Fairbanks
No photos today - I left my memory card in the van.
We’d left the bikes assembled and chained to our picnic table overnight, so we were soon zooming towards “Alaska’s guiltiest pleasure” according to Lonely Planet — Pioneer Park. I don’t see that it’s so guilty a pleasure. Parts of it are like a museum.
We arrived at ten past eleven, to find notices saying things opened at noon. We cycled around aimlessly for a while, noticed that some things were open after all, messed around chaining our bikes to a fence, by which time it was a quarter to twelve. Then we spotted the crazy golf, which was open.
It was a high quality minigolf course, alright. There were no tears in the carpet, and several of the holes involved motorised features. Over 18 holes I won by a slim margin of three strokes.
We looked around the river boat Bananarama (alright, Nenana), which had dioramas of gold rush era villages on its main deck.
We looked around for some food, and found a shack selling souvlaki. It was microwaved, not prepared with a great deal of love, but it tasted good.
Next we paid $8 each for the privilege of standing in a freezer. This was the “40 below experience” — a representative temperature for Fairbanks in winter. Handily, it’s -40 on both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. In fact it was rather entertaining. We were dressed up in winter coats and gloves. We were given a cup of boiling water. Once we were in the freezer, I threw the water in the air as instructed, and it solidified into snow before hitting the ground. A piece of wood, some nails, and some bananas were provided, in order to demonstrate that it’s possible to hammer a nail into wood using a banana frozen this hard.
Debbie demanded we leave. I didn’t think it was as cold as a visit to Leamington F.C. in March…
We rode a steam train around the park. The engine was the first locomotive in Alaska, in the late 19th century. It was fired by coal, and a piece of coal was handed through the carriages, for people to look at. I was astonished at how many people hadn’t seen coal before - even adults.
We felt we’d seen the important parts of Pioneer Park. We reclaimed our bikes, and set off towards the university campus. We found our way to Beaver Sports shop, and bought a hat for Debbie, in case it’s cold in Barrow. We looked at other items, but I was too impatient to let Debbie work through the whole shopping process.
We set a course for the university’s large mammal research unit, where it’s said you can see herds of Musk Ox and Reindeer. However, when we didn’t reach a waypoint in anywhere near the time we expected, it became apparent that the scale on the “not to scale” map we had, became smaller as you reached the edge.
Instead we took a very short ride through some woods on the university grounds — shorter than intended because we didn’t have a map of this, and feared getting lost. Then we rode back to the van, along a different route. Once again, the route improved our impressions of Fairbanks. It now seems like quite a nice place to live — in the summer.
Tired from our exertions, we sat around reading outside the van for a while. I confess to napping.
We ate at Chena’s, a rather swish riverside restaurant, that’s part of the RV park complex. We both had crusted salmon, and it was lovely.
We have an early start tomorrow for our trip to Barrow, so Debbie is packing bags, and before an early bedtime, we need to get the RV ready to just drive away in the morning.