Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, Alaska

Diary:

We got up at 5am, packed up our wet tent and gear, gulped down a quick breakfast and jumped on the 6:30am camper bus to leave the park. Lynsey and Arnoud had also decided to call it a day at Denali and accompanied us.

We got to the Visitors Center at around 11:30am and grabbed lunch at the Denali Mercantile. There was Internet access available and we tried to update Travelog for the first time - and failed miserably due to several limitations with the computers there.

We had decided our next destination would be Valdez. However, it was too long a drive to get there that day, and so we decided to break the journey in half and return to Anchorage that day, and head to Valdez the next day. We also had some remaining errands to run before embarking on our Central America leg, and, given we would only have one night in California when we returned from Alaska, Anchorage was looking like the best place to tie up these loose ends. So we bade goodbye to Denali and drove back to Anchorage in overcast, but thankfully dry, weather.

In Anchorage we went shopping, culminating in the purchase of an ultralight Sony Vaio laptop, which was not at all planned! However, we had finally reached the conclusion that it was going to be impossible to reliably interface our digital camera and Palm Pilot to random Internet cafe machines in order to update Travelog with our photos and notes; the only way of improving our chances was to have our own laptop configured with all the special software we would need, and use floppies to transfer this data to the Internet cafe machines.

We finished off our shopping spree with a brief visit to the very cool Kaladi Brothers coffee shop on the outskirts of town, which had high speed internet access and awesome espresso coffee. We wanted to try again updating our website, but again were thwarted as the machines there were all iMacs, and of course, we could not interface our camera or my Palm Pilot to them either. Dejected, we answered a few emails from friends - mostly asking why the web site had not been updated - and went downtown and got a room at the Inlet Inn again.

A late dinner was grabbed at Simon and Seaforts, which was excellent, and we called it a day.