day was the bartenders Bulgarian singing. We arrived around 4pm and headed for the McKinley Chalet Resort where we checked into our "log" cabin - one of 5 on the ground floor of building D.

What - It's not my birthday anymore???

Scenery from the Train
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It was a short wait to the highlight of the day - our Helicopter flight and Glacial landing. OK so we've done the glacier landing thing before, but you can never tire of helicopter flights.

The pilot (Scott) was young but definately has a great job... our 30 min trip out to the snow capped mountains that housed the glacier to be landed on was magnificent - even though glimses of moose, bear and sheep were limited, the brilliant scenery more than made up for the scarce wildlife. The glacial landing at roughly 12,300ft was smooth and the temperature felt like 0 degrees C with a brisk wind. We were supplied with overboots before we left to slip on over our shoes which gave us plenty of grip to walk around on the safe areas of the glacier taking many photos and left us in awe of our surroundings. The trip back was (luckily) uneventful with views of moose swimming in a lake and running streams from melting glaciers.

One of many Lakes during our train trip
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Dinner is a 45 min wait to get in at 9.30pm, so I am using this time to write my blog for today. We discovered the lobby has wireless, so you will get this update sooner than we thought!