A rather simple day...

I had only a couple of things to accomplish today:

Breakfast at the northern most Denny's in the world

A riverboat cruise

Return the rental car and drop off my very dirty bike

There isn't a whole lot to share in today's drama except the Riverboat Discovery, which has been operating on the Chena River in Fairbanks by the Binkley family, since 1950. Our Captain today is a fourth generation licensed pilot, the Great Granddaughter of Jim Binkley, the original Captain. 

This tour has been rated the top riverboat tour in the country, but it isn't exactly my genre. It is a well assembled, fully scripted, tourist attraction, frequented by cruise ship and tour bus operations as a point of interest on their tours. My problem is that the tours are the reason for the existence of the excursion. It isn't like standing at a scenic overlook, gazing in awe at the ageless grandeur of the Grand Canyon. 

The tour starts from a dock and, shortly after launch, twice a day every day, all summer, the stern-wheeler is met by the pilot of a Piper Super Cub on pontoons, who taxis past the boat, then turns and takes off while passing to the port side of the ship. 

He then circles clockwise around the boat while the narrator talks about the importance of back country pilots in the bush communities of Alaska. As the narrator reaches the end of his carefully timed script, the pilot side slips down over the river and sets pontoons on water again, to the thunderous applause of hundreds of people who have never seen an airplane before. (The boats capacity is listed at 900 people)

The boat then pushes further downstream to the Trailbreaker Kennels of Dave Monson, husband of the late-great four time Iditarod champion Susan Butcher. 

At one time Susan herself entertained the tours, talking about raising up to 100 dogs, and experiences from her four wins in the sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome, a distance of 1,000 miles! Dave himself is a former champion of a different 1,000 mile race and continues to entertain the tours, sell and autograph the book "Granite", co-written with Susan before she passed away, and raise money for leukemia research. It is an inspirational story of how two mutts (Susan and Granite) overcame long odds to become the best of the best.

Dave himself hops on a training vehicle (an ATV without an engine, pulled by the dogs for warm weather excercising) and takes a very anxious group of dogs for a spin around the lake behind the kennels.

Further down is a recreated Athabascan Village, manned by many of the high school and college aged locals of Athabascan descent. I'll let the reader discern whether this is educational or exploitive, or both. They demonstrated how to clean, dry and smoke a salmon, how animal hides are used for clothing, how shelters are built, etc. Although offering employment to many of the locals, the carefully scripted presentations made one wonder if this was their heritage or a summer job.

On the way back to our "home port" I met Jim Smith of Milton, Wi., a 2015 VetsRoll member. I told him to tell Mark and John I said "HI" the next time he talks to them. Small world.

I disembarked just in time to return the car, take the bike across the street for repairs, then work on my blog for several hours.

Tomorrow I hope to hop on the bike, hop on the AlCan and head toward Delta Junction. Tonight I'll consider which way to head from there. This trip has been more expensive than I had projected so I need to decide if that should influence my destination selections.