Day 02 - 06/29/22 - Riverboat & Denali Transfer

 Today was our big transfer day to Denali from Fairbanks. I set my alarm for 6am and put our luggage outside the room with our transfer tags affixed.  These had to be positioned there by 6:30am.  I reset the alarm for 7 and drifted off to never never land before being startled by the 7am alarm.  We all got dressed, packed our backpacks, ate the last of the pizza and made our way down to the lobby where our coach was waiting.  

 

It was a short drive out to the Riverboat landing which is located very near the Fairbanks Airport.  The riverboat tour company has been in business some 72 years and Mary Binkley, the wife of the founder, at 96 years old is still active in the business.  Her husband, Jim Binkley, passed away some years ago,  but their descendants are still running the company.  There's a huge gift shop and meal facility adjoining the dock which the owner constructed,  There's a terrific back story about the construction of the dock which also serves as a dry dock for the river boats because of their flat bottoms. 

 

The story goes like this.  At the conclusion of the construction of the Alyeska Pipeline that hauls the crude oil from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to Valdez which is SE of Anchorage, there were surplus sections of the pipeline.  Mr. Binkley only wanted to purchase several hundred feet of the pipeline, but the sellers said, "Take a quarter mile lot, or take none."  It was cheap enough, so he purchased 1/4 mile of it.  They constructed the dock with the needed several hundred feed of pipe, and put the rest in storage. Fast forward about 10 years and repairs to the pipeline needed to be made and the owners came knocking on Mr. Binkley 's door.  They wanted to only purchase a small quantity of the pipeline, but you can probably guess the response:  take it all, or take none.  The net cost of the dry dock and dock was pretty close to zero after that transaction.

 

Skyler, the summer narrator, was terrific, and our granddaughter really liked his jokes.  The cruise down the river included a Piper Super Cub take off and landing demonstration, a stop at Susan Butcher's sled dog training facility, and a stop at a replica Athabaskan village. At the village, we enjoyed presentations about the culture, and our granddaughter had the chance to pet a sled dog,  She really liked that.  She also really liked the stuffed pair of moose whose antlers became intertwined which led to both of their deaths.  The carcasses were found the following spring after the snow melted.

 

Back at the landing, we enjoyed a sumptuous family style lunch.  Seated at our table was a large family group from all over the US who are doing a Covid delayed trip.  They'll be on the Noordam with us in a few days.

 

After lunch, we tested the -40ºf cold room and purchased a picture to commemorate the occasion.

 

We reboarded our coach just before  1pm and headed on south on the two lane highway to Denali.  It continued to be hazy and we saw no animals along the way,  We did make a short stop in Nenana (pronounced Neen ana) and ana means river in Alaska.  There was an interesting railcar cut in half and. Some old mining equipment, plus a small gift shop.  

 

All totaled it took about 2 1/2 hours to reach the McKinley Chalet in Denali.  A greeter passed out our welcome packets and noted that no covid test was needed for here, but that we did need to schedule one for getting on the ship on Sunday which meant that we needed to do it on Friday or Saturday,  Using my phone I made the necessary reservations although I never received any confirmation codes. I'll recheck that tomorrow. There's no cost for this test. Our luggage also beat us to our room and was waiting there for us.  

 

I made reservations for us at the dinner show in the Golden Nugget Saloon,  The dinner was nice and one of our table mates was a student from the Dominican Republic who was here on a summer job to practice his English.  The show was good and was about the first persons to climb Denali.  Our granddaughter really liked it except "for the love songs which were too mushy".  There was also a really nice country singer in the plaza and there were a number of shops from which to browse.  After that, we took a shuttle to the main lodge and walked across the highway to check out the many shops over there,  Among them is a Subway which will help with the meal budget. I did note there was a large Princess lodge A&B which did not appear to be in operation. It was next to another Princess Lodge which appeared to be in full operation.

 

We retired back at our room and it took a bit for the granddaughter to unwind.  Eventually she did while I keyed in this blog.

 

Tomorrow we have a tundra tour which will take much of the day.