Last Sunday at the Chapel and First Lottery in Denali

Our last Sunday at the chapel was of course emotional - receive the infamous "Chapel Tile", play the guitar and sing for the last time, and Andrew's frequent antics. I kind of decided to play last minute, so I didn't know what songs we were doing until I showed up, and I had to "wing it" for a few, but the Lord blessed this last minute decision in a way none of us expected - after months and months of praying for a replacement guitarist, a guy came up to the praise leader after the service and said he was interested in taking my place - wow! That was pretty cool to see how He works! I would've stayed around longer afterwards but we had a mission: Utilize our Denali National Park Road Lottery winner letter and make it to Wonder Lake, seven hours away, and back. Denali National Park has a 85-mile long road that is used to transport busses in and out of the park to view the wildlife and Mt. McKinley all throughout the summer. Every year in September, 1600 lucky lucky people are selected from the hoards of applications to drive the entire park road for a day, in your own vehicle. They select 400 vehicles a day, for a four-day weekend and we were lucky enough to win a pass this fall! So, we packed up the kids, a bunch of food and headed south to Denali, for the last time. The weather was OK - pretty overcast, so we couldn't see the mountain, but just fine for viewing wildlife and safely driving the road. It was definitely a long trip - but well worth it - we saw a sow grizzly bear (mom) with two cubs as well as a pack of wolves and we got some great footage of all of it. It was so much better being able to see the park at our own pace, rather than stopping at every caribou a quarter-mile away or every snow-shoe hare like the busses do. We tried to get a room in the small town of Denali on the way home, but at $179/night, it was a little out of our price range - so we pressed, and by 1:30 in the morning, we were snug in our beds back at Eielson. Just a few more days before we hit the road! - God Bless, David.