Holland America's McKinley Explorer

Day 7 – Thursday, July 4, 2024 – Fairbanks, Alaska

We found out the night before that Holland America had put together a free all-day excursion to try to make up for the itinerary change. It was going to include gold panning, lunch, and a riverboat ride. However, there would not be a refund if we had already booked another excursion (which we had) and the meet time was 9:30 which was earlier than we wanted to do with our late night the night before, so we stuck with our original plan. I slept in and didn't get up until almost 10. I felt well-rested when I got up and was glad I let myself sleep late. I decided to skip breakfast (most days I've had a pack of granola bars) and we headed to lunch a little after 11.

For lunch I had a crab burger (crab cake on a bun) and Keith had reindeer sausage. Both were good. 

Then we headed back to the hotel where our guide picked us up for the excursion. It was only us and a boy with his grandparents. I enjoyed the boys excitement around everything and asking lots of questions. The guide was great with him. We went to the University of Alaska Museum of the North, a culture and history museum, and then on to the University of Alaska Large Animal Research Station, my favorite part of the day. We saw musk ox, the only animal that is still around and not changed since the ice age, up close. We also saw reindeer, but the guide wasn't able to get them to come as close for viewing. Final stop was North Pole, Alaska, and the Santa Claus House, a year-around Christmas store with Santa. As expected, they get lots of mail addressed to Santa and answer them with a North Pole postmark. The kid with us was pretty excited to go there.

Day 8 - Friday, July 5, 2024

It wasn't until Thursday afternoon after our excursion that we found out how we were getting from Fairbanks to Anchorage since we weren't supposed to be in Fairbanks. We were supposed to be in Denali and taking the train from Denali. The good news was that the rail service had reopened and we were able to take the train from Cantwell Station (a little south of Denali) to Anchorage. The bad news is we had to be in the lobby of the hotel, with our luggage, at 5:30 a.m. to board a bus for a 3 hour ride as we needed to be at Cantwell Station by 9:30 to make sure we were there when the train arrived. The train arrived about 9:50 and we were on our way for the 7-hour train ride to Anchorage by 10:00.

There were two domed cars on the train, each seated 88 passengers. Since it was the first trip with passengers after the railroad had reopened, our group of 41 were the only ones on the train and were split between the two cars, so we had lots of room to move around and could easily move from side to side to have the best view. The picture taking wasn't as great as it could have been as it was raining part of the time, so we were dealing with water on the windows. We did have the back car, so we were able to step out on the platform to take pictures from three directions and not deal with the windows, but did have to battle the wind.

We had lunch on the train. Each train car had a full kitchen downstairs under the domed car. I had a BLTO (onion) with lots of bacon. I had brought plenty of snacks with me, but thought the salmon dip on the menu looked good, so ordered that later in the afternoon as my snack.