The Fair City of Fairbanks

We spent the next week in Fairbanks. It is fair size town for this part of the country with all the obligatory box stores and fast food chains. The area itself has the typical landscape we have been seeing black spruce and bushes in the boggy areas and a mix of pines, birch and aspens in the non boggy areas. We needed to wait for our mail and have some do-nothing down time. Fairbanks was a good fit. We stayed at the River View RV Park – nice enough on the Chena River. Good cable but slow wifi. The first day there we went to Wal-Mart to get our prescription filled. I thought – hey, I’ll get my frames adjusted. Well, they put them on a heat machine to bend the frames and for some reason it etched my lenses. They looked like crocodile skin. Happy to say Wal-Mart made good on replacing the lenses but it still was a bit of hassle and we had to stay a few more days then we were planning.

One of the days we took the drive to Chena Hot Springs. Along the way we saw quite a few moose. I got some great pictures of one of them feeding in a pond. We also saw mama moose and two calves. Very cool! The hot springs were great too. Not crazy with people like you sometimes see in the lower 48 and Canada for these type of places. We ate lunch at the lodge restaurant. They grow a lot of their produce on site in giant green houses so everything was super fresh. They have a few other touristy type things you can do there too. All in all, it was very pleasant day. And the weather was sunny. One of the few days the whole time we were in Fairbanks. One of those dreary days we spent at the University of Alaska’s Museum of the North. They had few films about Alaska including one on the Aurora Borealis that were interesting. This time of year it never get's dark enough to see them. It was worth doing even if they were little overly proud of their “out house”. You’ll just have to find out for yourself about that comment.

Oh, and how can one forget about North Pole, Alaska? The very definition of the phrase tourist trap. But still ya gotta see Santa and the reindeer! Good fudge too at the Santa Clause house. I told Santa that Jack was very good boy. The lenses finally arrived and we were on way to the “Great One”.