Week Ten~Alaska Trip June 21-24

                Fairbanks Alaska and North Pole

In the morning we did some necessary errands like grocery and liquor shopping as well as getting a chance to use our new debit cards! We have had to use the credit card all the way through Canada and Phil said he thought it was going to melt. We did a little exploring and then had lunch. After lunch we booked our reservations for the Riverboat Discovery Tour on Friday. We are hoping for a nice day. We were able to use our two for one coupon, so that is a savings! We drove around town some to see where everything is. Yepper, looks like a small city with all the fixin’s.
Then we headed back to the North Pole to see Santa and his house. That was fun. I told Santa how wonderful all of my grandchildren are and we took some pictures. The town is cute as well, they have candy cane light poles and Santa Claus Lane and such for street signs. I think they should redo the town so that it looks like the one in The Polar Express but that would probably cost too much.

  There were also the reindeer as well. They are shedding this time of year.

On Thursday we traveled only a few miles and went to the Fountainhead Antique Car Museum. This was a pleasant surprise. The building is rather new and the cars are in pristine shape. We spent a very enjoyable morning browsing through this museum, The camera battery gave out part way through so Phil went back in the afternoon to finish taking pictures. Check out the Picasa Web Album to see all the photos that he took. We watched a worker painting pin striping on one of the cars in the morning. In the afternoon when Phil went back he was out on the floor. He is here volunteering at the museum for a few weeks. Phil asked him if he was enjoying himself and he replied, “Oh yeah!”.
  






Many of the cars were one of a kind and really neat to see. In the afternoon we went to the Creamery Farms which is a wildlife preserve. They have a lot of Canada Geese and Sand Hill Cranes. That was it for today……..


Friday was a beautiful sunny day. What a treat. In the morning we went to Pioneer Park and walked around. This is a free admissions park with museums and such inside. Some have a small fee. There are lots of free things to do and look at.

        S.S. Nenana                                      President Harding's railroad car.



Phil really enjoyed seeing a lot of the old equipment that was used to mine the gold.

           After lunch we went on the Riverboat Discovery Tour. The boat was clean, the staff was mostly young local teenagers and the whole tour was well done, if scripted.
We saw a bush pilot take off and land,
watched Susan Buther’s husband and children train the dogs for the Iditarod Race. Susan won the race in 1986, 87, 88 and 90. Then we traveled up the Chena river to a Athabascan Indian Village. Here the crew members showed us how the native tribes survived the winters.











                                                                                 Pretty, isn’t she?

On the way back I could help but snap some pictures of the ‘shacks on the creek’ that we went by……







Tomorrow we head for Denali National Park and I will not have internet unless we run the generator. We will probably do that for a short while a couple times a day, just so I can check mail and things. After that we will be boondocking for a couple of days, so I will probably not be posting any pictures or updates until next weekend, when we go back into a commercial campground. See ya’ll then!