It doesn't matter
how late you stay up - if you're used to waking up every morning
at 7 am, you're gonna wake up at 7 am. And if you find yourself
in Alaska and your body is still on East Coast time, you're gonna
wake up at 3 am. Trying to go back to sleep was futile, especially
since the sun had been up since 2 am. But we were leaving for
the Arctic Circle at 6:30 am, so we gave up trying to fight it.
Our last minute reservation for this tour required us to bring a lunch. Where does one find lunch before 6am? In all the planning for this trip, we never envisioned driving around Alaska at 5am looking for food. We found a 24-hour Safeway, and we got a couple pre-packaged deli sandwiches, some chips and Gatorade. They (fortunately) had a coffee bar, and we grabbed a couple cups and coffee cakes for breakfast.
The Arctic Circle tour is a 400-mile round-trip that included us and 17 other people in a small, rest-room-equipped (fortunately) bus. After 14 hours on planes yesterday, we chose to spend 17 hours on a bus today. The bus driver kept us interested and informed during the long trip. We spotted a herd of Caribou at 3:25, a near-blinding snowstorm ten miles from the Arctic Circle, and a moose on the way home. We crossed the Arctic Circle at 4 pm, were served drinks and cake. We watched videos about the Tundra, permafrost and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (which the route paralleled). We had a picnic dinner on the banks of the Yukon River. The whole trip was a lot more fun than you might think 17 hours on a bus would be.
We got back at midnight. It was still daylight.