Alaska Adventures: Day 1--June 19, 2010.

Saturday, June 19, 2010: Our adventure began with a drive to Hastings to meet Ann and Shelby. We are leaving our truck at the Travel Agency there so we only have to pay the parking fee, which will be considerable, for one car. Our plane out of Grand Rapids was delayed by 30-45 minutes. But we found out one good reason to do a tour—they held the plane in Minneapolis because there were 29 in our group. They also did a gate change so that we disembarked, crossed the walkway and got right on our next plane. No waiting at all! We noticed in flight that we went at least an hour over the Canadian Rockies without seeing a single road or town. It’s nice to be able to see that the wilderness still exists! The flight was otherwise uneventful but they couldn’t get the scheduled movie, “Valentine’s Day” to play correctly so they showed “Invictus” instead. The story of Nelson Mandela and the South African rugby team was very inspiring although we missed the very, very end of it because the plane was pulling into the terminal by then. It was 65° (not at all what we expected) when we got on a bus without worrying about our bags and rode the short way to our first Princess Lodge. We had been given our room keys already so we dropped the backpacks in the room and went to explore the lodge. After walking a short path along the Chena River we bought post cards in the gift shop and then continued on a little trail through the woods beside the lodge before returning to the deck along the river. We talked and relaxed until it was about midnight “our time” so we returned to the rooms, where the bags had been delivered. We rearranged the bags a bit, updated the blog, wrote post cards and went to bed around 9:30 Alaska time with the sun still pretty high in the sky and casting shadows.