The list of activities on the itinerary for today include driving into Seward to visit the Alaska SeaLife Center and see the Iditarod Trail Mile 0 marker. The SeaLife Center is a very nice aquarium. It has two floors and you start your visit on the second floor. There are the usual aquariums with a variety of fish, urchins, sea stars and one tank had a Giant Pacific Octopus hiding in a corner. They made it interactive to a degree with a tablet sized screen that scrolled through the inhabitants of each aquarium and how many of each animal was in the tank. It encouraged you to find them all, like an I Spy book come to life. Outside are three large tanks. The tank on the left was enclosed with netting and housed a variety ... read more

I was laying in bed contemplating getting up when I heard a loud BANG! I asked Mike what it was. He said the people behind us dropped their 5th Wheel on the bed of their truck. They hadn't secured the pin in the hitch before driving away. Oops! There didn't appear to be any visible damage from where we sat watching as they finally exited with their trailer following. Dave did that once. Unfortunately it did do some damage to the bed of their truck and now their tonneau cover doesn't fit quite right and has to be finagled into place. Mike and I brainstormed possible solutions to our slide problem: Could it be the batteries? Could it be a relay somewhere? Could it be the motors themselves? We looked online for nearby RV repair shops. ... read more

Brunch day! Back to McKinley Creekside Cafe for a late morning feast. Again, the portions were plentiful and delicious. All of us were curious about the hundreds and hundreds of acres of dead trees in what should have been a beautiful green forest. They hadn't been burned by forest fires past. We asked our server if he happened to know the cause. He did. He said the spruce beetle began killing off trees in Seward and has been making its way north. A little research shows the spruce beetle is native to Alaska and outbreaks are a regular occurrence. Air temperatures and snow levels affect the life cycle of the beetle. The current outbreak is located in south-central Alaska (southern Denali National Park, Cantwell, Carlo Creek and McKinley Village). Our bellies full, we went back to ... read more

Not a good way to start the day. I used the park's bathroom this morning instead of our to conserve tank space. I reached for the toilet paper and it was empty! It was one of those big round dispensers that held four rolls and EVERY ONE OF THEM WAS EMPTY! I sent an emergency text to Mike who brought me the roll from our bathroom. Whew! sometimes it pays to always have your phone with you. Today we had tickets for the green Denali Transit bus at noon. Dogs were not allowed on the bus so we made them comfortable and set a time limit for ourselves so the pups wouldn't be left alone too long. We left earlier than we had planned because one of the other campers, a man from Texas, told Dave ... read more

Because of all the fun with RV repairs yesterday we weren't able to squeeze in the Fairbanks Ice Museum so we decided to do it on the way to Cantwell today. The drive to Cantwell would be a short one giving us plenty of time to tour the museum. The only trouble we would run into is where to park our behemoths. Teri again to the rescue. She called the museum and asked if their parking lot would be big enough. Turns out they didn't even have a parking lot. The person on the other end of the line (is that still correct when you're using a cell phone?) said the Morris Thompson Cultural Center a few blocks away had RV parking. Problem solved! We left our dogs in the trailers with snacks, water and the ... read more