Journey In God's Amazing Grace: Fantasy Caravan Day 31

Monday was a free day (no scheduled activities by Fantasy). We started the day with to-do's -- Carl recharged the water softener, I did laundry, and we both worked on the day-shade in the front -- it wasn't going up as much as we wanted and got that resolved.

In the afternoon, we decided to drive out and see if we could see Mt Denali more clearly. One of our co-travelers had shared that they got good views from the Old Denali Highway, so we drove about 30 miles south on the Parks Highway and headed east on Old Denali Highway. The Milepost guide indicated that there was a view of Denali at a pull off about 1 mile in on this road, and we stopped, but the brush was so high that we couldn't see anything. We started driving further east and saw a stopped camper van, so I looked over my shoulder, and, lo and behold, there was Mt Denali! We turned around to go back to the pull off, but on our way back, we noticed a dirt road going up a hill to an electrical substation. There weren't any signs forbidding access, so we drove up there...

... and could see Mt Denali!

This was the view without any zooming (you can see the camper van on the road below us)...

... here it is zoomed in. Besides the view of Denali, the clouds were so interesting above the mountain.

We took dozens of pictures ... but you get the idea!

This was an "Oops" picture (Carl triggered the selfie stick by accident), but its the only picture we took that has the electrical substation in view -- there were two other cars parked up where we parked, as well as the camper van below, but we never saw any other human while we were there.

Selfie stick in use -- Denali is between our heads.

Denali to the far left with other closer mountains in the center and right.

We tried some "creative" pictures -- Carl showing how big Denali is!

Camera on tripod behind us while we enjoyed looking at Denali.

We ate our lunch while there and just enjoyed the beautiful day for an hour or so.

Driving back north, we loved the views of beautiful blue sky and mountains...

Out the windshield of the Jeep

We stopped at a couple of pull offs and Carl took several "Windows screen saver" pictures!

Putting the Jeep in the pictures for perspective:

I did a video as Carl was getting back in the Jeep -- is that sound from Carl's joints, or the Jeep's joints?

I think it is the Jeep's joints (door hinge).

More views:

We decided to return to Denali National Park and Preserve to take some additional pictures -- even though we had done the bus trip, our view on the bus was mainly just out the side windows, and we thought we might enjoy it more with better visibility.

We stopped at the entrance sign (some other family was having their pictures taken).

We also drove through the campground that was closest to the entrance -- the campground where we stayed in Denali Park Village was about the worst that we'd stayed at to this point and we wondered if the National Park campground would have been better -- there weren't many sites that we saw where Gracie would fit, but they were definitely nicer than the private campground where we were parked.

We got to the point where we could see Denali, but the view was no better than what we had seen on Sunday, and nowhere near as good as the view we had found on Old Denali Highway.

When we were on the bus, we had seen folks out in the bushes -- our bus driver said that they were picking wild blueberries -- we wanted to see if we could find any (we did not).