Day 39: There is no more unethical treatment of elephants.

A very relaxing week/weekend to be sure.

I haven't been doing all that much biking, partly because of being busy, and partly because of the weather. Hopefully, I'll get to resume that tomorrow.

Wednesday was the 4th, and on it, myself and a bunch of the other interns went on another Outdoor Adventures trip, this time to do some whitewater kayaking at Denali. We left at what would be the crack of dawn anyplace else on the planet, and made good time to Denali. Although there's hardly any traffic in the interior of Alaska, the neverending cycle of road construction occasionally caused by the damage done to the roads every winter does tend to bog things down. Fortunately, it was the 4th, and there was none.

Having gotten to Denali several hours before our kayak rentals were available, we took a short (and very steep) hike up to the top of a mountain, where we got some incredible views. According to a topo map, the climb was somewhere around 2500-3000 feet, assuming I was reading the right map. We ate lunch at the top of the mountain, and individually regretted not bringing cameras.

There's really no escaping the beauty of Denali. It's one of the most visually stunning places I've ever been, and I only got to see a tiny portion of it (the park's bigger than Massachusetts). I'd actually already seen most of the places we visited on the 4th, as the train runs parallel to the river we kayaked on.

We hiked back down the mountain (much faster, but not fun for your knees and ankles), and drove to the Kayak rental place, where were outfitted with inflatable kayaks and drysuits. The river water is fed entirely from a melting glacier, which meant that it was around 45°F. The drysuits helped with that quite a bit, and weren't too uncomfortable, given that it was also unusually cold outside on that day.

The river wasn't as rough as I expected it to be, which was also toned down even further by the inflatable kayaks, which are essentially indestructible and really difficult to flip. Even so, it was a ton of fun.

After we pulled out of the river, we each took off our drysuits, and I was one of the only ones who didn't leak, except for one of my feet. It's sort of weird, because it's really hard to tell if you're wet or not when you're wearing a drysuit.

We drove home, and the entire way I kept nodding off due to a general lack of sleep. On the way, we stopped at the (only) diner between Denali and Fairbanks, and ate dinner.

If my count's correct (it probably isn't), the 4th also marked the halfway point between my arrival and departure here, and unlike my intern friends elsewhere, nobody here seems to be in all that much of a rush to leave.

On Thursday, we also had off fom work, went to see Tranformers. Absolutely terrible. Save the money, and wait for the DVD. Die Hard was much better.

As a sidenote, why can't W&M give its students and employees off on July 4th and Labor Day? I never understood how they were allowed to get away with that.

Friday was a "normal" day at work, in the sense that we were supposed to go to work. It was a bit different in the sense that I was one of the only ones who actually did. This wasn't such a big deal, until I tried to check a book out from the library for some weekend reading, and was greeted with several forms that had to be filled out by unnecessarily high-up university officials after I told them that I was an intern. Being high-ranking administrators, everybody with the authority to sign the forms had taken the day off. All this to check out Al Gore's book from a library that's accessible to the general public (but not interns). Sigh...

Today I woke up at 3PM, and accordingly didn't get much accomplished apart from making a run to Fred's for tomorrow's lunch.

That's all that's new in Andrewland.