We arrived in Fairbanks on Tuesday afternoon. After our tire incident (see the travel update post) we learned that we needed a new innie for the drivers side as well, and it was getting to be about time for an oil change as well. So we had a couple of “chores” to do while we were here, but we were also pretty excited to see Fairbanks.
We started by looking for a place to stay, we were thinking we would be willing to actually pay for a camp site in order to get showers and maybe some good wifi, but we really couldn’t find anywhere that was a reasonable price. But while exploring we came across a place called Pioneer Park. It was by far the weirdest place that either of us had ever been.
It had the vibe of a run down amusement park. But it’s just a city park? It’s not very big but you can pay $2 to take a ride on a little train twice around the park while someone tells you about it. There was a carousel, complete with carousel music, that was going around and around with no one on it. Maybe it was just because of the time? Or season? Unclear. It did have some pretty cool things though. It has some old cabins moved in from around town that housed little museums and shops. They also had the train car that Warren Harding rode to Alaska when he was the first sitting president to visit the territory. The only place at the park that had a substantial number of people was the Salmon Bake which is an all you can eat dinner for $36 per person that they bus tourists into from the cruise lines. It smelled really good, but we decided that wasn’t for us. (We bought sausages, instant potatoes and lettuce for a salad at Fred Myer instead and had an awesome meal for ~$4.50 each).
Because we couldn’t find anywhere that seemed worth it to stay we ended up spending our first night of the trip in the Walmart parking lot. Our need for a shower was getting real though, and Walmart is not an appropriate place for a bucket bath, so we figured out that we could get showers at the local laundromat for $4.50. They felt amazing!
In full Kathleen Fashion, Kathleen decided to wear as much duck gear as possible knowing that women’s basketball player Ruthy Hebard is from Fairbanks. Kathleen (was mostly kidding) hoping to finding someone who knew Ruthy. Honestly, generally Kathleen wears plenty of duck gear while traveling because you just never know who you might meet. Also we don’t have that many clothing options. However, the plan worked! Kathleen had to walk out of the laundromat to go get her towel before taking a shower, and met Karen. Somehow, between the duck stickers on the RV (including tire cover), the duck basketball shorts, duck sweatshirt and duck bag Karen identified that we were from Oregon. She said that she also follows Oregon women’s basketball and got her picture taken with Sabrina when they played up here last year. She also said she really wants to make the trip to Eugene to watch a home game. So we chatted for a bit about that and ended up exchanging emails and becoming Facebook friends. She has also given us a lot of Fairbanks recommendations, so we hope we can be half as useful if she makes it down to Eugene.
With showers taken care of, we went to get coffee/breakfast at Alaskan Coffee Company. They had great coffee and a cute atmosphere but give you a strange one hour internet code. So we didn’t end up staying their as long as we had wanted to to work on our computer things. I guess that’s their purpose with the internet codes.
Ready to start our day we headed to Jiffy Lube to get the oil change taken care of. Everyone here is so friendly and we had great discussions with three groups of people in the waiting room. In order to have work done on the RV we have to get the kids out so we also looks strange sitting in the lobby of places with our dog on one leash and our cat on another. We always bring Declan’s backpack in but he’d rather be out and exploring on his leash, although he gets a bit nervous in all of these establishments.
It turned out that by waiting at this Jiffy Lube we were in the right place at the right time. The O’Rielly auto parts next door was having a customer appreciation day BBQ with free burgers, hot dogs, chili, chips and soda. It was great.
Our next order of business, getting a new tire, turned into more of an ordeal that we had hoped… the first tire place we went to didn’t have the correct sized tire and sent us across town to another place. That place was checking our trend and realized that several of our tires had some strange wear, and we had already thought we wanted to get our alignment checked. After further inspection the front axle, there was a lot of movement on the tire rod where the pitman arm and idler arm connect to the center rod of the steering assembly. We were worried we’d have to replace both the pitman and idler arms, which would cost us around $800. We were hesitant to do this at first but after inspecting the tire wear on the front tires, which are no more than 2 years old, we thought it would be best to do the fix the next day.
With another appointment made for Thursday we went off to see more of downtown Fairbanks. There is a really great visitor center called the Morris Thompson Cultural & Visitors Center. It’s basically a museum with several exhibits about the area and a theatre playing various videos on the hour. We watched a really neat video about polar bears in northern Alaska. They also have a super cool Antler Arch.
Thursdays tire appointment revealed that the part that they had thought was the problem wasn’t the problem. Good news- it wasn’t actually the pitman and idler arm, but the center rod that has the joints. This means we were looking at a $250 bill instead of one over $800. Bad news - the nearest part was in Anchorage and needed to be shipped in. So after spending two more hours at the tire place we had to make yet an other appointment to come back Friday.
After leaving the tire place with another day to spend exploring Fairbanks we went to Creamer’s Dairy wild water fowl refuge. There were some great hikes around there and we got see a ton of cranes, ducks and geese.
The other thing we knew we wanted to do before leaving Fairbanks was to check out the head quarters of the Yukon Quest. The Yukon Quest is similar to the Iditarod, a 1,000 mile dog sled race. This one alternates the start and finish between Fairbanks, Alaska and White Horse, Yukon Territory. We had heard from some people working at Pioneer Park that there were possibly some volunteer opportunities so we went to check out the head quarters. They had lots of information about the race, as well as a junior musher with two of her dogs to answer any questions. It was really cool and we are so down to come back up in February to volunteer at the race.
A couple of things surprised me about the sled dogs. The first was how small they are - they are all between 35 and 60 pounds, averaging about 45 pounds. However they each eat the equivalent of 75 big macs worth of calories everyday during the race. I was also expecting them to look more like huskies but they are much more mixed and bred for specific qualities from a variety of breeds.
With a lot more time to kill and out of ideas of things to do in the area we went to Lavelle’s tap house to get some computer work down. Because it was almost empty there in the early afternoon the had no problem with us hanging out on the patio using their internet. Which was the best internet that we have had yet. They also had a ton on tap including two of our favorite cider’s and several Oregon beers. But we elected to try local things that we hadn’t had before.
As much as we didn’t want to go back to Walmart for the third straight night, we couldn’t come up with a better idea.
For our Friday appointment at Alyeska tires we had to wait for them to call us and tell us they had received the part. We thought about going back to Alaskan Coffee Roasters but we needed a charge and they were very expensive, so we decided to try somewhere else. Andreas found another cafe called McCafferty's, A Coffee House, Etc. Kathleen got the best Chai she had ever had and we both had bagels for about half the price of the day before. The atmosphere was cute and we didn’t feel rushed out. They didn’t have wifi, but we sat and did crosswords. It was exactly what we needed. And it was good that we had picked it because it took Alyeska longer than we thought to call us.
But we did eventually get the part replaced and are finally ready to leave Fairbanks. We’re planning on heading North towards Prudhoe bay. We’ve heard they might be expecting snow on the pass soon so we probably won’t go all the way but we wanted to see a little bit of what’s up there.
This turned into a massively long post. Lots of people told us we needed to blog but we’re not really sure what that is supposed to look like. If you have comments and suggestions PLEASE let us know. We constantly feel like we’re oversharing and that no one other than our parents would want to read these posts. We’re definitely hoping that our writing gets better and that posting gets easier over the year but if you have suggestions they are very welcome.
