Days 3, 4 and 5

I thought I would only be a day or two behind at the most. I was wrong. Hopefully after today, when I'm caught up, I'll stay that way.

Let's start with Day 3.... Denali to Tok, via Fairbanks and North Pole. There's not much good I can say about the day, but I'll keep the whining to a minimum. Let's just say a late start + not hooking up the DVD player for the kid + mom not eating anything all day = bad night.

We got moving at a decent time and decided to go to the Visitor's Center at Denali and then drive in as far as you're allowed in a private vehicle. That was a total waste of time, come to find out. The weather wasn't great, so the scenery wasn't anything to write home about, and we essentially used a precious hour of nap time just driving in and out of the park, rather than heading up the road! Lesson learned on that one! From Denali, we headed toward Fairbanks, which I sort of wanted to check out. But by then, it was late in the day already, we had a lot of driving ahead of us, and we decided to truck on through. So much for seeing Fairbanks!!

The day wasn't a total loss, though... we DID get to go to North Pole. To say the town has made an industry out of Santa would be a total understatement. EVERYTHING is Christmas there... Here, I'll show you.

Yep, Santa Claus Lane. What's not to love about that?

Light poles? Candy canes! The pole for the McDonald's sign was even candy-cane striped. I wasn't fast enough to get a picture of that from the car, though.

Where the fun is - Santa Claus House! More Christmas ornaments, decorations, trees, etc., than you could imagine! And, of course, the big guy himself.

World's Tallest Santa. Look closely...we're there!

I think we might use this last one as our Christmas card this year. We fully intended to have Michaela sit on Santa's lap, but we seem to be in a bit of a "stranger danger" phase with her, so we went with the family picture instead! And that's totally not going to be our Christmas card picture. I don't do Christmas card pictures....

We didn't hang around North Pole long. We were on the hunt for some great ice cream, courtesy of a tip from our friend Amy, who used to live in North Pole. So we headed south the the Knotty Shop to check out their Alaskan made gifts and get some ice cream. It WAS good and a welcome stop. Definitely a kitchey tourist place, but we at least got out of the car for a bit! From there, we had the final (loooooong) push to Tok, where we expected to arrive by 5 originally, and didn't get in til 9-ish. Nothing good happened there except that the cabins we stayed in were great. Super cute, a good price and the owners were really nice. If you're ever staying in Tok, check out Caribou Cabins!

We did a MUCH better job of getting out of Tok at a reasonable time than we did leaving Denali yesterday morning, which was good because we had a long day of driving. I have absolutely nothing of value to tell you about the drive from Tok to Whitehorse because it rained most of the time, we sat in the car a lot, and mostly we tried not to get motion sick from all the frost heaves. It was definitely a BUMPY ride. And, Dad, all the tetris-style packing in the world was NOT going to keep things from moving around in those heaves. We had a bit of rearranging to do in Whitehorse. (And by "we" I mean "Jason.")

Although she slept well in the car yesterday, Michaela ended up slightly restless last night and we definitely did not all enjoy any sleep. Jason was able to get some, which was good since he's the driver, but I fought with the baby for over an hour at 2:15 this morning to try to get her back to sleep, even after being up til past 10 last night. She then woke up for the day at about 5:15. We tried SO hard to get her to go back down, but gave up at about 6 and decided we might as well get moving instead.

This is total blackmail. That's Michaela at 6:45 this morning, playing with the dog collar. That was after she started dancing at 5:30, crawled all around the room at 6:15 and tried diligently to get to the toilet at 6:30. She crashed at about 7:30 and slept until about 8:30 when we loaded everything up and headed out to find breakfast and hit the road.

Thankfully, today brought nicer weather and a shorter drive from Whitehorse to the Nugget City cabins outside Watson Lake, so we were able to stop for a bit at a scenic park in Teslin and stretch our legs for a while. What was going to be a half hour stop turned into just over an hour once we got gas, but it was totally worth it. Michaela finally figured out grass isn't that bad and was crawling all over the place. Yay for burning off energy!!! Of course, we still fought to get her down for bed tonight and I'm dreading a 2am wake-up again (Jason already warned the neighbors!), but it was a much more relaxed day than we'd had so far!

Here's Michaela enjoying the view, and the chance to sport her cool shades. Meanwhile, it only took forEVER to get her to look anywhere NEAR the camera. Amy took our pictures again last week and she hammed it up... I grab my camera and she does her best to look away. Turd.

And here's that view. I had fun playing with my fish eye lens!

Tomorrow we head out from here to get to Ft. Nelson, BC. Jason's looking at the Milepost right now to see how long it looks like the drive will be. We both remember it being a short-ish day on the way up, so hopefully we'll get the chance to stop a couple times again tomorrow for some energy burning for the baby (and the dog), and we won't have the 20 minute scream-fest we got tonight for bed time! We shall see!!

We'll also have to figure out a way to celebrate Michaela's birthday tomorrow! I can't believe a year has gone by already, but our little girl will (really) be turning one in about 24 hours! We'll come up with some fun way to commemorate it, I'm sure! And hopefully I'll get to the blog again tomorrow night so we can share it with you!

That's all from Nugget City! I'm off to do a couple things and get to bed! Sleeping in the car today didn't really catch me up after last night and I think Jason would appreciate it if I got some sleep. 'Night!