Early starts begin again... Although it doesn't feel like they ever ended. I got all my stuff together and then headed down to meet everyone.
Brendan was our tour guide, he is super tall like 6"6 and reminds me of Christian Bale when he was in The Machinist. There was 13 of us altogether; 3 people from Australia, 4 from England, 1 from Wales, 1 from Scotland, 1 from Japan, 1 from Hungary, 1 from France and 1 from Belgium: definitely a mix of people. We all had to write our details down for him which seemed to take forever and then Brendan explained how the week would work and the activities that were on offer to us.
Anyway, after that we packed all our bags into the trailer and then headed to Fred Meyer, a big department store to get anything we might need: of course I bought chocolate and found chocolate covered pretzels which I used to love ten years ago so this made me super happy!!!
Then it was time for an insanely long bus drive to our first camp site in Wrangell St Elias. I sat in between Ross and Louise (from Wales) on the bus and the drive was either spent chatting or everyone just fell asleep. We stopped about half way to take pictures of this huge glacier and have lunch, which was make your own sandwiches.
On the way to the camp, we had another couple of photo stops and then we were finally at Wrangell St Elias; which is a national park and has 3 main glaciers in it, we actually found out that Alaska has more than half the worlds glaciers in it so I'm sure I'll be seeing lots more. The campsite we first got to was right next to a river and didn't exactly look very inviting but luckily someone was already camped there so we got to move to a campsite in some woods which was much nicer.
This first campsite was very basic camping so we just had a long drop as a toilet and there would be no showers for the first two days... At least we would all be as dirty as each other I guess.
I was sharing a tent with Jennifer, from Bonnie wee Scotland, and we all separated into pairs to put up our tents: when we'd put our tents up we had to empty our bags from anything with a scent so all our toiletries, food and even our toothpaste had to go into a big box in the back of the trailer so that bears wouldn't be attracted to our tents! *gulps* I'm sure they wouldn't come anywhere near a campsite... Then Brendan spotted a pile of bear poo right next to where we camping, awesome!!
Anyway, tea was next and we had pasta in like a carbonara sauce with either chicken or pork... Pork??? I dunno, I had chicken anyway, was pretty good.
I was loving Alaska so far; the locals are pretty strange, the scenery is just beautiful and I was looking forward to camping and spending time with the same group of people for 7 days.