June 23, 2024

I woke up at 12 and 2am and both times I remembered to look outside. I wanted to know if it ever gets dark in Alaska in the summer. 

Here is midnight:

Here is 2am:

You can tell it's a little darker, but still quite light. The sun rises at 4, so it might get a little darker before then, but definitely not dark.

We got up at 5 so we could get ready and put our stuff outside our door by 6. We went to breakfast at Canyon Steakhouse and it was packed. We each had one voucher left to use so I had lemon French toast with berries (the real name sounded fancier), yogurt, and fresh fruit. 

We got on a bus at 7:15 to go to the Denali rail depot. We had to wait there for awhile. A ton of people were all getting on the train. It was chilly but sunny. 

When the train came, we climbed aboard and found our seats on the second level with the glass ceiling. It was really cool! Tammy sat in the window seat and I had the aisle.

They had a dining car down below and people who wanted to eat were taken down in groups. We brought peanut butter sandwiches we had made. We spent a lot of time looking out the window. There was a glare when you tried to take pictures unless your camera/phone was against the glass, which made it hard. I went down to the open part of the train car and fell in love! The air was fresh and it was easy to take pictures. Many fun adventurous people came out there. I took so many pictures and also just enjoyed standing out there and watching. It was chilly but not terrible. We saw Denali multiple times, as well as lakes, rivers, forests, and a few small towns. At one point, we met the train that doing the opposite as us (bringing people off our cruise ship and taking them to Denali). Some of them had made funny signs to hold up. The following pictures are in backwards order.

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The rail guide’s name was Kass (Kassie) and her sister TyAnn was the “beartender.” She told us lots of interesting information and pointed out things to see along the way. We were on the train for almost ten hours, but the time flew by! We went through Anchorage and we saw the rail yard we had seen on our trolley tour, as well as the coastal trail and the highway Abby took us on. The scenery was beautiful. We went through two long tunnels that had been used during World War II. When we went through the long tunnel, one of the train workers went to the outside part of the train car and screamed at the top of her lungs. For the second tunnel (Ansel Anderson?), there was a stoplight and we had to wait for all the cars coming out before we could go in. 

When we got off the train, we were right at the dock in Whittier. We saw the single building where all the inhabitants of Whittier live. Our cruise ship was right there waiting for us. We went through the lines. At one point someone told us not to go through her door because it was reserved for people in wheelchairs. We started going in the other door and that person told us not to go through that door because it was for people in wheelchairs and that we should go back to the first door. They apparently hadn’t communicated about this!

We went through security and got on. We immediately got in an elevator and went up to our deck. We found our room and got our key cards and dumped our stuff. We went to find our muster station on deck 3. They scanned us in with our key cards. Then we went back to our room and watched the mandatory safety video. We then headed to find dinner. We ate in the Lido Market, a casual buffet place that had excellent food with a ton of choices. I had Alfredo sauce on penne. After dinner we walked around and explored the ship. The observation deck (at the top of the ship) has windows all around and there were lots of games. We found the pickleball court and it was freezing up there. We settled in and got ready for bed.