Saturday July 3, Walmart, Fairbanks, Ak

These midnight nights somehow mean that it is a slow start to the day, no one starts moving before 9 am. We had planned a quiet day, walked across to Walmart for some supplies then drove out to the Farmers Market. It was really busy, enjoyed walking around and checking out the local foods. 

Then the thunder started and the wind got up, so back to the van for lunch in the carpark. Had read good writeups about the Museum at the University of Alaska. A very impressive building with some great exhibits and a great place to spend a few wet hours. We saw a good documentary about life in Fairbanks during the winter, although it gets to minus 60F, it is a dry windless cold that evidently is not as bad as it sounds. However frozen eyebrows and eyelashes, contact lenses that freeze on the eye ball and hot coffee when thrown in the air freezes before it hits the ground, gives us the impression that it is extremely cold.

We called into the information centre downtown, another very new and impressive building. They had a documentary playing on the building of the pipeline in 1976 from Prudhoe  Bay to Valdez….a real feat of engineering that was completed in 2 years. Look forward to seeing it.

Time for laundry so found a laudromat and in just over 1 hour had it all washed and dried, although the cheap shirts do seem to shrink a bit!  

Got chatting to David, a local who was an Ice Road Trucker, and drove the haul road for many years. He gave us some tips on the haul road and where to go fishing for halibut and salmon in Alaska and also where we will see bears…somehow we feel shortchanged on the wildlife viewing, but we are told everywhere we go that they are just around the corner!!!!

Back to home base at Walmart….along with 50 others.

Spoke to Aidan tonight, he is cross that we didn’t stop at the North Pole yesterday to get photos of Santa’s House and the reindeer….so that will be on the schedule for tomorrow!

Yes, there is a town of North Pole, just outside of Fairbanks, and it does have Santa’s house!